Virus: Powerless ministers in 'reformed' NHS and Keir Starmer
Rock & Roll Politics with Steve Richards
Podmasters
4.7 • 909 Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
Not for the first time ministers are hoist by their own petard as they try to exert control over the NHS only to discover they gave away their powers to do so..and Keir Starmer wins by a landslide.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve richards and what a lot we've got to talk about in the |
| 0:23.6 | short time available what do i mean short time available i got 24 hours each day at home but anyway |
| 0:31.0 | in the relatively short time you've got available to listen we've got to get through the latest |
| 0:36.9 | implications of the pandemic which which I think are so |
| 0:40.0 | interesting, and the landslide victory of Kier-Stama in the Labour contest, which is also |
| 0:46.7 | very significant, in my view, for reasons I'll talk about shortly. But first to the pandemic, |
| 0:53.3 | what's so interesting is that for those of us who |
| 0:57.6 | covered all the various attempts, first by Tony Blair, but in a much more accelerated way by David Cameron, |
| 1:06.7 | too, in their words, reform the NHS. We've watched with great interest how ministers now in the |
| 1:16.0 | context of this crisis try and pull levers and find it very hard to recognise what levers to |
| 1:23.8 | pull and whether there's anything at the end of those levers. Because the problem, |
| 1:29.1 | especially with the coalition's reforms of the NHS, and by the way, the more I think about it, |
| 1:35.8 | I think the 2010 to 2015 coalition wins in quite a competitive field the worst government since 1945. |
| 1:47.0 | So many of the measures they passed, usually with great approval from much of the media, |
| 1:54.1 | have proved catastrophic in their consequences, from the Fix Term Parliament Act to real-term spending cuts as a response to the 2008 financial crash, which, remember, was a banking crisis. |
| 2:09.1 | It wasn't actually a public spending crisis. |
| 2:12.5 | But the NHS reforms from that era are up there, there too because what they did was to fragment. |
| 2:21.3 | They were well-intentioned in the sense that their aim was to empower the patient. |
| 2:27.3 | And in their original form, there was no responsibility at all for the health secretary to have any kind of accountability |
| 2:37.1 | in relation to the NHS. It was all going to be devolved to mediating agencies and ultimately the patient. |
| 2:44.8 | And David Cameron claimed, when it all started to go wrong, that he didn't know what the then |
| 2:50.1 | health secretary, |
... |
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