Keir Starmer failed the NHS. The next Labour leader must do better.

As Keir Starmer ended his resignation speech with tears in his eyes, we remember the rivers of tears flowing from the people of Gaza and the occupied territories. Closer to home is the lasting sadness among the families of 305 people dying avoidably every week from delays in emergency care, and those impacted by the deep social inequalities and poverty that have not been seriously addressed. 

Starmer, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and former Health Secretary Wes Streeting have conspired to deliver a prescription without hope for the NHS and for patients. In place of compassion and positivity, they have built their ambitions on fear of the bond markets, the worthless opinions of the right wing press and partnership with private corporations.

Reeves stubbornly wears her self-imposed fiscal rules straitjacket. This prevents serious investment in public services despite being essential infrastructure for a healthy population and successful economy. Starmer has lacked any vision or urgency in addressing manifest social inequalities that contribute to poverty, homelessness, rising racism, sickness and almost 3 million people out of the workforce for health reasons. Instead, his political compass led him to keep the two-child benefit cap for too long, impose a winter fuel payment cut and attack disabled people’s benefits – all of which contributed to his downfall. 

Starmer’s unforgivable ‘island of strangers’ speech asserting that immigration had caused ‘incalculable damage’ – regardless of his subsequent apology – poured petrol on the flames of racism targeting black and brown NHS staff and patients. Far from rowing back on the racism of Theresa May’s hostile environment, with its harsh and bankrupting charges to undocumented migrants and health surcharges for migrant workers, he has overseen Shabana Mahmoud’s new onslaught of punitive immigration law. 

In Streeting, Starmer appointed a powerful neoliberal voice, heavily funded by donors linked to the private health industry. He repeatedly asserted that the NHS needed ‘reform’ and partnership with the private sector, rather than funding and that AI, data and technology would replace the need for a health and care workforce delivering personal care. The prime minister lapped all this up and regurgitated it. 

Starmer’s legacy is a series of policy failures and acts of omission. He ignored Labour’s manifesto commitments to roll back outsourcing of public services to the private sector, to scrutinise existing contracts and to return them to the public sector. He and Streeting were silent when the East Suffolk and North Essex Foundation Trust (ESNEFT) outsourced 1000 NHS staff to Sodexo in April 2025. He allowed Streeting to announce arrogantly the abolition of NHS England, the 50% funding cut and merging of Integrated Care Boards, and the enforced financial cuts to trusts which, when totalled up, may lose the NHS between 50-100,000 clinical, technical, support services, admin and management staff – collective experience discarded without even a workforce or redundancy plan, and guaranteeing damage to clinical services. The 7.2 million waiting list simply cannot be addressed in this way.

The crisis in the NHS spans the whole service: inadequate numbers of GPs facing intense pressures and thousands of unemployed colleagues; insufficient community nurses making a mockery of Streeting’s ‘hospital to community’ shift; social care in crisis, with over a million people denied the support they need. Lack of community and social care support means around 13,000 hospital beds are occupied by patients unable to be discharged; A&E’s consequently overwhelmed, with patients experiencing delayed transfer from ambulances, many hours waiting for assessment, and in May, 3,000 patients a day needing admission but kept waiting in corridors, storage spaces and other unsafe areas for a hospital bed and definitive treatment. 

If one thing is unforgivable – and there are many, from maternity and infant deaths, to dental deserts and mental health failures – it is the silence from Starmer and Streeting on this crisis at the frontline in A&E: in 2025 there were 554,000 patients who waited on trolleys for over 12 hours for a hospital bed leading to 15,860 preventable deaths.

The 10 Year Health Plan for England, crafted by Alan Milburn – endorsed by Streeting and embraced by Starmer – is an open-door invitation to the private sector to continue its parasitisation of the NHS, with private health care funded by the NHS, the return of private finance for estate building, and involvement in commissioning and workforce planning. 

The starkest example of why this is so dangerous and wrong is the privatised cataract surgery industry. In 2023-24 the five main companies received £536 million in NHS cataract contracts, extracting 32% (£169 million) in profits while, at the same time, NHS Eye departments lost funding for healthcare for patients with serious eye conditions where delay in treatment can lead to blindness.

We need commitment to a publicly funded, provided and accountable NHS, not an ever-closer relationship with the parasitic private sector. Politicians must recognise that underfunding brings inefficiency and costs and that investment is essential to restore the NHS to its number one world-wide status up until 2014. While urgent action is needed to save thousands of lives, Starmer and his team have looked the other way, falsely claiming victory on waiting list reductions. We need an end to cronyism, yet we have Streeting’s mentor and Epstein associate Mandelson, Global Counsel, Palantir, Samantha Jones and Matthew Swindells mired in revolving door unethical influence and conflicts of interest. Instead of hope for millions of people that the social care system would be addressed, the Government kicked that can to beyond the next election. 

For too long, our national health service has been treated as an aberration to be corrected by neoliberals in both the private sector and in government. We need the stable to be cleansed and a new approach that sees the needs of the population and public services as a top priority. 

Tony O’Sullivan and John Puntis are co-chairs of Keep Our NHS Public

Image credit: Simon Dawson / Number 10 – Creative Commons