‘The three letters key to beating the SNP: NHS’

The SNP launched its Scottish Parliament election campaign with 100 days to go with a billboard trundling around the streets of Westminster, talking about Westminster. 

It’s an odd choice for a party who have been in government in Scotland for 20 years. It’s odder still for a party who claim to put Scotland first – they won’t even put Scotland first on their election adverts. 

Why are they so afraid to fight an election about Scotland? Three letters sum up why – NHS. 

The NHS is the Labour party’s proudest achievement and the public institution people in Scotland and across the UK cherish above all. 

The reason for that is because it’s with us at incredibly emotive times in our lives. The birth of our kids, the passing of our loved ones. We enter hospitals filled with anxiety and dread and we leave filled with relief, joy or occasionally grief. 

READ MORE: ‘From the Clyde to the ballot box: why Glasgow can’t afford drift’

The NHS is personal to all of us in ways other public services aren’t. And in Scotland that personal relationship with the health service is the key to Labour success in the Scottish Parliament elections in May. 

Voters hate spin. But what they hate even more is spin that takes them for fools. Scotland has a waiting times emergency under the SNP despite every protest to the contrary from John Swinney. 

Everyone in Scotland knows someone on an NHS waiting list – one in six of us are. NHS staff are more likely to be exhausted and burned out because they are overstretched and A&E waiting time standards aren’t so much missed as ballooned over the bar like Roberto Baggio’s missed penalty in 1994 World Cup Final. 

In my health board area of NHS Lanarkshire, which serves a population of around 600,000 people, more people were waiting over two years compared to the whole of England. Let me repeat that – more people were waiting over two years for treatment in one part of Scotland than the whole of England.  

Meanwhile our health service has essentially been privatised by SNP incompetence. Scots are taking out loans or remortgaging their homes to go private because they simply can’t wait in pain any longer.

Monklands Hospital – on the border of the seat I am standing in – is in the seat of the SNP Health Secretary. Over the winter every second A&E patient routinely waited too long. One in two of them. The goal is fewer than nine in ten. 

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A decade ago the SNP pledged to eradicate the practice of people being stuck in hospital without a social care package when they were fit to go home. It never happened and it has cost our health health service billions of pounds as a result. 

The scale and extent of SNP failure in our health service is so wide ranging that everyone in Scotland knows someone impacted by it. 

And then there is the faceless bureaucracy leaving families in the dark and without answers about the future of their local health services. In Lanarkshire the Scottish Government is proposing to downgrade intensive care at Wishaw Neonatal Unit. That would force the families of sick babies to travel for hours to see their child in hospital. Local people have campaigned against this, only to be stonewalled and met with a ‘computer says no’ attitude. 

The SNP Government say services have to be centralised, and if that means a family from Lanarkshire is ripped apart, facing a four-hour trip to Aberdeen to see their critically ill child, then so be it. 

Meanwhile, the biggest scandal in the history of devolution still requires answers. The Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow was opened weeks before the 2015 General Election. It was opened with contaminated water.

The health board has now accepted that dirty water at the hospital “most likely” caused infections in child cancer patients. Children and adults died 

The health board says pressure was applied to open the hospital before it was ready.

No one has ever taken responsibility. In Scotland under the SNP accountability is optional. It’s time for that to end. 

SNP ministers will go into the election citing progress on the NHS. People aren’t daft and they don’t like being patronised, they know the NHS is suffering after a decade of distraction and disinterest from the SNP.

Scottish Labour has answers. We’ll declare a national waiting times emergency and do whatever it takes to get waits down. Funding will follow the patient and patients will be treated wherever there is capacity in the country. 

We will end the 8am rush for a family doctor by negotiating the GP contract and driving tech and digital into an NHS which is still using pagers and fax machines. We will ensure a service established in the 1940s will be fit for the 2040s and beyond. 

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We will create an additional 1,000 non-residential care packages as a starting point in tackling unmet need and making care at home more widely available, freeing up capacity in our hospitals. 

We will stand opposed to any downgrade of Wishaw neonatal unit. 

And we will deliver answers and accountability for the families of the Glasgow dirty water scandal. 

Our NHS doesn’t belong to the managers and the ministers, it belongs to patients, staff and their families. On 7th May we will begin the process of giving it back to them. 

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