Keir Starmer decided to fill the space at today’s pre-Autumn Statement Prime Minister’s Questions with a focus on a missing pledge from Rishi Sunak. He pointed out that the five new pledges the Prime Minister announced this week missed one on the NHS, and asked why. Sunak replied that ‘just weeks after’ he became prime minister, he ‘injected record funding’ into social care and unveiled the first ever long-term workforce plan in the NHS’s 75 year history. He didn’t explain why a pledge on the health service was missing, instead preferring to skip to the ones he had met on the economy.
Starmer told the chamber that the reason Sunak had dropped the NHS from his priorities was the size of the waiting list: now 7.8 million. ‘If a labourer or care worker is forced to wait a year for an operation, how are they meant to grow the economy?’ Sunak insisted that the government was ‘doing an enormous amount’, but then skipped over to Wales and the Labour-run health service that conveniently offers an attractive contrast with anything going on in NHS England.
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