The NHS was a huge issue in #GE2019, at times and in certain parts of the UK a bigger issue even than Brexit, and it should have represented an open goal for Labour, the party of the NHS. Yet, for me, the central campaign message of #NHSNotForSale just didn’t connect with voters.
For instance, I spoke to a bloke in his 70s, an ex-factory worker who’d voted Tory since Thatcher but he’d been following the election and reckoned that Corbyn was ‘talking a lot of sense’. But he asked me to explain if the NHS is really up for sale as he didn’t get the argument
Whilst I, an NHS worker, understand where #NHSNotForSale comes from, for many it probably sounds like nonsense. A completely abstract concept. I mean is Johnson really going to go to Trump and say “here’s the NHS mate, how much will you give me for it?” No, he isn’t.
And if your central message on the NHS doesn’t connect with voters then neither will banging on about A&E waiting times and cancelled operations when Johnson’s also pledged to pump billions into the NHS and “build 40 new hospitals”.
How did we let it get to this? It’s basic comms, for fuck’s sake, that your key messages have to resonate with your audience otherwise you’ve lost them. Labour is the party of the NHS, it really shouldn’t have been difficult to win the argument on the NHS.
So we ended up in the utterly ridiculous situation, with the NHS on its knees after nine years of Tory mismanagement, where I suspect most voters felt that there wasn’t that much to choose between the two main parties on the NHS - both were promising billions of extra funding.
And don’t label working class people in the north & midlands as thick simply because they didn’t vote Labour. Many, fearful for their local NHS services, were prepared to listen but we failed them when it came to the NHS debate by failing to get points across in a clear manner.
There are so many areas, after 9 years of deliberate under-funding, in which we could have attacked the Tories on the NHS: 100,000 vacant posts that undermine patient safety; the staggering £4.8 billion cost to the NHS of social inequality in greater hospital admissions alone.
The billions wasted on the ridiculously bureaucratic ‘internal market’ that should be reinvested in patient care; the lengthening waiting times in A&E and for planned operations; the rationing of healthcare as funding is cut; the misleading talk of “record levels” of funding.
The real reasons why more than half of hospital trusts are in deficit; the con-trick of PFI that is crippling many trusts; the introduction of up-front charges for NHS services for some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
All of these are issues that could resonate with voters yet we, the Labour Party, chose to lead with the essentially abstract concept of #NHSNotForSale. Something that I think most people either simply didn’t understand and/or could see that it wasn’t true.
That means on one of the two biggest issues of the whole campaign the Labour Party simply did not make a clear enough argument that connects with people. That is, sadly, a failure of leadership. All of us rely on the NHS but we’ve been let down by the party that created it.
It’s a failure too of journalistic scrutiny - the quality of debate about the NHS in recent years (who properly understands the consequences of 2012 Health & Social Care Act?) and the failure to hold politicians to account for what’s currently happening to the NHS is a disgrace.
And people like me, in back office NHS roles, who see what’s going on but tend not to say anything (it’s seen as ‘career limiting’ to speak up) are also to blame. We have a responsibility to patients to do all that we can to raise public awareness of what’s happening to OUR NHS.
The NHS won’t be sold off, in the traditional sense, but I genuinely fear for what will happen over the next five years as the principles on which it was founded are increasingly eroded and we move inexorably towards a US-style system. We must, all of us, keep fighting for it.
