It is now time to drop the Health Bill

The Tories are bad with the NHS – everybody seems to recognise it, apart from those pushing through plans to 'reform' it regardless. Luke Pollard explains why ConservativeHome's Tim Mongtomery is right to call for an end to the Tory Health Bill

By Luke Pollard, on Monday, February 13, 2012

Dave Cameron's pledge on the NHS. He also promised no top down reform of the NHS, too…

Last week a man who I often disagree with did something very brave. Although I fundamentally disagree with his politics I have utmost respect for Tim Montgomerie of the ConservativeHome blog for standing up to his party and saying that the Government’s Health Bill should be dropped.

Regular readers will know I’m not a Tory, but in coming out against the Government’s hapless Health Bill, Tim Montgomerie put his head above the parapet and in doing so did a very sensible thing.

The Government’s Health and Social Care Bill is a monstrosity, a legislative pudding and a Bill that has few friends outside the Tory rightwing and private healthcare companies. For anyone who cares about the NHS and that will number most people in the Westcountry, this Bill should ring the alarm bells. As well as dismantling established structures in the NHS, this Bill explicitly intends to open the floodgates to private health care companies taking over large chunks of the health service. It encourages needless competition amongst services that should be working together and will usher in a patchwork quilt postcode lottery of disjointed, unconnected and costly service provision where the neediest and poorest patients will suffer. In short, this Bill represents the biggest attack on the founding principles of the NHS since its creation.

Tim Montgomerie’s intervention not only highlighted that much of the Bill is needless with many the Government having much of the powers to reform elements of the NHS that the Bill proposes already but it is electoral dynamite for the Tories.

His argument, and not a bad one either, is that this Bill if implemented would allow Labour to highlight that every problem in the NHS from this moment forth is the fault of this Bill. And that would largely be because much of the chaos would be. His worries are not only about the NHS but also about the Conservatives’ electability. David Cameron did much to woo those who thought the NHS was not safe in Tory hands at the last General Election and helped neutralise the NHS as an electoral weakness for his party. Remember the airbrushed posters from the General Election and the manifesto promise of “no top-down reorganisation” of the NHS? Tim’s fear is that this Bill if passed exposes the Tories to dangerous widespread and proper criticism that could undermine the party’s chance at winning an outright majority in 2015.

Now let me be blunt, I care little about helping the Tories win in 2015, the opposite in fact, but I care deeply about the NHS. This Bill would fundamentally change the NHS as we know it and impose the biggest reorganisation on the service since its inception at a time when every penny spent on reorganisation should be spent on nurses, doctors, drugs and treatments not rebranding, redundancies and retreat from the public service principles that the NHS was founded on. Ed Miliband highlighted this week that the costs in the Health Bill could employ 6,000 nurses. I would prefer to have the nurses in the NHS rather than the private sector taking profit from the NHS.

Tim Montgomerie’s analysis is that it is better for the Tories to suffer a month of glum polls by dropping the Bill now than risk it becoming electoral dynamite under the party. His worries are well-founded.Tory research tells them that the NHS is an area of weakness for the party and if confidence in the party’s ability to handle the health service falls further then it could spread to permanently afflict the Tories.

I agree with Tim Montgomerie’s assessment. Andrew Lansley’s health reforms have disaster written all over them – for the Tories and for the NHS – and stubbornly refusing to drop the bill is setting the PM and the Coalition up for a fall. Plymouth’s two Tory MPs back the Bill. Both Oliver Colvile and Gary Streeter have publicly backed this terrible piece of legislation. Plymouth’s Labour MP, Alison Seabeck is opposing it. The Lib Dems are, as you might expect, all over the place.

So what is to be done? Whether it is for party political reasons or for the sake of NHS patients this Bill must be dropped. And momentum is building against it seeing the statute books. It seems everyone but David Cameron and Andrew Lansley can see that they are haemorrhaging public support for these privatising healthcare reforms.

You can help put pressure on the Government to drop this Bill by signing this online petition that asks the Government to drop the Bill.

Sometimes doing the right thing is difficult and painful. ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie took a difficult decision to come out against the Bill in his must read post on ConservativeHome this week. Now the Prime Minister and his floundering Health Secretary must take an even more difficult decision about whether to drop the Bill or not. Let’s join ConservativeHome and help them make the right decision, for whatever reason, and drop the Bill.