Labour looks more like a government in waiting and yet still promotes some of the more radical policies advocated by the left.  After the success of Labour’s conference even Momentum is offering some grudging encouragement whilst claiming credit for a leftwards shift.

Policy for Care is starting to emerge with a few major themes.  Support for the NHS model (universal, comprehensive and free) is overwhelming and alternatives such as social insurance are rejected.  The suggestion is that social care will move to the same model, with a major focus on workforce.  Conference accepted the scale of the challenge to rebuild an NHS even as good as it was in 2010. It will be an even bigger challenge to make our social care system fit for any kind of purpose.  So far there is less emphasis on the retail promises like free car parking but more emphasis on training and length of waits and other important measures that could even be put on a pledge card.

Amid this generally positive and productive approach we have the perennial diatribe from the Sad Left and a unanimous motion passed at conference in Liverpool. What is most interesting is that the Motion got absolutely no scrutiny at all.  It is a lengthy ramble built around nostalgia for some NHS that has never actually existed, and which never can exist under a mixed economy (maybe after the revolution or after the inevitable collapse of capitalism things will be different).

The Motion appears to have been written by a Socialists for Lansley faction since it wishes to return to the Lansley Act by repealing the Act that overturned most of it.  Truly bizarre.  Most would claim credit for the fact that we were proved right, and the Lansley changes never worked.  Going back to enforced competitive tendering does not appear to be very socialist.

It rehearses yet again the myth that everything about localism is a plot to end the NHS.  Every step since 1980s has been condemned as “the end of the NHS”.  The idea that the NHS was ever some coherent national organisation implemented in the same way to the same level everywhere is just another monolithic phantasy.

Then of course is the big conspiracy that everything is part of a plan to allow US companies to buy up the NHS.  The market collapse has nothing to do with a ludicrous non-budget it is a plot to lower prices, so the NHS is cheaper to buy!  I kid you not.

The plot is the best conspiracy ever as nothing has ever leaked from it, no whistle-blowers ever appear, no papers have ever been found – and also the worst because in 30 years of plotting nothing has been achieved.

There is the ritual denunciation of ICSs (like the previous denunciation of CCGs and PCTs) claiming this is a US model of integrated care for cost cutting and service denial.  Comparison with Scotland and Wales might be more sensible.  They have non-market systems (but not as non-market as is claimed!) based on local boards.  But the comparison is always with the US despite it being the biggest outlier on just about every measure.

Then there is the pretence of the fully Public Sector NHS.  That would bring in the Public Domain GPs, pharmacy, ophthalmology, and dentists, require the termination of tens of thousands of small contracts with small organisation like physiotherapy providers or podiatrists and require the NHS to suddenly scale up to stop any need for the independent sector to provide any services.  The NHS would do its own construction and build its own MRI machines as well. The private sector probably delivers 30% of the NHS Budget; big change then.

The better informed and less conspiratorial left groups accept that workforce shortages caused by years of underfunding are the priority. The Motion suggests that an incoming Labour government waste its entire term changing structures (to who knows what) and fighting endless legal battles to remove contracts that currently mostly work.

And not a hint of an idea about social care which is more privatised and in a much worse state than the NHS.

To the barricades then – Socialists for Lansley! What do we want? – years of chaos!

Authorship: News from Nowhere inner-Party mole 3/10/22