It’s kill or cure
THE futility of hosing down an unreformed NHS with billions more has been proved time and again.
Its annual income was at unprecedented highs under the Tories yet it continued to fail, especially post-Covid.
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And it was disheartening to see it given another £22.6billion in last month’s Budget, NOT tied to the comprehensive reform Labour promised at the election.
But that reform is now here.
And Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s blueprint looks promising.
Regularly updated league tables of NHS providers to expose their failures.
Useless managers fired.
Troubleshooting hit-squads sent in to fix failing hospitals.
“Every penny of extra investment” well spent, with waiting lists slashed.
We have always feared radical change will hit a brick wall of union intransigence.
And it is not encouraging either that hospitals are already complaining they will miss Labour’s targets on waiting times despite all the extra billions.
But if Mr Streeting really is to cut wait times “from 18 months to 18 weeks” he will need immense determination and the courage to bulldoze those standing in his way.
Crucially, he will need unswerving support from No10 — especially when the going gets tough and the blockers are Labour’s political allies.
The Health Secretary says it’s “reform or die” for the NHS. We don’t doubt he’s right.
Holy untenable
JUSTIN Welby had to go. His position as Archbishop of Canterbury was indefensible.
In 2013 he knew all about paedophile John Smyth’s sadistic abuse of boys at Christian camps but did nothing.
So Smyth stayed free until his 2018 death.
Mr Welby is not a bad man — but his judgment has so often been poor.
Instead of reviving the struggling Church of England he falsely maligned it as “institutionally racist” and was consumed by guilt over slavery, abolished 149 years before he was born.
All the while, as he enjoyed signalling his woke beliefs, he was hiding the truth about a monstrous sex predator.
His unhappy resignation was inevitable.
Meat meddlers
IF Keir Starmer is serious about “treading lightly” on our lives why is he surrounded by climate zealots who want the opposite?
We’re not talking today about meddling Miliband, though he is bad enough.
The Government’s Climate Change Committee advisers now want to pitchfork us all into vegetarianism, presumably via punitive meat taxes.
That’s all to help meet the PM’s latest emissions target, unveiled at the Cop29 eco jamboree no other global leader worth a damn bothered to attend.
Do well-heeled Whitehall types have so little grasp of how much voters hate this insane acceleration off the Net Zero cliff?
