The Conservative neglect of the NHS
A “decade of neglect” has been suffered by the NHS, since David Cameron’s Conservative government won the 2010 general election. ‘Austerity’ was the term used to introduce this neglect. Politically, austerity is when a government attempts to control debt levels and reduce the amount of spending, by raising taxes and implementing cuts. However, the Conservative government at the time, primarily used the term as a dig toward the previous Labour government, and as a ploy to ‘fix their mistakes’.
One of Labour’s ‘mistakes’ that the Conservative’s identified, was their appropriate funding of the nation’s health service. Their ploy to fix this mistake was to defund this service. Under Labour, the NHS’s annual budget increase was 3.6%, however David Cameron made the decision to reduce this annual budget increase by over half, to just 1.5%.This has ultimately led to the severe loss in capacity that we are witnessing today, and harrowing statistics such as the 7.2 million people in the country who are on indefinite waiting lists for treatment.
Writing in The Mirror, Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University, has calculated that the NHS is underfunded by £30billion a year. He states that based on NHS spending and population growth, the NHS should be funded £3,058 for each person in the country. But actual spending is closer to £2,642, more than a £400 shortfall per person. He further estimates that the appropriate extra £30billion “would fill all the vacancies”, by increasing the number of nurses by over 50,000 and doctors by 20,000.
The scathing effects of the austerity policy have all been revealed in a recent report published by The King’s Fund. In this report, Richard Murray, the King’s Fund Chief Executive states: “Though Covid certainly exacerbated the crisis in the NHS and social care, we are ultimately paying the price for a decade of neglect”. Another anonymous expert featured in the report further stated: “We have essentially had 10 years of managed decline. This is not a Covid problem. This is an Austerity problem.”
Many suspect that this managed decline was motivated by the intention to increase privatisation. Anoosh Chakelian, writing for the New Statesman, likened the process to a quote from left-wing thinker Noam Chomsky: “That’s the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to the private capital.”
David Rowland, director of Centre of Health and Public Interest, warned that the UK is moving towards a two-tier healthcare system, where those with more money can buy faster healthcare, but those with less are left to deal with the failing system. Further, the government has encouraged this process through subsidies given to private healthcare providers, and guaranteed taxpayer revenues to support their expansion. Evident in the fact that cancer care is now the biggest earner for London’s private hospitals.
“The NHS doesn’t need reform, it just needs to be sold-off… Publicly-funded workers aren’t essential, if people are getting old they should have worked harder when they were younger. Why should taxes pay for their laziness?”Shahmir Sanni quotes from private dinners of Conservative that he has attended during his time working in Conservative lobby groups. In his article for Byline Times, he details how the Conservatives, in private, are ideologically opposed to anything state funded, particularly the NHS as it “does not fit in their free market utopia.”
The Conservatives, during Covid, may have farcically clapped for the NHS as it suited them to do so at the time. But now that particular crisis is over, we are seeing the repercussions of their genuine intentions, and the real crisis is climaxing. The austerity policy implemented in 2010 is succeeding in benefitting the privileged few who can afford private healthcare. But those who cannot, the rest of the country, are privately disregarded and branded as lazy.