Happy Birthday NHS, 76 years old this Friday

On Friday, it’s the 76th anniversary of the legislation which founded our National Health Service. The NHS is a pillar of our society, one of the things which binds us together as a country from the cradle to the grave, an institution no political party would dare to attack directly for fear of the backlash, but it wasn’t always that way.

When the Labour Party put forward the bill establishing the NHS the Conservative Party actively opposed it, repeatedly voting against the proposals as they made their way through Parliament. Even today, on the right-wing fringe of the Conservative Party there are those openly prepared to talk about a need to replace the NHS with a private model.

While the strategists in the Conservative Party as a whole is aware that such a policy would see their obliteration at the ballot box, instead throughout their time in office we have witnessed the death of the NHS by a thousand cuts, with the Conservatives consistently underfunding healthcare.

While the average investment in the health service over the last 76 years has been an annual increase of inflation plus four percent, under the Tories this has been limited to inflation plus two percent, which simply isn’t sufficient to deal with an ageing population (as I have written previously, with demographics driving the demand for healthcare costs will peak and then fall in due course).

As a result, our local health service is experiencing:

• Record waiting lists for treatment
• Long waiting times for emergency treatment
• Huge numbers of cancellations to planned procedures
• Delays to urgently-needed cancer treatment
• Mental health services in crisis
• The collapse of NHS Dentistry
• People being left sick for far longer, damaging people’s quality of life and the economy.

If the NHS is to survive it needs to be rescued from a party which has spent 14 years allowing it to fall apart. In 1997, the Labour Party inherited an NHS in similar crisis and by 2010 it was recognised as one of the best-performing health systems in the world.

We have fixed the NHS before and a Labour Government can do it again, starting with

• Faster NHS treatment delivering two million more appointments a year by paying NHS staff more to work evenings and weekends.
• Fewer cancer deaths by improving early diagnosis for cancer by doubling the number of NHS scanners.
• 700,000 more urgent dentist appointments.
• Fast access to mental health services by recruiting 8,500 new NHS mental health staff.
• Return of the family doctor by cutting red tape so that patients can see the same GP each appointment if they choose to.

This will be funded through scrapping loopholes allowing those on extremely high incomes to avoid paying tax in the UK and with the mental health professionals including in schools is paid for by ending the tax breaks for private schools.