Nothing better shows the stupidity and emptiness of Starmer, Streeting and Reeves’ commitment to the NHS than the bombshell announcement of the abolition of NHS England in March 2025.
Starmer was all dressed up, as he often is, in Hi-Vis as he made a speech at the Dettol research centre in Hull. The centre piece was a pledge to “slash bureaucracy” and get rid of “pen pushers” and spend the money on the “front line”. It was a pathetic attempt to emulate Elon Musk and his chainsaw.
Of course, health workers hold no brief for NHS England as an institution. It was set up more or less as a human shield for Andrew Lansley, then the Secretary of State for Health. The responsibility for the health of the population was transferred from the Secretary of State to the new institution, allowing Lansley to walk away from any problems in the NHS. It was supposed to be ‘independent’ with a board, a Chair and a CEO and everything, but it then proceeded to follow every twist and turn of government policy, both Conservative and Labour. It also became a repository of various health ministers pet ideas – Monitor, NHSx, NHS Digital and NHS Improvement – as they were successively trashed and merged.
But although the institution was flawed from the outset, the people working in it were not. They are senior people, often experts in specialised fields, with decades of experience in the NHS. Overnight Keir Starmer callously plunged them into uncertainty.
First, they were going to be made redundant, then the Treasury refused to cover the redundancy costs, and now thousands are leaving on redundancy. As the months have gone by, it has become very clear that there was no plan for what would happen to the people, or the services they provided. Even now, staf are leaving on redundancy but the work remains for those who are left, with no idea who is going to provide them long term, or even IF they will be provided, in the future. It’s a mess. A mess that will cost over £1 billion.
And for what? There was no plan for the services, just a plan to get a day or so of newspaper headlines. And Elon Musk’s ‘war on waste’ was never popular anyway, not really, not with real people. The only people who liked it were the sort of creeps that sell their souls every day to fill the pages of billionaire-owned newspapers. That was Starmer’s target audience when he was waffling in Hull.
NHS England is not a nest of “wasteful pen pushers” as the Daily Mail and Keir Starmer would have you believe. It covers national vaccination programmes, it arranges provision of specialised health services, it monitors targets like waiting times and A&E waits, and it promotes digital initiatives in cancer care and mental health.
The institution itself, with its toytown Board, Chief Executive and Chair, could have been abolished, but the people in it, and the services they provide should have been transferred either downwards to the regional commissioning boards, or upwards to the Department of Health. But that would have taken a bit of thought, and Keir Starmer would have missed a few days headlines in the Tory press.
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