I am sure that my hon. Friends the Members for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) and for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton) were simply trying to find out why the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) did not want to talk about the £70 million-odd a year that the SNP Government in Scotland are spending on outsourcing, but we will leave that for another day.
I was delighted that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State mentioned Henry Willink, the former Member of Parliament for Croydon North and war hero, who was one of many people who helped to form the national health service, along with the great Liberal Beveridge, of course. It is disappointing that Labour have tried to make the NHS something that they alone feel they have the right to talk about. It is not their NHS; it is our
national health service. It does not belong to any one political party; it belongs to all of us. There was opposition from a number of Conservatives to the Bill that set up the NHS, but some Labour peers, such as Lord Latham, and Herbert Morrison were concerned about that Bill, although of course all that is written out of history.
We know that whenever the Labour party is in trouble, it starts to generate scare stories about privatisation. We have been thinking about the celebrations for the anniversary of the national health service, but I was rather sad last year about another NHS anniversary: 30 years since Labour started making up mythological stories about the Conservative party wanting to privatise the NHS. It was 30 years since 1987, when Labour said that they would end “privatisation in the NHS”. They did the same thing at the ’92 election, saying:
“Labour will stop the privatisation of the NHS.”
And so it went on at one election after another: Labour trying to conjure up the idea that the Conservatives wanted to privatise the NHS. Despite that, we won numerous elections after 1987—we have been winning them since 2010—and we have absolutely no intention of privatising the national health service and never will.
It was interesting that Labour’s 2005 and 2010 manifestos said that a Labour Government would start using the private sector. The 2005 manifesto talked about using the “independent and voluntary sector”, and that approach continued in the 2010 manifesto.
As a result, between the financial years 2006-07 and 2013-14, we saw a gentle increase in the amount spent on the private sector within the national health service to deliver operations free at the point of use to those who need them by occasionally using private contractors, as the SNP is doing in Scotland. The figure went up from 2.8% to something like 6.1%. To put those figures in perspective, Cuba—a country I love, but not one known for its wild capitalist economy—has about 18% of its production in the private sector. Figures from an obscure website, thediplomat.com, suggest that 7.5% of North Korea’s economy is in the private sector. In other words, North Korea makes greater use of the private sector than the NHS—a figure of 6.1% does not represent privatisation.
From my experience, I can truthfully say that I have a complaint about the NHS in England, and so do my constituents: we cannot access it, because we are forced to use the national health service in Wales. The result of our having to use a health service that has been under 18 years of Labour government is that we have longer waits for our ambulances. I recently dealt with a case of a lady who had to wait two hours for an ambulance after a suspected heart attack. We have longer waits for accident and emergency. We do not have access to cancer drugs such as Avastin in the way patients do in England. And, of course, we wait much, much longer for hospital treatment and operations. The target in Wales is 26 weeks, as opposed to 18 weeks, but that target is all too often missed.
I wish that I had more time to talk about Labour’s failings in the national health service. I have suggested a few things in my time, but neither I nor any Conservative MP will ever privatise the NHS. It is about time the Labour party stopped telling those fibs.