We should remember today for a very long time. Rishi Sunak went to Winchester in his capacity as prime minister, paid for by you and me, to – and let’s be honest about this – campaign in what is a marginal seat. He was approached by a woman who asked him about the state of the NHS after it took her daughter seven hours to be seen. The woman said: “But you could stop it all. You could make it all go back to how it used to be…” Sunak then burst out laughing. In response to his laughter, she said this: “But where if you had a problem you could go to the hospital. My daughter spent seven hours waiting with an asthma problem… and it’s not good.” At that point, Sunak lapsed into politics-speak: “I’m sorry to hear that. The key thing is that we have resolved all the industrial action in the NHS apart from the junior doctors who are still not saying yes, but everyone else has said yes.” What?
Sunak’s shtick is that the NHS waiting lists are rising because of doctors. Everything was coming good. We were doing so well until those trainee doctors went on strike, he lied. There were no waiting lists until the strikes started. Now there are over eight million. The 14 years of underfunding in health spending was “Nothing to do with me, guv“. Who needs doctors anyway?
It is so weird for the prime minister to choose his enemies and have doctors at the head of his list, just behind desperate refugees. A man with no empathy, nothing that even resembles “the common touch“, I am wondering if by next week he will come to the House of Commons and announce that doctors will be punished for asking for better pay by being sent to Rwanda. “It’s the will of the people,” he will exclaim, and of course it will be. Who, after all, would not want to see the NHS emptied of pesky doctors so we can all be left to die in peace? Rishi doesn’t care. He’s worth three quarters of a billion quid. No late night queuing at A&E for the short-trousered buffoon.
In November 2023, there were 6.39million patients across England waiting for what is known as routine treatment, down from 6.44million in October. Any drop is welcome but you have to admit that Sunak is stretching things a bit when he blames the doctors, who are the ones dealing with the waiting lists, for causing them in the first place. This is what is technically known as bullshit.
Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting summed it up for me: “Rishi Sunak has no idea of the misery NHS patients are going through. When patients try to tell him, he laughs in their faces and walks away. When Sunak asks for their vote later this year, he will get a taste of his own medicine.” Quite. Bring it on.
