Strayside Sunday is our weekly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. 

In 1942 William Beveridge identified “5 giants on the road to post-war reconstruction in the United Kingdom.”  Disease was one, and, on the 5^th July 1948, the NHS became the state’s answer to it.

The NHS is a living breathing political battleground.  Blunt force rhetoric about it generates huge heat, while ideology, knowledge or nuance cast only low light.  Take the following case; the virtue-signalling phenomenon of clapping for the NHS, while failing to ensure or, at the very least, publicly confirm, the post-Brexit future of this treasured institution.

During lockdown, both Harrogate MP Andrew Jones and Ripon MP Julian Smith, together with every MP in parliament, implored us to “clap for the NHS.”  With typical political expediency, (alas) Smith and Jones embraced the NHS rainbow flag and led our constituency-based public displays of affection.  This week, both men voted against an NHS amendment (put down by Green MP Caroline Lucas and supported by the Labour Party) to the Trade Bill that, post-Brexit, will shape our international trading relationships.

The NHS amendment sought to protect the British principle of universal healthcare; it sought protections against wage cuts for NHS staff; the protection of the British medicines market from price gouging; to ensure that our confidential patient data could not be shared without our knowledge and permission.  I don’t know about you, but I have found it difficult to disagree with the NHS being protected from the avarice of Donald Trump’s America.  I challenge our district MPs to take a principled stance in relation to the NHS, rather than simply use its good name when they see a public relations opportunity at a time of crisis.

On the most important guarantor of British wellbeing, the future of the NHS, can there be a more obvious barometer of a person’s character?  In the end, holding to principle against the wishes of one’s own party machinery may well prove personally expensive.  But clapping for the NHS while voting to leave it open to profit-takers from abroad is most certainly cheap.

I know that in the age of the Cummings Tyranny, to vote against the party whip is career limiting.  And if I were in a charitable mood I would accept that the amendments above were put down by the Greens and by Labour to make political mischief; “nasty Tories won’t protect NHS,” “nasty Tories sell out NHS,” and so on.  Of course parliamentary politics is at play, yet it seems to me that the blue team isn’t playing very well.  What would it cost for Smith, Jones and colleagues to go on record, preferably in these pages, to state their views and, specifically, make plain that, even though they voted for the trade bill, they voted tactically against the opposition’s NHS ‘spoiler’ amendments in the interest of post-Brexit progress?

So much ideological tosh is talked about the NHS:  For example, the Labour Party and the British Medical Association (the doctor’s trade union) scream about the ‘privatisation’ of the NHS.  This, despite the fact that no one is charged by the NHS for visiting their GP, or for going to hospital, or for treatment.  Some services that are ‘free at the point of use’ to you and me are, in fact, provided by private companies, themselves paid directly by the NHS.  But at the last official count ,the proportion of the NHS’s overall budget paid to private healthcare providers was less than 9% and falling.

And we Tories bang on about waste and inefficiency, which does exist, but the fact of which is hardly surprising given that, since 1997, the NHS has endured 7 major structural reforms – with New Labour, the Coalition government and the Tories roughly equally culpable - and its demoralised staff don’t know whether they are coming or going.  Billions has been spent too (a good proportion of which has been in vain) on attempting to harness the power of technology to deliver better care outcomes, and to wire together a hugely fragmented healthcare delivery system, so that we can share patient information across and between care settings.

At this point I should declare an interest: The National Health Service is particularly dear to my heart; I worked in the system for several years and, for much of my adult life, have been a frequent acute customer.  In the summer of 2006, I was diagnosed with late stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and the odds were very much against my survival.  I spent the next 3 months in hospital receiving brilliant care.  My chemotherapy worked, but a hospital acquired infection almost killed me.

14 years later, the consultant oncologist who saved my life remains a dear friend, a friendship we forged through political discourse; when I arrived at hospital that June, my time as Director of Communication for the Conservative Party was not yet in the distant past.  My doctor, a Professor at Imperial, was then and remains now, a die-hard socialist.  ‘Prof’ refuses on principle to see patients privately, even though with his skills and reputation he could have charged his way to millionairedom, had he been so minded.

Later, when I was discharged as an in-patient and returned to see him for quarterly out-patient check-ups in clinic, Prof would announce loudly “the Tory is back! Everyone remember to give him a hard time.”  Too civilised and sensible a man to subscribe to the view that he “could never be friends with a Tory,” what he meant was that I was to be kept honest in my views about the NHS. ‘Prof’ insists that the service is a humanity defining idea first and a set of healthcare delivery arrangements and economics second.  Do Messrs Smith and Jones?

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

Read More: 

• District's MPs vote against protecting the NHS in post-Brexit trade bill


• Call for clarity on the future of Harrogate's NHS Nightingale Hospital at the HCC