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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The NHS is to the Tories what immigration is to Labour – a policy area they can’t win. Better to move on
A week, as Harold Wilson used to say, is a long in politics and just seven days ago the Tories felt they were on to a winner with the concerted attacks on a Labour’s custodianship of the NHS when they were in power.
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Should the Tories make the NHS the centrepiece of their campaign? No.
Should they abandon the territory to their opponents: absolutely not.
So the answer is to make occasional raids to distract the enemy and force them onto the defensive. And one day, perhaps, the country may be willing to have a rational debate as to the optimal system for providing great healthcare to everyone, irrespective of their ability to pay.
Checking out Paddy Power's Royal Baby's First Words betting market, I notice they offer among other possible utterances the following:
Dora the Explorer at 66/1, Where is One's Soother at 200/1, with the rank outsider Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious priced at 500/1.
Should Jeremy Hunt do the same?
No.
A political and journalistic class who are trying to set the narrative and momentum. US2012 showed that the days when that could happen are pretty much over.
The newspapers are a shadow of their former self, no more "the sun wot won it". Those days are gone.
Polling is better now than it's ever been; Nate Silver last year stuck to the fundamentals from the polls, mostly state level. Today's polling shows a very strong likely-hood of a Milliband administration, it's a stable and long lasting picture.
Labour ruthlessly exploited the Tory's eff up over the ERM and eventually won the war. This was totally unthinkable before Blair - they retained this until they screwed it right up courtesy of Gordon.
Any party that cedes whole subject areas to their rival would be mad - just because Labour's wrapped themselves in the NHS flag for 65yrs, it doesn't make it their property in perpetuity.
The scandals we already know about are bad enough to have severely dented its sacred cow status - I expect more skeletons will fall from its cupboards just because that's what happens. Tribunals like this just add grist to the mill
"A misconduct and competence panel of the Nursing and Midwifery Council heard that the former nurse bullied staff, put patients at risk and failed to meet hygiene and cleanliness standards. Mrs Harry, 60, admitted that she had received coaching in how to speak to staff after claims she had been "aggressive" when dealing with colleagues but denied knowing of, or playing any part in, serious failings at the Mid Staffordshire hospital.
She worked as director of nursing, and later as clinical director and chief nurse for the trust, but had no front line involvement with the 800 nurses working there..." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10198157/Mid-Staffs-nursing-director-asked-staff-whether-patients-were-dying.html
The Tories are working hard to change the game by talking about patients' experience being paramount, not the demands of its staff. It'll take a long time to shift the balance back to the centre - and it may never happen. However, the sooner the NHS is debated more objectively the better for everyone who uses it.
Right now, far too many hospitals own staff wouldn't recommend it to their own friends and family - what a shocking state of affairs that is.
Labour - core plus 2010 LDs
Tories - core plus potential UKIPers
Overall percentage approvals in different policy areas don't really matter. It's the weighting that's important. So, for example, if the Tories can neutralise negativity towards their NHS approach among UKIP waverers while actively winning them over on immigration then it could be a net win. And vice versa for Labour with 2010 LDs. For both parties what those outside the target audience think is irrelevant. Another area might be education. The polls tell us that generally Gove and his policies are unpopular. But among those who like them the level of like verges on the religious. That, too, could be a net win; except, of course, Gove's messiah complex also actively repels a pretty sizeable section of the electorate.
In short: it's complicated, but in our dysfunctional FPTP system net policy leads do not tell the full story. That said, though, it maybe worth remembering that Lynton Crosby has prospered in alternative vote systems. With FPTP he has enjoyed less success.
Labour covered up failings for political reasons : 41
Labour did not cover up; tried to fix failings, but failed: 22
Labour did not cover up; tried to fix failings & succeeded: 9
Almost as worrying are these numbers among Labour supporters - 13/36/24 - given the benefit of the doubt on a cover up, but 50% more believe they failed to fix the problems than succeeded.
The Tories should carry on talking about patients.
"...The NHS is a system of health care. It is a system through which tax money is spent, care rationed and provided and results recorded. It is a system that has notable flaws, which are far outweighed by its considerable strengths. It is a system that needs to constantly evolve in order to keep pace with the changing nature and distribution of health in our society.
What it is not is a living being. It is not a sports team that you can blindly support. It is not a religion that you commit to absolutely. And, while these may be fairly obvious points, many of us on the left treat the NHS as if it is all of these things.
The general response to the Keogh Report, led by some of the big thinkers on the left, was, as it all too often is, some variation of “I love the NHS”. Every year we celebrate the birthday of the NHS (which when you think about it, is just a little strange). And, rather than precisely and accurately put the case against widespread private involvement in the NHS, based on facts and figures, we shout ourselves into a frenzy about people making money from Grandma’s death, and then go home thinking we fought the good fight.
Those of us who believe in a universal system of health care, funded through taxation, free at the point of use, urgently need to participate in the debate surrounding the NHS as thinking, considered advocates rather than as fans, supporters or followers. Understanding and fixing what happened at Mid-Staffs is not possible through rose tinted glasses. Even less so if we willingly fail to recognise the problems that exist.
We are losing the debate over the NHS because we are simply ignoring the big questions: How do we maintain standards of care in an increasingly fragmented system? How do we ensure compassion and care matches clinical excellence? How do we keep the NHS model viable for the next 50 years? Serious efforts to answer these questions, and confront uncomfortable truths, would do far more for the NHS than slightly bizarre statements of love and affection." http://labourlist.org/2013/07/the-left-are-doing-a-very-bad-job-of-being-advocates-for-the-nhs/
I have panic, Cheshire farmer, desperate stuff and Tony Blair on my RD bingo card.
The polling suggests some rewards if it's a combination of both.
Posters asking migrants to go are just ‘inane and laughable’
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/416759/Posters-asking-migrants-to-go-are-just-inane-and-laughable
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article3822849.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2013_07_22
Panic.. he certainly does.
Blair...as opposed to Cameron in the Father stakes..joke
Cheshire Farmer, He claims/ed to be one..we all know that is not true, he lied..
There, done it for you, you can go and relax now
As a marketing man myself, I take great pleasure in discovering a classic new advertising turkey. Those billboards just scream turkey the moment you see them. They are likely to go down in advertising history.
So…I’d suggest a good choice would be give a nod to each of these with the appropriate saints’ names. George James David Patrick.
Who could grumble at that?
I could have had a full house.
That's three posts about Tim in 15 minutes. A good start; well done!
I personally don't like the tactic - but I can see their logic in encouraging illegals to get on their bike before they're forced to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patron_saints_of_places
I've just heard Charlotte on Sky come out with a classic, commenting on the video about the divers and the whales. She said
'Experts have said there was very little chance of the whales swallowing the seamen'
So Whales don't swallow.
I wonder if it was deliberate?
"Baroness Young, the former head of the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent NHS regulator [said she] had been under “huge government pressure, because the Government hated the idea that a regulator would criticise it by dint of criticising one of the hospitals or one of the services that it was responsible for”, and that “we were under more pressure” when Burnham “became minister, from the politics."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/andy-burnham-judge-me-by-what-i-did-for-the-nhs-8679977.html
"David Cameron has agreed with a worker at the Bentley Factory in Crewe that immigrants are a “constant drain” on public services. “I basically agree with you,” he said. “There are some benefits from being a country that welcomes people who want to come here and work hard. But in the last decade we have had an immigration policy that's completely lax. The pressure it puts on our public services and communities is too great." http://click.email.telegraph.co.uk/?qs=d06a3df98b5e8b1e6c9efbfd948d8c85faf2b032509d005ead7357919ffe0339
This is more important than it may at first appear, as marketing has such a huge input into popular culture, and thus into wider culture and society. If we could bring back an Englishman from 100 years ago and ask him to spend a couple of hours in a big English city, and then ask him which country he thought he was in, I'm sure that 9 times out of 10 he'd guess the United States.
In other words, day to day English society has changed beyond all recognition in an incredibly short period of time.
This is more important than it may at first appear, as marketing has such a huge input into popular culture, and thus into wider culture and society. If we could bring back an Englishman from 100 years ago and ask him to spend a couple of hours in a big English city, and then ask him which country he thought he was in, I'm sure that 9 times out of 10 he'd guess the United States.
In other words, day to day English society has changed beyond all recognition in an incredibly short period of time.
English society has changed beyond all recognition
I wouldn't exactly Scotland and Ireland have bucked the trend ;-)
Actually, I am not doing it for the money, I'm doing it because it is something I really enjoy. My wife, on the other hand, likes seeing the bank balance swell
I wouldn't exactly Scotland and Ireland have bucked the trend ;-)
Oh, indeed!
But while the primary change in England over the last hundred years is that England has become more like the U.S., the primary change in both Ireland and Scotland is that they have both become more like England.
In fact, it could be argued that Ireland and Scotland today are more like England than England is. If you get what I mean.
Even formerly loyal Mary Riddel is starting to question the wisdom of Ed doing and saying nothing that voters give a toss about. ..
Mr Burnham is peeking out again on Twitter and talking total numbers of staff rather than patients yet again.
It's all very producer interests. What Mr Cruddas comes up with here will be fascinating - more of the same as before or something more nuanced?
This Spitting Image from the 80s just shows how far thing have come or not!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8--ReA778Q
But while the primary change in England over the last hundred years is that England has become more like the U.S., the primary change in both Ireland and Scotland is that they have both become more like England.
In fact, it could be argued that Ireland and Scotland today are more like England than England is. If you get what I mean.
yes I understand where you're coming from, but isn't that more the celtic time lag, where the fringe bits of the B Isles tend to be 10, 20 or 50 years behind the rest depending on just how fringe you are ?
"In the middle of the 1970s New York’s Abe Beame led a delegation of his fellow American mayors to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Like many visitors he wrote a wish on a piece of paper and put it in the cracks between the stones. Mayor Beame’s note consisted of a single word written in capital letters. “HELP”.
New York was in trouble, and Mayor Beame did not know what to do. In April 1975 the city came within an hour of going bankrupt. It was saved only by a team appointed by the state Governor who managed to persuade the teachers’ union to invest its funds in New York’s debt. The city was not just debt-ridden, it was dirty, crime-infested, run-down and demoralised.
The famous “I love New York” campaign, with its iconic red heart, was created by the State’s Department of Commerce in 1977 precisely because, at that time, so few people did. Its aim was to attract back the tourists and businesses that were deserting the city..."
Nope.
Of course, you are looking at the issue from your perspective and I from mine, but leaving aside the standpoint issue, I think that there is a genuine, underlying difference in the directions travelled by England, Ireland and Scotland during the last century. And it has nothing at all with England being "50 years ahead" of the other two.
For example, net "increase" A/B:
Welfare: -13/-28
Pensions: +50/+35
NHS: +64/+51
In line with other polling, sustained support for the NHS, with hardening attitudes on welfare.
http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/07/23/public-spending-and-info-effect/
LONDON--House builder Barratt Developments PLC (BDEV.LN) Wednesday said it will build 1,100 new homes for London via formation of two new joint ventures, and confirmed that it was now targeting 2,000 completions per year from its London business in the medium term.
MAIN FACTS:
-Two further joint ventures (JVs) would bring the gross development value (GDV) of the Group's JVs in the capital to over 2.0 billion pounds.
-British Land (BLND.LN) and Barratt London have secured planning permission for 463 homes, a 160 room hotel, retail and office space at Aldgate Place on the edge of the City.
-Development will include three towers of over 20 storeys as well as public open space and a pedestrian street; It will have a GDV of around GBP250 million and work is scheduled to start early in 2014.
-Progressing a further JV with L&Q, to develop the Sainsbury's site at Nine Elms.
-Site has GDV of GBP425 million with a detailed planning permission for 645 homes, a new Sainsbury's store and 27,000 square feet of retail and office space.
On a day to day basis I can't really see how Ireland and Scotland have diverged that much from England, I'd argue they're paradoxically getting more like England the harder they protest their differences. The big dividers - religion ( calvin and catholicism ) are no longer that resonant, the languages have standardised, the cultural splits have declined through mass media ( we all watch coronation st and the premiership ), and industry and commerce has become more uniform and integrated. It's more in losing the real differences which used to exist between BI regions, that new ones are having to be created. The only major difference between England and the celtic fringe (Dublin excepted ) is in mass immigration and its knock on effects, I suspect long term that will have more of an impact.
Privatisation is killing off the NHS south of the border.. we must pay to keep it healthy in Scotland http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/privatisation-killing-nhs-south-border-2079601
if immigration makes us all richer why are we not the wealthiest country in Europe ?
No VI this time but questions on PRISM and how much you trust Google, Facebook etc on data sharing.
Also Lads Mags in supermarkets
The key thing about YouGov's ratings is that they're completely consistent on Labour, which is always around 38, +/-MOE. The gap narrows when the Tories pick up votes from UKIP, widens when they don't. But essentially the picture has been much the same for a long time, which is why NOM is probably overrated..
The basic question stands, why after the biggest and most prolonged migration to the UK in its history are we not all substantially wealthier ?
I'd much rather we spent our money on the 2m-ish who are out of work, are unemployable currently because they don't have the skills or have a criminal record [half of which can't read or write adequately either] and are effectively barred from the workplace.
Substituting UK workless with Portuguese workless isn't solving the bigger problem we have here. Our workless don't move to Portugal to get a job cleaning in supermarkets or as health care assistants...
In any case, whether or not the Tories can win, what they certainly can't do is allow Labour a clear run - something they'd undoubtedly use to paint the Blues as ready to scrap the entire thing, sell it off to Rupert Murdoch or similar.
A 12% lead for Labour is not massive and can be reduced by minimising the Labour figure as well as increasing the Tory one. In addition, the poll doesn't say by how much people think one party or another would be better. The Tories need to stick Stafford and Morecambe to Labour and Burnham as much as possible, both to justifiably discredit their record in charge and to build the case for reform.
Has he apologised yet ?
Without immigration we would be a lot poorer and that's the point.
There were failures, as there were under the last Tory administration and in health systems around the world - and let's not forget that mortality rates have plunged since those dark days.
The Tories cannot shake off the feeling - justified in my opinion - that they have an ulterior motive behind their idiotic and foolish attacks on the NHS: that is the desire to privatise it against the wishes of the vast majority of the British people.
Privatisation of the NHS is the Tories' "ideological obsession". Everyone can see it, which is why it is daft for Tories and their press mouthpieces to attack Labour for their instinctive wish to defend what is a massive achievement for human civilisation.
May as well say it's all down to North-Sea resources, The City or the EU. We-are-where-we-are: All else is meaningless conjecture....
"Labour for their instinctive wish to defend what is a massive achievement for human civilisation"
The NHS? Really? Up there with putting a man on the Moon?
It's a system of health provision that isn't replicated anywhere else. I wonder why?
Anyway, I spent the first night in A&E. Security had to be called four times during the night to drunks and the disturbed... threats, violence, exposure, racial abuse of staff etc. How staff stayed so calm and patient and reasonable is beyond me. I'd have decked a few people.
Sadly they couldn't sedate me until the baby hoo-haa had die down
There is a huge disconnect between what Labour says and what it does there.
Some immigration has benefitted the UK, some hasn't. It's also about numbers and whether the scale of immigration is such that it can be absorbed and integrated or is more likely to set up cultural ghettoes.
61% in @PopulusPolls survey says schools should be free to pay teachers on performance. Also found 70% oppose planned school strikes.
Doesn't this post mark out a basic ignorance?
We don't spend money on immigrants. That's the point.
They turn up at the border ready-skilled and ready-to-work. They use less services due to their general youth while paying for them.
As for sustitution of workers, you should read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Miss Carola, I hope you've made (or will make) a full recovery.
100% Yes.
In a list alongside penicillin, combustion engine, democracy, the iphone
If someone's worked for 50 years(ish) and retirement lasts about 20 years now, does their contribution cover their pension?
I can't see the pension age staying where it is. It'll be about 75 by the time I reach the age, I imagine.
The fact remains that you can't show that the UK is substantially better off after mass immigration. It has been good for big corporations but of little value to ordinary citizens. UK economic performance hasn't made a step change because of newcomers and for some communities life has gone backwards.
That's fab - but we need to address why our own workless aren't taking these jobs, that is available without travelling 1000 miles for it.
Until we do, we're not addressing the core issue. It's like giving aid to Africa - it creates a dependency culture unless we provide the tools to catch their own fish.
Remarkably CON majority is at 4.5 on Betfair still.
You touch upon an important point about violence in hospitals and doctors. There is far too much of it, and the causes must be multiple. But I do wonder if, like alcohol, pain can bring out an aggressive instinct in some people.
Anecdote alert: a member of my family is a nurse in a specialised field. One morning she had to deal with an emergency with someone she knew well, and she described as being a very nice person in normal circumstances. What she was faced with was a swearing and angry young woman who tried to fight the people treating her, despite bleeding profusely. She was stone-cold sober, and utterly apologetic when she was stitched up and safely in hospital afterwards.
I wonder if this is at all common?
Germany has a falling birth rate and isn't a basket case.
Societies are quite able to adapt to falling birth rates and survive, it has happened across the whole of human history, though usually it was plague and a sudden fall off a cliff. Now parts of humanity have the chance to walk down a hill with several decades warning. Most human population projections envisage a peak in population stabilisation and then an eventual decline, best to get on and develop the blueprint.
The Lynton Crosby story has vanished into thin air:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/benedictbrogan/100227859/the-lynton-crosby-story-is-fast-losing-its-audience/
Immigration - Alan Brooke is right that it's possible to control immigration from some countries even though not the EEA. But if the demand for foreign workers is there, they'll be drawn in from Bulgaria instead of Bangla Desh.
There are reasons why some employers choose foreign staff, ranging from the understandable ("they show initiative by coming to Britain", "I like their attitude and willingness to do messy jobs") to the dodgy ("I can get away with sub-minimum wage"). It'd be interesting to see a survey on it, even though it would no dfsoubt understate the dodgy part.
There is of course a cultural angle as well - some of us like seeing diverse foreigners around and some don't. There's also a strong dose of realism in it - I strongly suspect that 50 years from now it will seem surprising that anyone thought that any society could remian predominently monocultural.
Speedy recovery to Carola!
Some, lefties mostly, seem to use GDP as a measure. GDP is poor measure of anything much – but especially bad for measuring ‘wealth’. GDP / capita is slightly better but still sucks.
Wealth is really a measure of what you have. Assets minus liabilities. For individuals it translates to ‘net worth’. For countries the same. GDP is a measure of flow not stock. Wealth measures your balance sheet not your P&L.
Immigration may tend to push up GDP a bit. It will tend to push GDP/capita down a bit. It may also put a lot of pressure on public services and drive increases in the deficit.
To get a better debate we need to agree what we’re measuring. For a country I’d suggest debt adjusted growth per capita id a good measure of flow. For wealth I’d suggest median net worth (where actually the UK is looking quite good):
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-23/how-does-america’s-middle-class-rank-globally-27
Labour don't use absolutely bloody brilliant ideas because they don't work.