14,000 arguments against the NHS

That’s how many preventable deaths are caused every year by long A&E waits.

The figure comes from the report commissioned by the government and submitted by Lord Darzi, a former Labour health minister.

Lord Darzi also mentioned that our cancer survival rates lag behind other developed countries. However, he didn’t express this deficit numerically, leaving us to guess how many people die who could have lived. My guess is that the number is much higher than 14,000.

Then it’s not just A&E departments that keep patients at arm’s length. Thousands and thousands have to wait months, sometimes years, for essential operations and treatment. That has to push mortality rates further upwards, though the report doesn’t say how high.

As for primary care, depending on where you live, getting a GP appointment is either difficult, taking days or even weeks, or well-nigh impossible. My own surgery is a prime example.

When I was first assigned to it, we had two excellent GPs, both men. Just two – yet there was never a problem getting a next-day appointment. One doctor even paid me a house visit once, a service that used to be routine and is now nonexistent. The other GP possibly saved my life by referring me to an oncologist 20 years ago, when he spotted something untoward.

They both retired in their 50s, crushed under the weight of useless admin demanded by the NHS. Reinforcements arrived in the alluring shape of 12 young women, who now use patients the way badminton players use shuttlecocks.

We are passed from one to another, never seeing the same doctor twice. What care has lost in continuity, it hasn’t gained in availability. Next-day appointments are a thing of the past – next week is the best we can hope for. And I live in an affluent part of central London, where the situation is much better than even a mile or two away.

Again, I don’t know how such developments affect the health of the nation, but it would be counterintuitive to believe the effect is positive. I wonder what Lord Darzi thinks about it.

On balance, his report, saying that the NHS is “in a critical condition”, is uncharacteristically honest, which one doesn’t normally expect from Labour. What one does expect is muddled thinking, and Lord Darzi obliges by offering two mutually exclusive findings.

First he says that ministers must stop “throwing money” at hospitals, which have failed to increase productivity despite a major increase in staff numbers since 2019. Yet in the next breath he mentions that the NHS is “starved” of £37 billion in capital investment.

Perhaps this amount should be gently pushed towards the NHS, not thrown at it. Or thrown overarm, rather than in an underhanded fashion.

In any case, Sir Keir Starmer responded to the findings by pledging “the biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth”. The choice of words is telling: our PM seems to realise that whatever he proposes will remain a figment of his imagination.

One such figment is Sir Keir’s promise never to raise taxes on “working people” as a way of plugging the aforementioned budgetary hole. There he lets his imagination run wild: raising taxes on working and other people is a Labour compulsion, which they indulge even more passionately than the Tories.

The political price of tax rises supposedly needed to save the NHS is low. Our leading parties, but especially Labour, have won the propaganda war by sacralising the health service in the British mind.

We are ready to swallow any canard peddled by any government, such as that the NHS is the envy of the free world. This makes it hard to explain why the free world has so far neglected to follow our shining example – and still maintains much higher cancer survival rates, to mention just one marker.

Our PM also hinted at our difficulty “to meet the ever-higher costs of ageing population”, creating the impression that other Europeans oblige their governments by dying young. Yet 20 European countries boast a higher life expectancy than the UK, and none of them has a socialist Leviathan dominating their medical care.

So far Starmer hasn’t got around to following the advice of his fellow socialist, George Bernard Shaw. GBS suggested that when people reach 70 they should be asked to prove the social benefit of their continuing existence. If they couldn’t do so to GBS’s satisfaction, it was off to the abattoir with them.

That would be one solution to the exorbitant cost of treating wrinklies, but Starmer is manfully resisting it for the time being. Instead he is talking of greater use of technology and a “shift in the distribution of resources towards community-based primary, community and mental health services.”

Allow me to translate from socialist into human, avoiding Starmer’s tautologies as best I can. He is talking about replacing clinical medicine with social care, counselling, psychotherapy and other shamanistic practices beloved of socialists. We can also look forward to intensified state hectoring on every aspect of our life, from diets to leisure pastimes to preferred modes of transportation.

The modern state’s solution for anything is increasing the modern state’s power over everything. The NHS Leviathan is merely a projection of that innate impulse onto medicine, and such ossified socialist structures are unreformable.

Getting back to Darzi, he sounds desperate, disingenuous and hopeful. “My colleagues in the NHS are working harder than ever but our productivity has fallen” – that’s desperate. It’s also an illustration on the previous paragraph.

“It took more than a decade for the NHS to fall into disrepair so it’s going to take time to fix it” – that’s disingenuous. Darzi puts the blame squarely on the Tories, not on the uncorrectable systemic failings of nationalised medicine. One such is a guaranteed steady decline in productivity that mortifies him so.

“But we in the NHS have turned things around before, and I’m confident we will do it again.” I’m not aware of any such successful turnaround in the past, and I’m sure it won’t happen in the future. To use Chekhov’s quip, “this cannot be because it can be never”.

I’m expecting new radical proposals concerning public health, such as dancing around campfires at midnight, eating dried toads or sacrificing virgins (if none can be found, house pets can be used). These would be about as likely to solve the problem as anything our government can come up with.

A piece of avuncular advice: if you can’t get any A&E help, make sure you aren’t bleeding too fast. Then again, red is the colour of Labour.