Louise Bagshawe: In praise of Andrew Lansley

Louise Bagshawe welcomes the Conservative lead on the NHS.

For obvious reasons, it was very moving to be in Liverpool last week for the recording of Any Questions?. It is a wonderful programme that affords the panellist enough time to actually answer the questions put to them. Whilst I knew that the recording would concentrate on the unimaginable tragedy that had happened to Rhys Jones, it would touch on other issues too. You have a good guess at what might come up. That week the National Health Service had been much in the news, and the media spin was not wholly positive for the Conservatives. We had circulated a list of hospitals that were under threat. It contained one true error (the name of Altrincham hospital substituted for Trafford General, which is in the same NHS trust). A combination of media bias – the reporting of complaints by NHS Trust managers as though they were by definition justified – and unfortunate news management – Henry Bellingham MP apologising to his local hospital – led to a narrative of shambolic Conservative media controls and Tory fear-mongering on maternity and A&E.

The fact that the protestations of the trust managers were often unfounded and that Bellingham had never said his own hospital ought not to be on the list, but rather, that other area hospitals should have been added to it as well, did not seem to matter. Never complain, never explain.

On the AQ panel with me was Peter Oborne, the Daily Mail columnist. He gave a brave performance in the face of an unremittingly hostile audience and stood his ground on the issues. In an article last Saturday, Peter argued, as an aside, that Andrew Lansley should be sacked. I must disagree. Whatever the flaws of last week’s presentation, both our overall strategy on the NHS and the decision last week to highlight maternity and A&E closures are proving themselves justified.

One of the great achievements of the last eighteen months has been for the Conservatives to fight, and win, on ground Labour thinks of as its own. “Stop Brown’s NHS cuts” was a highly effective issue campaign; I recall Polly Toynbee arguing how worried by it she was after last year’s Tory conference. After years of double-digit deficits on the issue of health, the Cameron/Lansley one-two punch of pledging to defend the NHS and pointing out Labour’s waste and failure finally got home to the public. We erased Labour’s huge lead and built a slim one of our own. A new poll today shows that Conservatives enjoy a 25% lead over Labour amongst GPs.  That was as unthinkable once as Labour leading on immigration would be now. Under Andrew Lansley, the message has been hammered home. A scarcity of NHS dentists. Fewer health visitors and midwives. Hospitals in hock to PFI profiteering. Before the local elections this year, we were treated to the astonishing sight of a rally of junior doctors cheering David Cameron to the rafters. The Conservatives under Lansley had held Patricia Hewitt accountable for the disastrous IT failure for their applications. And of course, at last year’s conference, David Cameron promised that the NHS would be his priority. You can argue that Labour had been bad but they have been bad on the NHS before. Under this team they have been made to pay for it.

I wish I had got the question on the hospital closure list. First of all, I can speak about it with some passion, since a few weeks earlier I’d actually given birth in one of the fine maternity units Labour threatens to shut. And secondly, you could almost feel the momentum shift on the issue as our train pulled in to Liverpool. The prior day, the story was about the typo that Altrincham (which doesn’t have a maternity unit) was threatened with maternity cuts. But that day, the hospital in the same trust they meant to include was one of four that actually lost its maternity unit, four in Manchester alone. Which was the more important – a researcher’s naming error, or the fact that Mancunian mothers now have to travel further from home whilst possibly in agonising labour to give birth? Want to talk about some minor clerical error? Great, allow me to remind you of the Chairman of the Labour party and a cabinet minister marching against her own government to save her maternity unit – which Labour just shut. And in an obvious ‘bury bad news’ move, the same day the maternity units were closed, Labour announced the cost of its last pointless reorganisation – 80 million quid in redundancy payments, not one penny of which goes to the health of patients. Average consultant payoff? Three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Yes, I know. One consultant received nine hundred grand of taxpayers’ money. That wastage would have paid for a lot more district nurses.

Andrew Lansley was right to fight on this issue. These cuts are driven not by clinical need but by EU regulations, the Working Time Directive, which demands more doctors to do the same amount of work. We could have opted out; as always, Labour chose not to. Labour may have chuckled at the minor snaffles on the Tory hospital list. Lansley, being human, admitted he was exhausted. But it was the wrong strategy. Their moment of fun kept the issue in the news; barely a couple of days later, as maternity units shut and the papers fisked the Tory list to pen ‘Cameron was right on the NHS’ stories, it became clear the strategy was justified. A report out two weeks ago tells us every six miles travelled puts critical patients 1% closer to death. I know first-hand that if forced to travel to Eastbourne, I would have had my third child without pain relief stuck in a traffic jam (he arrived quickly). Mr. Lansley should continue to fight on this issue. His shadow department has done wonders to highlight Labour’s ongoing failure. The latest opinion poll, taken after the release of the Tory threatened hospitals list, showed that the party had regained its lead on health. Labour will be very worried indeed.

Comments

[TomTom]

Yes Louise but when Peter Oborne goes to Liverpool and tries to ingratiate himself with the audience by speaking of David Sheppard and James Jones - he should remember he is speaking of Anglican bishops in Catholic Liverpool.......mentioning the late Archbishop Derek warlock might not have come amiss