“We still have such a huge backlog from so many services being shut unnecessarily during Covid,” says a London GP. “Heart disease waiting times for tests, diagnosis and treatment are worse than I’ve ever seen. In some areas, target times are being abandoned because they can’t be met.”
Can we please pause a minute to let that sink in? Critical targets are being abandoned by the NHS because they know they will never be met. What a cynical, shameful, secretive admission of failure that is. Yet, instead of owning up, in true Stalinist style NHS managers pretend there never was a target to miss in the first place.
Yet, I can guarantee fleets of NHS communications staff will go on pumping out perky propaganda so the public is falsely reassured. And costly posters and leaflets will demean and insult pregnant women by calling them “ovary owners” and “birthing parents” because Left-wing identity bilge is more important to the NHS than, for example, making sure maternity units are safe.
Until recently, politicians have been too scared to challenge the NHS, such was the public affection for the institution. Today, their protestations of fealty to this greedy leviathan sound increasingly deranged. When Jeremy Hunt used his Budget speech in March to claim that the health service is “the biggest reason most of us are proud to be British” many people watching at home cried: “You what?” Like many wealthy people, the Chancellor has the option of going private and not joining an eight million-plus waiting list.
Even the most devout NHS worshipper is clearly starting to have doubts. According to the recent British Social Attitudes survey, dissatisfaction with the NHS is at an all-time high, with less than a quarter of people satisfied with our health system.
Who can blame us? The stats are as terrible as they are relentless: more than 150,000 patients were forced to wait more than 24 hours in A&E before getting a hospital bed last year, a tenfold increase on 2019.
More than 250 people a week die needlessly because of long A&E waits.
Those are just the official data. Many of us will know of relatives or friends who are too scared to go to hospital (because they think they will die of sepsis or neglect), who have spent several excruciating hours on the floor at home awaiting an ambulance, who have given up even trying to get a GP appointment (more chance of a blind date with a unicorn, quite frankly). Or they’ve found out that their “urgent referral” means an initial hospital consultation in June 2025 and have raided their savings to go private for their hip operation.
Why not go private if you can when the alternative is a sick joke? “One of my patients received four letters on the same day from our local hospital,” says the London GP, “two letters giving her an appointment on two different dates, and two letters cancelling them both!” That’s peak NHS for you.
Labour, which has always scaremongered about creating a “two-tier health system”, is now openly saying it would use the private sector to help reduce waiting times. Sir Keir Starmer may piously sing on the stuck record of “our NHS” crumbling due to inadequate Tory funding, rather than the true explanation: inadequate NHS management. But shadow health secretary Wes Streeting shows more guts than any Conservative predecessor when he says there will be no more cash without the “major surgery” of reform. “It’s a service not a shrine.”
I like the way Streeting calls out those Olympian hypocrites, the “middle-class Lefties” who cry betrayal over “free at the point of use” while paying for private medicine to get quicker treatment themselves.
Reform UK has gone one better than Labour. Richard Tice’s party promises to spend the cash committed to the reckless, futile pursuit of net zero on tax relief of 20 per cent on all independent healthcare and insurance. That should incentivise those who can afford it to go private and free up the NHS for those who can’t.
This is the future. By 2050, every working person will have some form of private insurance supplemented by the state, I think. That same system, by the way, which operates in all civilised countries with far better healthcare than our own because they aren’t a cult member worshipping a grotesque, cruel deity called “our NHS”.
Out of interest, I asked a source in NHS England what all the senior managers like CEO Amanda Pritchard made of the recent appalling headlines about their failing organisation. Surely, they must be worried? “There isn’t even any acknowledgment of either the (dis)satisfaction survey or the stories about A&E waiting times killing people,” said George. “Working at NHS England is like being on the International Space Station. You wouldn’t think there was much connection with the actual world of treating actual patients in actual hospitals. It’s all about the latest restructuring which has taken 18 months so far. They really couldn’t care less.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the arrogant, unaccountable bureaucratic caste which gobbles up billions of pounds of public funds yet gives such bad value for money that Kate and millions like her spend the night from hell in A&E.
Being born British should not be a death sentence in any circumstances. As long as we go on believing in the NHS it will be.
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