Would you vote conservative again?

That's complete nonsense @MariEllie - Corbyn was suspended from the Labour party by Sir Kier Starmer so he's hardly likely to be backing him now.

They really can’t. However much fictitious hyperbole you post. Crashing the economy and nearly bankrupting the country is as bad as it gets.

Have you seen who is waiting in the wings to take over? Sir Keir who backed Jeremy Corbyn and his neo-communist policies last GE plus Angela Rayner who is a big fan of Mr Corbyn. So things can get worse!

It’s true in relation to ambulance and A&E waits, cancer diagnoses and GP appointments. In the early years of this century you were guaranteed a GP appointment in two days, now the ambition is two weeks.

What do you think waiting times indicate? They indicate prompt treatment which automatically leads to better patient outcomes.

Unfortunately, that's not true in all cases. There are data from England showing that when patients were operated on locally by general surgeons to reduce waiting times, 30-day mortality was significantly higher versus patients operated on in a specialist centre.

The things that hold back our country, which never seem to get fixed, no matter which party is in power, are:

the blame-game - pointing the finger at previous administrations and claiming what they did wrong was the cause of current failures. If less energy was spent finding somewhere else to lay the blame for stuff and more energy invested in actually getting to real solutions, even in incremental steps, we'd be a lot better off.

Linked to the above

Short Term-ism - politicians doing whatever is expedient to make them look good in their immediate term of office, to the sacrifice of the longer term good of this country. Where's the altruism, and for that matter, where's the honour. There is none.

There was a time when, if someone did something really shameful, they'd own it and do something about it. I always think of Profumo and how he spent the rest of his life away from the public eye, giving back to society, because he felt that was the honourable thing to do. Nowadays, someone who lies, cheats and misleads is clinging on for dear life like a limpet, insists on waiting for a report to be published, marking time in the hope it can all get kicked into the long grass.

What do you think waiting times indicate? They indicate prompt treatment which automatically leads to better patient outcomes. Your attempts to discredit a report which definitively indicates that the NHS was infinitely better 17 years ago than it is now are frankly pathetic. And transparent. I doubt anyone with half a brain can’t see what you’re doing. It’s impossible to have a sensible debate with a fact denier.

Blossomtoes · Today 12:08

The bit that you posted refers to waiting times not health outcomes? The reports conclusions are that there was massive increase in investment which led to no discernible impact on productivity, staffing levels or improved patient outcomes?

Yes.

To be fair, it was the global financial crisis that crippled the country with debt. That was partially caused by New Labour being intensely relaxed about low regulation and oversight of the institutions which actually caused the global financial meltdown, because the country had short sightedly made these institutions its cash cow, to the disadvantage of other sectors, long before Labour came to power (partially, because the UK government was not the only one in the world to be intensely relaxed about neo liberalism). New Labour at that time was really just a high spending but otherwise right wing party which specialised in intensely annoying the Tories by adopting a lot of the same policies they would have done, but then spending more on things that improved the quality of life of the majority, thus making them popular, so the Tories didn’t know how to fight against it until the low regulation of which they actually approved sparked a financial meltdown.

So the Tories would not have saved us from financial crisis and recession, they would just have ensured most people had a lower quality of life and poorer public services and infrastructure at the start of it. And they would still have inflicted austerity on us. And we would still be where we are now, only with even worse health, education and infrastructure which would thus require a far longer period of time and far more investment to recover from.

We could, of course, all vote for the party that is at the moment going out of its way to accelerate the decline of the country and accelerate increasing global instability, but I’m not sure why we would want to do that? Why encourage dictatorships and extremists to believe they have already reached their opportunity to make themselves pre-eminent?

The irony of quoting Pink News, then admitting it’s a poor source!!

Either Starmer has policies or he does not. Make up your minds.
Self ID has not been on the cards for a couple of years now and none of the parties has policies since their last manifestos.
What’s the Conservative policy on Self ID?
They were the ones that were going to bring it in. Have Maria Millar, Penny Mordaunt etc. changed their minds?

@ilovesooty yeah, probably. With the Tories, it's less likely they will raise my taxes. I know they have recently and that's been disappointing, but the other parties it's almost guaranteed. I can't afford to pay anymore.

Yes, I would & will.

The Tories threw money at the vaccination programme. That's the main reason that worked. 'Throwing money' at a problem, generally does work.

With the greatest of pleasure. Here you go.

digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/hospital-accident--emergency-activity/2019-20/performance-times

www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/qualitywatch/nhs-performance-summary#headlines

I'm sure you have the stats. Why don't you post them if you think it will further your debate.

This

Remind me how long A&E and GP appointment waits are now. And don’t say “Yes, but Covid” because they were abysmal in 2019.

That isn't true.

Waiting lists were considerably shorter until about 2000, but various counting measures have changed over the years.

The version that puts 2010 as lowest is a system that began only in 2007.

So yes, in the last 3 years of that Labour government there was a fall, but to say that was "the lowest in history" is simply not true

Did you actually read that report @Effic or are you misrepresenting it to influence other posters who haven’t bothered?

Here’s an extract from the summary.

The Government is now on course to meet its key targets to reduce the maximum time that patients have to wait for a first outpatient appointment to 13 weeks, and for inpatient treatment to six months. According to one official measure, the average time that patients have to wait has also fallen, from just over four months when Labour came to power, to less than three months last year.

^The Government has tackled other difficult areas. More than 96% of Accident and Emergency (A&E) patients are now discharged, transferred or admitted to hospital within four hours; a little short of the Government’s target of 98%.
And official statistics say that virtually 100% of GP practices now comply with the target that patients should wait no more than two days to see a GP (although patient surveys give a rather different picture).^

Despite these successes, the Government has accepted that there are ‘hidden waits’, in which treatment is stalled at specific bottlenecks (for example, diagnostic tests, such as MRI scans, that will lead to a diagnosis). To address this, the Government has announced extra investment in diagnostics and a new ‘total waiting time’ target; patients should wait no more than 18 weeks from GP referral to treatment by 2008.

Verdict: Targets met. Huge progress in the area that was the highest priority for the Government. However, more work is required to reduce waiting times for diagnostic tests.

Labour also crippled the country with debt when they left too. In retrospect though, the outcomes in health (or education) weren't really any better for people overall despite labour throwing money at the problem. The impact on actual people needs to be measured as well. So no, it's not really measurable enough for me. I say that as someone who was, at the time, a massive supporter of Blair, until he involved us in a war that never should of happened.

But that aside, knowing that Labour does tend to throw money at the problem, with seemingly no better results, what do you think they would do differently now in 2022, to what they did before?

@JabberwockyPie - how about waiting lists in the NHS were at their lowest in history when Labour left power in 2010. Is that measurable enough for you?

The existence of human beings like Rees-Mogg who want to accelerate the world towards a vision that would be disastrous for the vast majority of humanity is why low regulation of their levers of power is an absolutely atrocious idea. Hedge fund profiteers who are manipulating politics and the markets for personal gain and pulling the ladder up after them so they cannot be challenged. They will suffocate the world in a vat of their own disgusting greed.

Like Truss, Rees Mogg also seems wedded to a fantasy that will be catastrophic in reality.

notprincehamlet

For example, the policies of the government have stoked inflation to more than 10%

Inflation is the same in the EU. The only significantly different county is France because they allowed the building in nuclear power when the rest of Europe incl the uk said no.

ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/14698150/2-16092022-AP-EN.pdf/741bf6b2-1643-6ff0-34e7-31522ce1e252