Kate Forbes has finally managed to shake off questions about equal marriage. The SNP leadership contender has been busy instead talking about Scotland’s crumbling health service – and how she’d fix it. It’s looking like Forbes, if successful, will scrap the Sturgeon-Yousaf National Care Service, back an independent inquiry into Scotland’s healthcare system and enter into considerations about the long-term future of the NHS. Will any of this help turn around a failing health service?
Forbes said today during her speech at Reform Scotland’s event, a health service inquiry would be an ‘excellent idea’. She said it would look at the ‘short, the medium and the long-term future of the NHS’ and also address difficult working conditions faced by frontline healthcare workers, yet she made clear that any shake-up would not entail privatisation.
‘I wouldn’t in any way swerve on this: [it is] an absolute foundation stone that the NHS continues to be free at the point of need. That would be absolutely non-negotiable,’ she told Chris Deerin of Reform Scotland. Forbes did, however, go on to say that the ‘long term future’ of the health service ‘needs to be considered’. What she meant by this was not entirely clear – though she indicated she would like to involve senior medical workers in any planning.
Forbes also targeted the ‘bureaucratic managerial levels and layers’ that may be chipping away at NHS funds. The SNP finance minister made it clear she would be scrutinising where money is going in order to better direct it to the ‘frontline’. Common sense, perhaps; but many healthcare workers are often left frustrated that politicians don’t appear to understand the day-to-day issues that affect healthcare spending.
What of Sturgeon’s controversial National Care Service (NCS) plan? The outgoing First Minister’s proposals would centralise social care, care of the elderly, family support and community healthcare into a single service to create a free social care system. Yousaf, the Scottish Health Secretary and Forbes’ rival in the leadership contest, labelled it the ‘most ambitious reform of public services since the creation of the NHS’. But the response to the NCS has been lukewarm to say the least. Care worker unions have come out in opposition, with the Scottish Trades Union Congress calling on the Scottish government to put the brakes on the policy as it is ‘not fit for purpose’.
Forbes is no fan either: she took a subtle swipe at Yousaf when she expressed the need to rethink the care service proposal. Something ‘simpler’ was needed in its place, she said, as opposed to ‘creating something that’s massive and doesn’t solve the core problems’. Forbes also warned that centralising services of this kind ‘might create more problems than you’ve solved’, and later reiterated that she believes ‘in decentralising power by default’ and ‘empowering people’.
She kept to her usual straightforward, earnest style and so Forbes’s subtle digs at Sturgeon and Yousaf’s policies could easily have been missed. But as all three candidates continue their campaigns, the deviations from Sturgeon’s way of running things become ever clearer – and the cracks in the Scottish National party continue to widen.
Some in the SNP are already concerned about the tone and content of the current leadership debate. Stewart McDonald, one of the party’s more thoughtful MPs at Westminster, felt the need to go public today to issue a reminder to colleagues this morning on Twitter. While it should be expected that leadership candidates will likely talk down some areas of government policy, he tweeted, ‘for goodness sake, try not to look like an opposition politician’. The SNP’s fractious leadership contest has shown that the SNP – for so long seemingly immune from the rules of normal politics – might not be so different after all.
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