One thing that's been bothering me recently is David Cameron. That's a lie. He hasn't been bothering me recently, he's been bothering me since becoming PM and leading Britain in to selfish Tory territory. His reforms of the NHS are insubstantial and miscalculated. I worry that they are so misguided because of his own prounouncment that he wishes to be the heir to Tony Blair on the NHS. Many political commentators on the left have commented that his 'reforms' are nothing more than a vanity project. Polly Toynbee says it with much more political know-how than me, but speaking from a point of view in which the NHS has played a pivotal role in my life (grandparents, parents, aunts were/are employed by the NHS), it's unsettling.
Cameron's plans to put patient care first yet opening our NHS to EU Competition Laws reeks of back-door privatisation. To make a commodity of the NHS and people's health is to make a mockery of everything the NHS was set up to do. Cameron's attitude to the staff is disgusting too. Expecting doctors and nurses to help his plans while calling the service they give 'second rate' shows an appalling lack of understanding from a PM who prides himself on rebranding the Tory party as a party who 'cares'. He showed in those remarks that like any rebranding, it's still essentially the same product despite a new media-friendly face. Diane Abbott raises an interesting point about the speed at which these changes are being implemented. Many senior medical spokespeople are urging David Cameron to trial his plans for longer. But the ever ruthless PM just want to have his shot at being remembered as a great reformer in a similar light to Tony Blair. Little does he realise that Tony Blair's plans worked because he had (at the beginning) a great affinity with the working man, David Cameron has shown himself as a ruthless and contemptible of the working man. I just hope the NHS can withstand such an onslaught. His grand plans for GPs (already over-worked and under-valued) to organise and carry out the care given to patients is absolutely barmy. GPs didn't endure years of medical training to become proficient in middle management, they wish to help people. What will happen is that the GPs will be forced to seek help from private companies and thus we'll have private contractors slowly but surely working their way through the hierarchy of the NHS. It was raised on Question Time last night that a scheme similar to what David Cameron wants throughout the country was trialled and then ceremoniously dropped because it was such a far-reaching failure. While I haven't had the chance to read in to this, it is clear that there are many harbingers on Cameron's 'modernisation' of the NHS. His cloudy rhetoric of 'modernisation' comes like a bitter after-taste to his 'wholly necessary cuts' which actually masked a right-wing Tory agenda of a smaller state.
I'm casting my mind back to Claire Rayner's immortal last words: "Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I'll come back and bloody haunt him." And I think it's safe to say that Mr Cameron may start having many sleepless nights.
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