(Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Keir Starmer blamed his Conservative predecessors for leaving England’s health service in a “broken” state, in his latest effort to frame the political narrative ahead of what’s expected to be a difficult budget proposal next month.
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Successive Tory-led governments dealt “unforgiveable” damage to the National Health Service in the 14 years before his Labour Party’s landslide election victory in July, Starmer told the BBC in an interview set to air on Sunday.
It was the latest in a series of appearances by the prime minister in which he’s sought to shift the blame for the UK’s mounting problems away from Labour.
“Everybody watching this who has used the NHS, or whose relatives have, knows that it’s broken,” Starmer said, according to excerpts released on Saturday. “That is unforgivable, the state of our NHS.”
The interview comes ahead of a report expected to be published on Sept. 12 that finds reforms under Conservative Health Secretary Andrew Lansley in 2012 were “hopelessly misconceived.” Starmer said the review by a prominent surgeon, Dr. Ara Darzi, would reveal that too many children were “being let down” by the NHS.
The NHS, which was set up under Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labour government in the wake of World War II, has long been a totemic issue in British politics. Its recent strains — illustrated by a surge in wait times to get doctor’s appointments since the Covid pandemic — have been a chief contributor to a sense that the British state is broken.
While Starmer has pledged to improve public services, he has little money to invest in them, with Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves considering tax hikes and spending cuts to plug what she says is a £22 billion ($29 billion) “black hole” left by the Conservatives in the current year’s budget. Starmer warned last month that Reeves’s first fiscal plan on Oct. 30 would be “painful.”
Victoria Atkins, the Conservatives’ shadow health secretary, dismissed the criticism of the party’s record as political. “Labour’s instinct is to politicize children’s health, rather than provide solutions and reform our NHS,” she said in a statement.
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