LABOUR’S health secretary Wes Streeting yesterday unveiled his new ‘trimmed down’ mandate for the NHS.
Declaring that he would bring the health service ‘back to basics’, Streeting issued the warning that this meant the ‘NHS must learn to live within its means’, and that: ‘The culture of routine overspending without consequences is over.’
This mandate, published by Streeting, sets out a cut in the current 32 targets set on the NHS, and places all the emphasis on cutting waiting list backlogs, delays in A&E, tackling the access to GPs and dentists, along with improving cancer care and mental health.
These will now be designated as the central focus for the NHS.
In order to achieve these demands, Streeting announced he would give health officials the most ambitious efficiency targets ever with strict instructions that the NHS must ‘live within its means’.
Streeting told The Daily Telegraph: ‘We are telling the NHS to go back to basics and focus on fundamentals. It needs to deliver on patients’ priorities – shorter waiting times, being able to get a GP appointment and ambulances that arrive on time.’
Warming to his theme of cutting costs, Streeting went on: ‘Our reforms will squeeze better value out of every penny going into the NHS, so it delivers a better service for patients.’
Squeezing value out of the NHS budget is a recipe for massive cuts across the board for the health service, and an increase in privatisation, with NHS bosses instructed by Streeting to ‘live within their means and not spend beyond their budgets’.
According to the Telegraph, Streeting proposes to set ambitious targets to boost productivity following warnings that the NHS had overspent its budget by £2 billion in the first few months of this financial year.
Expected to be dropped from previous NHS targets is the pledge to roll out women’s health hubs.
These hubs were intended to address the often ignored issues of women’s health by providing a wide range of services under one roof in centres across the country. But women’s health is now not considered a ‘priority’ by Streeting.
Equally the Alzheimer’s charities have warned that the national target for boosting diagnosis of dementia is in line for the chop under this new mandate.
Fiona Carragher, director of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said the scrapping of this target would be a ‘glaring omission’ which would send the message that dementia ‘doesn’t matter’.
The only thing that matters for Streeting is cutting the NHS budget, and achieving his proposed cuts to waiting lists and GP appointments by extending the use of computer technology and artificial intelligence in hospitals to slash the number of doctors and nurses.
Earlier this month, Streeting vowed to scrap ‘waste of time’ hospital check-ups and scrap over a million ‘pointless’ NHS hospital appointments.
Labour recently announced they are preparing to open up the health archives and patient records to the US tech companies for them to use for training their latest AI models, using private health data to increase their profits.
US corporations have been lobbying Labour since before the general election to be given an open door to privatise the NHS and loot billions in profit from the health service.
The campaigning group ‘Every Doctor’ conducted an analysis of the donations received by members of Starmer’s cabinet since 2023. They found that over £500,000 in donations alone from lobbyists, hedge funds and private equity firms connected to the private healthcare sector, had been made to Labour in this period.
None of this comes as a surprise.
Both Streeting and Starmer have made no secret that their plans to ‘rescue’ the NHS is really about savage cuts to health funding, bringing down waiting lists by scrapping appointments they consider ‘pointless’ and by bringing in the private health companies to take over.
The NHS is rightly considered to be the greatest gain ever made by the working class and today it must be defended by workers, forcing the TUC to take action by calling a general strike to bring down the Starmer-led Labour government and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
Labour’s war on the NHS must be defeated with the victory of the British socialist revolution!
