Taking the temperature
On Saturday, all over the country the Conservative Party had an NHS Action Day, with leaflets and petitions.
90% of people who passed our stall signed the petition. It was extraordinary – their enthusiasm to do so. The night before on the local TV news, we heard that one of the region’s hospitals is so short of secretarial help, because of cuts, that the surgeons were sending handwritten letters to their patients. Community nurses on Saturday told me that they were barred from ordering even basic equipment like disposable gloves ahead of the financial year end, of people discharged prematurely from hospital, of incredible pressures put on them to prevent people from going to hospital at all, and of the total collapse of morale. In Suffolk, we have a financial crisis of gargantuan proportions, with NHS trusts finding it impossible to pay off accumulated debts. This is from a government which said “24 hours to save the NHS”.
Much of the rejection of Labour arises out of what has happened to our health service. People are no longer angry or even disgusted, they just want to get rid of them. It is difficult to believe that they will be changing their minds over the next two years.