« The Cause Of Immigration: Benefits
The Greenest Car In The World… »

The Party Of The NHS

January 3rd, 2008 by ThunderDragon

That’s what David Cameron wants the Conservatives to be:

[The NHS] is an institution I acknowledge and respect as a Conservative - and for that matter, an institution I am really proud to use as a father…
I feel passionately that Labour has badly mismanaged the NHS.
I’ve said before that in their drive to ‘modernise’ the NHS, Labour haven’t improved it, so much as simply ripped out its heart and installed a malfunctioning computer instead…
A Conservative Government will pursue… empowering patients and empowering professionals…
[A] Conservative Government will scrap all centrally-imposed process targets, and enable the NHS to focus instead on outcomes…
[I]n this, the NHS’s 60th year, the Conservative Party has an historic opportunity: to replace Labour as the party of the NHS.
That’s quite an aspiration - but I believe it is our duty to live up to it… [Full speech]

Quite an ambition. But an achievable one, since Labour have failed to improve the the NHS despite pumping billions of pounds of our money into it. Instead, they have destroyed it in many ways, changing it into a service that worries more about meeting targets than making people better.

That there is also little ideological difference between the two parties over the idea of the NHS, making it hard for Labour to claim as unassailable territory. Whether the Conservatives can really manage to become the “party of the NHS”, I don’t know - but if they can, it will be a substantial victory. I’m not convinced that it will be easy, or even possible, to do so. But it is certainly traditional Labour territory [much like the North] that the Conservatives certainly can and are making substantial inroads into.

Even though it’s slightly out of date with Tony Blair no longer being Prime Minister, watch this video for the view of two doctors on the last decade of Labour NHS policy:

This entry is filed under Conservative Party, David Cameron, NHS, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. No Comments
Post your comment
« The Cause Of Immigration: Benefits
The Greenest Car In The World… »