Nhs

The Health Secretary is making a big fanfare about a cash boost in the Budget and a new plan to reform the NHS so that it becomes a more community-based, prevention-focused service. But at the moment, his plan for the health service is very much in nascent form: the government is nowhere near close to publishing it and is instead going to start asking for ideas from the public and healthcare workers.  Wes Streeting’s ministerial colleague Stephen Kinnock sketched out how this consultation would run when he spoke at The Spectator’s health fringe at Labour conference. He told us that there would be a lengthy ‘national conversation’ about what people

This Labour conference has largely been about Keir Starmer and his ministers making the argument for what they are doing, rather than giving any details of how they plan to achieve it. Wes Streeting’s speech to the hall in Liverpool this morning fitted that pattern. He didn’t announce anything new. Instead, he set out quite how big the challenge was, and made the argument for what Labour planned to do. He told members: We can only deliver recovery through reform. Without action on prevention, the NHS will be overwhelmed. Without reform to services, we’ll end up putting in more cash for poorer results. That’s the choice. Reform or die. We

Ed Davey owes much of his election success to Boris Johnson – and in more ways than one. The slide-loving, bungee-jumping, paddleboard-slipping Lib Dem leader has, like Johnson on his zipwire, learned how to capture media attention while evading being placed on a conventional political axis. One day he’s intoning soulfully on social care in the Commons; the next rocking up to party conference on a jet ski. He wants inheritance tax hiked but decries Labour’s plans for VAT on school fees. Such shenanigans enabled him in the election to appear both serious and silly, left and right, using any publicity to deliver ruthlessly crafted messages on health, sewage and

I am not yet eligible for the winter fuel allowance. Nor am I especially in favour of it, regarding it as one of those times when the government bribes the public with the public’s own money and expects gratitude for doing so. Like anyone who pays taxes, I rather resent a government of any stripe using my earnings to make themselves look good. I’d go so far as to say it irks me. Still, I have watched Labour’s abolition of the scheme with something like awe. I know pensioners who appreciate the couple of hundred quid that the government lobs their way each winter. But last month the Chancellor of

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were adamant that economic growth would be their first priority in government. It is hard to square that with the decisions the Chancellor has announced this week. The Chancellor claims to have discovered a £21.9 billion ‘black hole’ in the nation’s finances, yet she has created the largest part of that sum by deciding to spend £9.4 billion on inflation-busting pay settlements for public-sector workers without asking for reforms in return. This, it seems, is the first Reeves doctrine: pay now to avoid strikes later Junior doctors are to receive a rise of more than 20 per cent, spread over two years. But it is