If the Tories are responsible for the failing NHS, why is the picture no better in Wales under Labour?

[Namechanged2023]

I have never voted Tory, never will. I don’t support anything they stand for.

But I don’t buy this narrative.

The NHS has been rubbish for years. I work in a different public service, that is also rubbish. Too many people talking instead of doing, no performance management, too much leeway with full paid sick leave.

I’ve had mixed experience of the NHS like most. Some excellent staff who want to help and save time, some of the same role who do things completely differently, in a much more time consuming and resource intensive way (think simple tasks like administering antibiotics to a small baby). Some really empathetic, compassionate staff; some the complete opposite. Proactive GPs, and some who refuse to budge.

Their processes are just ridiculous though. I have waited hours to be discharged. Everything has to be done on paper. Letters sent out for everything. Phone lines only open for 2 hours on 3 days a week, so impossible to get through.

Agree - but you are getting rid to replace with something better.
What do you do if the only other likely provider is also unsuitable?

We're in a bind because there isn't a good way forward with either major party.

All of this.

@Hoowhoowho good post.

YANBU to say it isn't just a Tory issue, but they have been in charge for 12 years so they have to bear some responsibility.
Scotland and Wales have a degree of devolved government but they are not in sole charge of their destiny as a previous poster pointed out very well.
The Tory answer to any criticism of the NHS under them seems to be just to point to Scotland and Wales - but it's not that simple.

That was the results of PFI - cheap at the time, crippling budgets now

And introduction of private provision.

Both those put short term money in to the system, but were - exactly as predicted - going to fail after the short term (but Blair/Brown knew there was a good change that would be on someone else's watch, so didn't care that the actual legacy was a mountain of new debt and the door wide open to further privatisation)

So another question is - do you wants more smoke and mirrors (though where one finds the dosh for that in the post-PFI world is beyond me)

Or do we need enduring proper change, which neither party seems currently capable of?

I'm in Scotland and it's a disaster up here too.
What we need to do is look at the services the NHS provide and scrap many of them. They also need to sack every single EDI department, stop wasting time and money on stonewall accreditation, rainbow crap and pronoun badges etc.
I would also say that they should be promoting palliative care and quality of life for cancer patients with no chance of recovery and little to no likely improvement by treatment. This may seem cold and calis but I just keep remembering my grandmother (then 86) whose bowel cancer had recurred (after 30+ years in remittion) being pushed by the oncologist to treat it aggressively with surgery, chemo and radiotherapy even though she had a heart condition that she was told that they couldn't operate on because she would never survive the anesthetic let alone the surgery. Getting that dr to accept that she didn't want to go through the treatment was almost impossible

the problem is i doubt it would become a german style system where everyone pretty much has universal access. Germans spend a lot on healthcare but they can afford to-14% of income. The average income is much higher. average gross annual salary in Germany was 47.700 euros a year, or 3.975 euros/3500 GBP a month. Thats equivalent to an average salary of GBP 42k per annum. As someone kindly reminded me last week, 42k is the average salary in London! Not the whole of the UK! And most places in Germany don't have London house prices either; in fact my DH's grandfather's 3 bed house in a wealthy Bavarian city was recently valued to be a worth a smaller amount than my flat in London! I have my doubts about that valuation but still...

None of it is that simple.

Tory voters aren't all rich people with private medical cover. That would make 50% of the country in that bracket, which would actually be really good news!

The whole screaming idle fat cat Tory bastards is so unproductive. If people can't work together to find solutions, if we are so caught up in dissing the opposition, we can't achieve anything.

It's bigotry.

sadly the difference this time is that Labour is not going to reverse Brexit. And there is no money left to fund the NHS. There are a lot of other social problems that contribute to overuse of the nhs- poor housing, low incomes and inadequate heating in many homes. It would be difficult to solve those now that most of the social housing has been sold off.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't vote out the Tories. The system has undeniably gotten worse under their watch which means they must be gotten rid of. If not, what is the point of democracy?

Most people with private medical cover are working people. I am not saying there are no pensioners with Bupa but i read up about the statistics and most people with private medical care have workplace cover. It gets very expensive if you are retired and older and have preexisting conditions.

by and large, working people don't vote Tory because even higher rate taxpayers feel oppressed by high childcare fees, high housing costs etc. The main bulk of the vote comes from the over 60s who ironically need healthcare the most. The Tories I know do support the NHS existing. they just seem to have little idea about how it fares badly compared to other systems. They blame the lockdowns but other countries had lockdowns too. They blame the aging population and entitled people, but other countries have them too.

My area, the Tory voters are small business people, self employed, employed, childminders, nurses (yes).

And the pensioners voting Tory voted Tory when they were employed in the 80s, too.

The pensioners in my area are miners, so they won't be voting blue. We get labour at a local (borough) level and conservative at a wider (county and mp) level. There are a whole load of people round here voting Tory who are in employment, work in shops, care homes, hardworking families. Not professionals with employment provided health care.

One of the positives about being older is experiencing the past.
I remember the last time there were headlines about crazy NHS waiting times and people dying on trolleys. It was in 1996/1997. Then nuLabour came in, started incentivising reducing waiting lists and funding the NHS differently and it improved.

Now we are back at 10+ years of Conservative government and a fucked NHS. Despite being told that there was going to be £350m a week extra for the NHS from Brexit and that we had to lockdown to "protect the NHS". But we clapped, so all good.

I don't think that's a coincidence personally.

FWIW I used to hate Labour and have voted Conservative in the past, but imo they have destroyed our country this time and I'm fed up with "Labour are just as bad/but Corbyn" as its not true and if voters believe it we might as well not bother and happily become a Tory dictatorship

How much money did the Tories waste during the pandemic? PPE? Test and Trace was 37 Billion : committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/
and was not fit for purpose.
The tories do not care about you or the NHS. They’re just in it for the cash.
Why any working person votes for these people I do not understand.
What’s worse though is that even though health is a devolved matter, when England votes Conservative all the UK, including NI suffers.

As much as the tories are rubbish and have probably underfunded it, I don’t think it’s a simple as vote out the tories and things will improve. As demonstrated by the situation in Scotland and Wales under different governments. I think some of the issues aren’t easily fixed - we are all living longer but living with more health conditions that require the NHS, we are more unhealthy in our lifestyles but due to modern medicine we are living with long term health conditions rather than dying with them if that makes sense. Intervention to help adults become healthier so they don’t develop conditons that need the NHS needs to start in childhood so improvement there is a generation away. Also re evaluation of what we think the NHS is actually for…eg during ambulance strikes people were saying don’t call an ambulance unless your life is in danger - I was under the impression that that’s why you should call an ambulance anyway? If your life isn’t in danger and you can get to hospital another way then do that? I’ll probably get flamed for saying all that!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50543903

The most striking difference of all is between younger and older voters.
About three-fifths of those aged 65 or older are currently proposing to vote Conservative, compared with less than a quarter of those aged under 35. Conversely, nearly half of those aged less than 35 are backing Labour - but only 17% of those aged 65 or over.

There has always been a tendency for the Conservatives to be favoured in greater numbers by older rather than younger voters, with the opposite being true for Labour. Nevertheless, the gap widened noticeably in the 2015 election and even more so in 2017. It looks as though the generational gap could be just as big this time.
Younger and older voters also disagree about Brexit. Younger voters are more likely to have voted Remain and older ones for Leave. This helps explain why younger voters are less willing to vote Conservative.
However, the generational gap was widening before the EU referendum was held, so it must be about more than Brexit.
Some other generational differences in the UK may be playing a role, such as attitudes towards immigration, ease of getting on the housing ladder, and the cost of university tuition.
Either way, it is clear that age, not social class, is the division that nowadays lies at the heart of British party politics and will play a significant role on 12 December.

I work in a workplace which provides private healthcare cover and most people don't support the Tories (most are younger though). DH works for a bank and even he says its 50/50 whether they support Tory which is quite striking given the nature of the profession. Many junior staff are already higher rate taxpayers so probably earn more than people in a care home or a shop. But plenty still live at home even if they are on 70k. They would probably buy a home eventually (and it would be a nice one in a desirable area) but they are very bitter in the mean time. I speak from personal experience and even when they have bought their home, they still remember. And vow not to vote Tory.

Intervention to help adults become healthier so they don’t develop conditons that need the NHS needs to start in childhood so improvement there is a generation away
What, like the old "Sure Start" programme that NuLabour introduced, and then the Conservatives cut because Austerity? How will we fund that then?

Yeah I grew up in South Wales and the NHS there is and always has been dreadful. They repeatedly told my father he was overreacting and had indigestion when he had pancreatic cancer. They finally admitted him when he was yellow and 8 stone.

Their mental health provision was horrific. You get addmitted when you make a near successful attempt but until then don't bother us.

These experiences were in the late 90s / early 00s.

Labour got away with ignoring the dire state of public services in Wales and the North because of course "those areas will always vote Labour". Yeah right. Unbelievable entitlement.

The media is only getting exercised about the NHS crisis now that the crisis has spread to the comfortable Home Counties and London. Boo hoo. Most of us have been dealing with it for decades.

But the Scotland and Wales governments are not completely free to do as they please, so that's not really a fair comment. Wales has its own problems with a poorer, older, less healthy population, than England, and this also means just raising taxes is not an easy option.

Other choices in the past meant that the NHS wasn't doing so well in some areas, but we didn't have such severe social care problems as England - and there really is no point in looking at health and social care separately, as the social care crisis impacts hugely on the NHS through Delayed Transfers of Care ('Bed Blocking') and so on.

Of course, everything really has gone to shit since Brexit/Covid.

As much as med advances have put the NHS under strain etc, they also reduce pressure.
Many surgical procedures now are in out on the same day, people can be monitored from home, new drugs/techniques mean people can be treated on a ward/at home instead of ICU.

On ambulances, yes sure call for one only when life in danger but what about a broken leg, hip, concussion? a stroke wont always be life threatening but i'd want an ambulance!

Why are you advocating the UK have a 3rd world health service?

If other countries are coping, the real question is "why isn't the UK ?"

Not good in Scotland under the SNP.

Because health funding made available to devolved administrations is proportionate to that in England. So where its cut in England, that effects what the other nations get.

If other countries are coping, the real question is "why isn't the UK ?"

Public healthcare systems all over the place are creaking, which is why it’s pointless having endless arguments about eViL TOriEs when the reality is far more complex. Australian friends in recent years have described identical situations with emergency departments and ambulances as we see reported in the news in the UK. We were in Detroit over Christmas with the extended fam, of which several are medics. It was really interesting to hear from them that many of their colleagues are Canadians from the Windsor area who live right across the border but choose to work in Michigan hospitals because a) the pay and working conditions are so much better than in Canada, where many medics are at breaking point, and b) they then obtain US health insurance and can be treated in the US rather than having to rely on the Canadian systems where they’ll wait months or years for many treatments. I was really surprised to hear that. But I did a bit of reading and pretty much any news article or position/advocacy piece from the Canadian equivalents of the BMA or RCN etc about the Canadian healthcare system I read portrayed it as having exactly the same problems as the NHS - I had to check whether I was actually still reading about Canada several times.

Countries which are coping best are coping for a range of reasons, and some of the best performing healthcare models are in counties with centre-right and right-including coalition governments, so the rigid focus on the NHS failing simply because the Tories are ideologically opposed to poor and disabled people having nice things and being alive is frustratingly simplistic. Nothing is ever going to be fixed if the default reaction to any discussion of the NHS immediately reverts to Labour v Tory rather than reasoned assessment and analysis.

Didn't Wales vote in favour of Brexit? And why would you want to reverse Brexit if you want to control your own borders and immigration policies? Being in the EU means giving up those rights?

what countries would you say are coping well?

control over immigration policy is a bit of an illusion. We may want less immigration but at the same time the HE sector needs foreign students (and many also bring their families esp at graduate level-- we would not get the best science PhDs if we don't allow them to bring their families and many of them would be at that age where they have kids). On the other end, we need fruit pickers and care home staff and medical staff as there arent enough British people willing to do those jobs.

So we have 'control' but yet we don't because we need the immigrants to do these jobs or have entire industries collapse. Being in the EU means many of these immigrants would come from Europe. Being out of the EU means many of these immigrants would come from outside the EU which is why net immigration is at a peak right now.

At least when we were in the EU, we also had reciprocal rights to settle in Europe as well as advantages with trade and funding from the EU for our most deprived areas. I am the non EU spouse of a British citizen and being in the EU meant my DH could study in Germany and when we married, it meant we could return to the UK after living in Germany and only pay £65 for our visa rather than thousands under the official spouse visa route.