Corbyn must figure out how to break down May's flimsy defences
This is getting old.
At Prime Ministers Questions today, Theresa May answered Jeremy Corbyn’s questions on the NHS with the same tired response that the Conservatives have been leaning on for seven years.
Corbyn opened with a question on government cuts to the number of hospital beds ‘when hospitals are struggling to provide essential care’.
May responded:
“Let’s actually look at Labour’s record on this issue. In the last six years of the last Labour government, 25,000 hospital beds were cut. But we don’t even need to go as far back as that. Let’s just look at what was Labour’s policy before the last election. Because before the last election, the Rt Hon Member for Leigh, a former Labour shadow health secretary, said the following ‘what I’d cut are hospital beds’. Labour policy — cut hospital beds.”
Corbyn reminded May that ‘in 2010, there was the highest ever level of satisfaction with the NHS delivered by the Labour government’ but that didn’t stop May from trotting out variations the same answer four more times in response to his subsequent questions, on waiting times, social care, nurses bursaries and patients on trolleys.
This trend presents a major challenge to the Labour leadership team. Week in, week out, the PM is getting away with offering the same threadbare response, despite the fact that she is misrepresenting both Labour’s policy in government and its 2015 election promises.
If Corbyn is going to continue pressing the government on the NHS he must, at the very least, develop an effective strategy for pointing out May’s obfuscations, and for explaining why Labour has a vastly better record that the Conservatives on the NHS.
However, May’s approach, as we have pointed out plenty of times before, shows contempt for the parliamentary process.
She knows full well that comparisons between absolute spending a decade ago and absolute spending today are meaningless; the comparison must be based on real terms spending. Additionally, when assessing NHS spending, government must also factor in that fact that the population is both growing and ageing.
And when that context is provided, the independent IFS has projected that Department of Health spending will be lower in 2020 than it was in 2010.
May knows that her defence of Tory health spending is flimsy and, considering that she is still not a confident PMQs performer, it shouldn’t be difficult to break it down.
But for now, her phone-in responses are working well enough. Unless Corbyn changes his strategy, the PM won’t change hers.
Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin is editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter
See: ‘Permanent winter’ is coming in the NHS
See: Social care could ‘completely collapse’ this year or next, warns Age UK
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3 Responses to “PMQs: Theresa May repeats herself five times on the NHS, but doesn’t give an answer”
Ann Blyth
Corbyn is useless. Wish he would stand down in the hope that we would get a stronger opposition. All Cruella Mayhem does is sneer at him.
Mike Stallard
Table 1 Changes in numbers of certain groups of NHS staff 1999–2009
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/general-election-2010/key-election-questions/how-many-managers
Well now because of the website, i cannot reproduce the excellent table.
But notice how the number of nurses has dropped. So has the number of doctors.
This could well be because the number of chiefs has gone up in all cases.
Doctors and nurses are professional people who rely on their own professional expertise. The bureaucrats who demand more and more resources have no clinical judgement of course – they are not expected to have – and they get badly in the way, often frighteningly so. It was, for example, their decision, not just the politicians, to cut the number of beds which leads to the cancelling of operations at the mast minute. They wanted “care in the community”.
What the NHS needs above everything is not more and more managers (ie more cash). What it badly needs ifs freedom for the doctors and nurses to be trusted to use their professional skills without interference from people who know nothing about it..
ian campbell
admin costs gordon brown 4%of NHS Budget May 12% and rising a real cut of 8% in spe nding on front line services EVERY YEAR therefore total lies about funding by the time cuts savings etc have been included