AFTER another tumultuous year in the political life of the UK, it is good to know that the dreadful handling of the NHS has been recognised by the King’s Fund in a recent report on the Conservative’s record as being due to “a decade of neglect…leaving it with too few staff, too little equipment and too many outdated buildings to perform the amount of surgery needed.”

Embarrassing or what?
The report goes on to compare that unfavourably with the tactics used by the Blair-Brown Labour Government in the late 1990s in chasing down the horrendously long waits for both care and operations, which that Government found on taking office in 1997.
While Rishi Sunak is throwing everything at the waiting times problem, it is only having a limited effect.

Those ten years of Tory/LibDem ‘austerity’ have come back to bite him!
Sunak would be entitled to quietly curse David Cameron and Theresa May.
With the NHS cracking up under the strain of the Covid epidemic, it has to be said that those years of neglect, together with loss of staff through ‘burn-out’, return of workers to Europe following Brexit, and the huge deficiency of nursing and doctoral staff due to this Tory Government’s inability to recruit and train enough people, has led to this current impasse with the administration.
And is it small wonder the bubble has burst over the ridiculous pay offer made by the so-called ‘independent’ pay review body.
This is a fight this Tory government is totally unable to win.
It should call for pay talks with the unions now as this dispute shows signs of becoming nasty.

And let’s not forget the nurses are the ‘darlings and heroes’ of the Covid days of two years ago, and polls still show overwhelming support for this strike.
Rishi Sunak says we cannot keep inflation down with such pay deals being done.
I say without upping the pay offer already on the table there will be no NHS left.
This is a pretty weak argument from this Government stuffed full of billionaires and millionaires, and given the billions of pounds lost in rotten PPE deals for Covid and the £40billion lost during the disastrous and short-lived leadership of Liz Truss and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

This year we will be getting closer than ever to the next Labour Government, this time under Keir Starmer’s control. A happy New Year to all readers.