For a politician who has set much store by being pretty boring, Keir Starmer seems to be enjoying his current provocative spell. His desire to shake up the ‘nonsense’ bureaucracy in the NHS makes the Sunday Telegraph splash and was a key feature of his interview this morning with Laura Kuenssberg. He argued that ‘the reason I want to reform the NHS is I want to preserve it’ and ‘I think if we don’t reform the health service it will be in managed decline’.
The Labour leader was insistent on the BBC that he didn’t want to touch the ‘founding principle of the NHS’, that it remained free at the point of use, but added that he had tasked his frontbenchers with coming up with ways the public services in their portfolios needed to be reformed. He said he disagreed with those who thought the NHS and other services should always stay the same – something he and his team know will annoy a certain section of the Labour party.
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