The LABoraTORY: The NHS gets its big day as Number One political football

BOTH PARTIES WILL BEND REALITY TO GET WHAT THEY WANT WHEN THE STAFFORD REPORT IS PUBLISHED TODAY



After eating his cream, Jeremy the Cat decided to corner a defenceless sparrow




YOU'LL PROBABLY HAVE SPOTTED THAT COALITION SPIN-DOCTORS HAVE GOT THEIR INTO ALL THE MAJOR MEDIA CHANNELS OVER THE LAST 24 HOURS: '13,000 NEEDLESS DEATHS'. YOU MAY ALSO HAVE NOTICED THE LINE ANDY 'SHAGGER' BURNHAM WILL TAKE TO DEFEND HIS BACKSIDE: 'I WARNED TORIES ABOUT NHS'. ALL OF IT IS THE USUAL BOLLOCKS PUT OUT TO MEET A HIDDEN AGENDA. KEEP YOUR EYE OUT FOR THE DISTORTIONS.



The disgraceful state of affairs at Stafford Hospital five years ago should not in any way be minimised. In one of those right-place-at-the-right-time twists, I was in the town investigating social worker and psychiatrist corruption in Staffordshire Council at the time - and thus stumbled onto the fight by patient activists to get the hospital criminals brought to book. While most press titles yesterday were seeing the debate about the Report as one in which the blame for this mess will be 100% laid at Labour's door by the Tory leadership, I beg to differ.



I think the furore will be used, very cleverly as always, by Jeremy Hunt and others to smear the entire idea of a State-run health provision system. The key to this lies in the decision to report on standards across 14NHS Trusts: the goal is to suggest systemic failure.



Quite a lot of the Stafford anomalies can indeed be laid at Labour's door. Stafford was - and is - probably the best example in Britain of how fluffy social policies and tramline thinking can produce a culture in which feral behaviour and the acceptance of sufficiency become the norm. This was in turn reflected in the poor standards and couldn't care less culture that dominated the town's hospital. And lest we forget, Andy Burnham's signature is on the document approving the hospital for NHS Trust status - which was, to say the least of it, something of a clanger - and thoroughly undeserved, given the appalling nature of treatment there.



But many of the staff issues were cultural and professional - bent consultants and coroners, falsified death certificates and so on - and can be laid at the door of nationally declining professional ethics. Further, social problems translate into admissions overload: people wind up dehydrating for hours on trolleys because kids don't care for their older relatives any more, idiots get pissed and have fights, doctors in primary care refuse to work unsocial hours, and too many nursing staff are agency top-ups who don't GAF or have a clue what's going on. Just as bent psychiatrists make money bending the truth about dysfunctional kids in the secret family courts, so too have many standards of nursing care and management honesty been knackered by our 'do what it takes' social values. In this sense, they're no different to G4S overcharging the Government, or Barclays Bank lying about the true state of its finances, or RBS defrauding SME customers.



This is nothing to do with the NHS as an idea: it's current state, however, is a result of the culture of sociopathy nurtured by first Thatcher, then Blair, and now Camerlot. But human tweetfest Dan Hannan has already tried hard to show that the victimisation of one of the patient activists involved 'shows that the NHS culture is irreparable'. That's bollocks: it was hardcore Union activists who were chiefly behind it. It is the social culture that needs re-engineering - and the political football kickers who need to be sent off - not the NHS concept. Just watch Jeremy Hunt in action today: I guarantee he will, with his usual weaselly back-handed observations, develop arguments suggesting that the NHS "needs radical reform" (which it does) and that surprise, surprise private insurers and providers will be riding into town any day now.



The reality is that the NHS is usually most royally screwed when the private sector gets involved. The PFI so criminally moved off the New Labour balance sheet by Bamboozling Brown is a case in point. Connecting for Health is another. Agency nursing staff another. The supply of medicines by greedy Pharmcos another still.



But the naivety and incompetence of NHS management and its surrounding quangos must share the responsibility for this waste.



Predictably, my solution remains the same: clear out all the State sector timeservers on the one hand, and the private sector crooks on the other. Scale down the ambitions of the NHS. And mutualise it community by community.



This would make for the safest governance, and the best result for the citizen. But it won't happen, because neither the private health lobby nor the trade union movement would allow it. This is another example, I'm afraid, of how and why policy in the UK has nothing whatever to do with our needs any more: all of it is aimed at the survival of privileged interest groups.
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