Though the NHS made a welcome change from endless bickering about energy bills at today’s PMQs, the exchanges were just as unedifying. There is very little gain in the sort of fact war that David Cameron and Ed Miliband tried to indulge in, as there is no killer fact that can silence an opponent on the NHS. Instead, the exchanges descended very quickly into ‘let me give the right honourable gentleman the facts about the NHS under this government’, ‘we have a Prime Minister too clueless to know the facts’ and ‘once again, the right honourable gentleman is just wrong on the facts’. Each man used his own ‘simple facts’ that he claimed either showed the NHS was safe in the Tories’ hands or that it was being killed by the Tories. Neither built a sufficiently strong pile of facts on which to stand taller than the other.
But there was an interesting line that the PM repeated which jarred rather. Today was a day of fluffed lines by many in the Chamber: perhaps they’re all a bit stunned by the grim rain or tired before recess next week. But if Cameron wasn’t fluffing this line, he should modify it before it gets its next inevitable outing. He told Ed Miliband:
‘I am clear that my job is to stand up for the NHS and deliver a stronger NHS – when is he going to understand that his job is to stand up to the bully boys of the Unite and show some courage?’
Now the second half was a typical Cameron shoe-horning moment, although not quite as brazen as his response to John Cryer’s question about tribunal fees for women suffering discrimination at work because they are pregnant (he didn’t answer the question and instead had a rant about Unite, which was then cut off by the speaker, leading to the breakdown of relations between the two men reported by James). But the first half didn’t quite work because all along the Tories have been trying to argue that they stand up for the consumers, not the producers of healthcare. Of course the NHS is our national religion and politicians must pay their respects at all times. But Cameron should have been arguing that ‘my job is to stand up for the patients and give them a stronger NHS’. That patients’ advocate narrative has a far stronger resonance on the day another series of allegations about serious problems with another NHS hospital surfaced. Being the party of the patients and the party of the NHS is of course not mutually exclusive by any means. But it is important to be clear that the priority is those being treated by the NHS, not the institution itself.
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