David Cameron: Confused about the NHS

By David Higgerson on Jan 4, 10 04:36 PM

So David Cameron is the man to save the NHS. After announcing a new announcement a day, every day, until the general election, Cameron started off on the NHS.

Usual stuff fell from his mouth. Less central control, fewer targets, more power to the people.

But Cameron also seems to contradict himself. He promises to reward those parts of the NHS in poor areas which improve the most, but says he'll do away with targets. But those in the NHS say that it's not the targets which cause the problems, but the management of the statistics and data which need to be collected to compare with the national targets.

To reward those which improve the most, you still need that data collection and management - so while the target might not exist, the workload still does. And that really runs the risk of being less transparent.

It is good to see policies coming out Cameron's mouth for once. But sadly the biggest promise he made, of fighting a positive campaign to beat the negative, appears to be little more than a headline grabber.

To say the gap between the richest, and therefore the most healthy, and the poorest, and therefore the illest, is as big as in Victorian times might look good in a speech drafted up by experts. But these don't feel like Victorian times, and the fact things are starting to look a little better for many people than they did a year ago is presumably what is behind the need to paint everything darkly. Opposition parties always do that - but not when they've promised to be positive.

Cameron would have been much better off pointing out that Labour had made some improvements, such as SureStart centres, but that the vast sums of cash pumped into them weren't getting results on a scale of the money spent.

He shouldn't seek to become the man of the NHS, he should seek to become the man who wants to improve the NHS. Don't protect it at all costs. Look at it, interrogate it and work out where money can be spent better. Because, much as we all love the NHS, we all have stories about how it could be more efficient.

But in his fear of appearing critical to the NHS, Cameron simply does what all politicians do: he fiddles. Changing maternity plans for example. A big deal to many, sure, but the only guarantee such a plan brings is more reorganisation and expense in the NHS.

So no change there, then.

And when he hit back at Alastair Darling's claims about a huge financial gap in the Tory NHS plans, he didn't go into detail or seek the moral highground. He simply called it "complete junk" and said he'd spotted £11bn of mistakes in Darling's analysis in just 11 seconds.

He rattled off a number of policies which he said Labour said he was committed too and then insisted his party weren't committed to them.

Two things from this exchange. 1) The 'he says' 'no he says' politics of the playground are the very style of politics the public want to see and end to - and by indulging in the them, Cameron is neglecting his promise of change.

Secondly, Labour can't pin many policies on Cameron at the moment - because the announcements at present are "the first chapters of a draft manifesto" to quote form Cameron's speech on Saturday. So he can drop them at any time.

In short, in attempting to launch an election campaign now, Cameron is in danger of being exposed of being light on policies - and in danger of being accused of distracting politicians from the task in hand: Of making sure this country's slow recovery continues.