We can have a Tory government and Brexit or we can have the NHS. Which do you choose?

[verdantverdure]

YANBU I'm not a millionaire so I chose the NHS.

YABU I am a millionaire so I don't need the NHS and I choose Brexit and Tory government.

I'd let go of the NHS. There is a reason that not one single country in the rest of the world has decided to copy the NHS... It's a disaster. Give me the French or Canadian model any day.

The NHS was set up to give medical care to patients. The food bill alone must be astronomical. People should pay for their own food. There is way too much waste. A shortage of nurses and carers on the ground means too much paid absence leave because of stress and too much money spent on the likes of diversity zars and trust leaders. We should be training more nurses and doctors every year so in 4-5 years time things would ease off. We'd need less agency nurses who cost a lot more than permanent staff yet can't do many simple procedures.

That isn't really what I said, and you seem to have a very simplistic idea of there being one party "at fault".

My point was this - the NHS under Blair, which you brought up as a properly funded, functioning system, was only able to achieve that because they brought in the PFI system. That's essentially a loan from the private sector.

The NHS, today, is still paying these off, huge amounts of money, and that is money that is not available for other things. So yes, some of the pinch now is because of retroactively paying for the NHS under TB. He has been very clever in arranging things so that would appear to have happened under someone else's governance.

The last Labour government before that, the UK overspent and was in the hole to the degree that they had to get an IMF loan to prevent a real economic collapse. This was a major part of the reason that the Tories in the early 80s had to institute such draconian austerity measures - that is the trade-off when you accept those kinds of loans, your economic policy is now largely decided by the people providing the money. Much like Greece more recently with EU money.

The Tories certainly haven't covered themselves with glory, but I don't really understand where this bizarre idea that Labour will fix things, or did much better, comes from. They are very much part of this boom/austerity cycle, and in any case, they are currently promising nothing for the NHS. I can't convince myself either that the situation would have been better had Labour been in charge of Covid management, I suspect they'd have dug an even deeper economic hole.

The Canadian model is in as much trouble as the NHS, I suspect because it's very similar.

@TempestTost - you're a Tory. I understand

The private sector is not the enemy. The country would not run without the private sector. Pensions are invested in the private sector, we need them to make profits so they pay tax and dividends. Yes, of course they have to provide good service, but they have to be allowed to make a reasonable profit.

Ha! There we go. But, oh no, the blessed NHS must be preserved at all costs! Even though we can't actually meet those costs...

You don't understand the trouble that Gordon Brown's precious PFIs got the NHS into, because he wanted to keep debt off the balance sheet. I understand.

Well, that's a convincing defense of your view that Labour will improve things and it's all the Tories fault.

Is that purely a matter of belief for you? Labour says they are Good and Caring, so it must be so? That is an impressive faith.

Anyway, I don't understand your point OP. Because we have all those three things - a Troy govt, Brexit, and the NHS.

As far as I'm aware this isn't Twitter / X so I have zero interest in the back and forth. But as a general rule I believe that any Labour government is better than any Tory government. It's not a faith, it's 62 years of lived experience.

Brexit is the drug of choice for old rich white people; just say no kids.

Yes for a little while and then Labour made changes for the worse and then the Tories came in and had to mop up the mess. The waiting lists were already going up sharply until the end of the Labour government, and things had been changed so severely nothing could be done to slow that down. Not to mention during the last Labour government we had one of the highest year on year population increases. It was an explosion waiting to happen. COVID sped things up.

In 2011 I had an accident. I sat and waited a whole day and most of the night, sat in a corridor, I couldn't walk and wasn't even given pain relief. How is that any better than now? I went through 14 months of having painkillers thrown at me with no resources to find out what was wrong with me. Had I not been able to afford private healthcare I would still be in a wheelchair now.

It was not this fantastic rose-tinted situation everyone makes out it was. The NHS is very different now. It began in an era when people took better care of themselves, the population was much lower. People on Mumsnet weren't telling others to go to A&E for an ear infection. There didn't need to be a department for every little thing. Not everything was ensconced in red tape requiring twelve pages of paperwork for a single appointment and a risk assessment checked by three members of "management" before a wet floor sign could be put out.

Average democracy enjoyer

I have voted quite definitively for the NHS and against Brexit in every election ever, as have all the people who are likely to respond to your question. I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to prove.

I've spent years in NHS management. I'm tired of all the lazy arguments about how inefficient we are and how wasteful we are. Very tired of the pointless restructures for political reasons that do no good for patients or staff. Sick of the lack of money to make any meaningful changes.
Sick of patient expectations and the media.
I'd welcome a new system, mostly because then maybe I'll be paid what I'm worth and not the peanuts the government thinks I should be thankful for. If patients have to pay, then they will have more respect for the services they use.
Of course millions will die, especially vulnerable people, because any sort of insurance system will mean people can't afford healthcare, but if that's what you all want, then bring it on.

That was a blinder

For Labour not the tax payer

But why do you think that?

It is a bit, I don't know, odd, that people so keen on how great Europe is don't seem to notice that many European health care systems, which have significant private sector elements, function really well, better than the NHS.

I don't think anyone is suggesting a system which is just cash in hand for users.

This.
I find it incredible how many people are falling for this narrative. Incredible and worrying. The next election is not a dead cert for Labour even after last week’s results.

@CoatRack / ime the only people still enjoying this kind of sniff are those who are well off enough not to care, or Reform voters. Democracy is a continuation not a moment in time

Nhs... always and forever..

It's a continuation as long as you don't like the result, and everyone who disagrees with you is a bad person, I get it 👌

@CoatRack - not voting in the next election then?

Of course, nothing to do with the existing government at all, the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years, nearly a decade and a half!

NHS decline and mismanagement is obviously not anything to do with contracts to the private sector, who correspondingly happen to be Tory Donors, more wealth driving up the bank balances of the few- in 2023 one of the Conservatives’ biggest ever donors has profited from £135m of contracts with the Department of Health and Social Care in under four years! Then there is the 10 billion on unusable PPE, the procurement process used the “VIP lane” priory system through which potential PPE suppliers referred by MPs, ministers, or civil servants could gain quicker access to contracts! It is just the continuous flow of money to the very wealthy, the wage stagnation of the rest of us, diminishing assets for the majority and inequality that of course means the NHS cannot survive without looking more broadly at the systemic problems of a British political and economic system that sees the very rich get richer year upon year and the middle and working classes poorer year upon year! Close the tax loopholes, tax the very wealthy- 10 million plus wealth tax, land value tax etc are all examples of how to redistribute wealth and the corresponding power for political decisions and ensure public services that are used by a majority survive. We are seeing Dickinsean levels of inequality that we mostly seem happy to not challenge and it's getting worse, the average house in the UK currently costs around nine-times average earnings. The last time house prices were this expensive relative to average earnings was in the year 1876- so many similarities now to Dickens' Victorian Britain, if we continue on this path, there will be many children experiencing the plight of 'Tiny Tim' with parents unable to afford healthcare for their children! The future may look very bleak as Dickens describes in A Christmas Carol,

“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”

100%, this started with Thatcher who recognised that by saying complex issues were simple, thick people would believe her nonsense and vote for her, in spite of her very obvious integrity bypass.