Founding principles of NHS betrayed by both Labour and SNP

The National

13-05-2025

It was fun to be back in the industrial Lanarkshire heartland where I cut my political teeth 40 years ago. It seems like only yesterday I was jousting with the local Labour MP, George (now Lord) Robertson, in the town hall at Young Socialist meetings.
On the doorsteps, then as now, the state of our National Health Service was never far from people's minds. It's not surprising, since the British Medical Association believes the health service is currently facing 'the most severe crisis in its history'.
If so, it's a crisis precipitated by widespread privatisation, chronic underfunding and NHS leaders who do not support its founding principles. Wishaw General and Hairmyres are the NHS Lanarkshire hospitals covering the Hamilton area. Both buildings are owned by commercial companies under the now-notorious Private Finance Initiative.
READ MORE: Quality and quantity of GP appointments have both declined
Their budgets, like six other PFIs in Scotland, have been drained by this arrangement because of the profit-taking inherent to its DNA the profit-taking in the DNA of such arrangements. The controversial model is neither popular nor efficient. History will record for ever more that Labour used these schemes to build six Scottish hospitals and the SNP two more.
Bluntly speaking, this means both parties betrayed the promises they made to protect the NHS's founding principle, established in 1948: that our health services would be free at point of need, publicly owned and run, and guarantee equity of access.
Two reports published last week highlighted the extent of that much-restricted access. First, Audit Scotland reported that one-fifth of all calls to the NHS 24 service last year were abandoned – in other words, 60,000 people gave up waiting for an answer in their doubtless exasperated quest for help.
Adding to that appalling statistic, BMA Scotland calculated that we are now 1800 GPs short in the ambition to return to even pre-Covid levels of primary care provision.
Reinforcing patient dissatisfaction even more, Professor Allyson Pollock, of Newcastle University, sent me her study of elective surgery performance from 1997-2021, which concludes that private medicine is not augmenting the NHS, as successive governments insisted it would.
It is in fact replacing it when it comes to hip and knee surgery, to the detriment of long-suffering patients who can't afford the exorbitant private hospital charges.
Meanwhile, a University of York study on productivity in the NHS revealed that the organisation is now performing 11% below pre-pandemic levels because of the triple whammy of privatisation, chronic underinvestment and staff shortages.
The promise First Minister John Swinney made last week of 100,000 extra GP appointments next year will therefore underwhelm most people experiencing the crisis our NHS is now facing.
The intense frustration patients across Scotland feel at 8am daily attempting to access the medical care from GP surgeries to which they are entitled will be little diminished by such paltry promises.
The provision of social care in Scotland is another demonstrable disgrace.
During the pandemic, then-first minister Nicola Sturgeon acknowledged that the situation was completely unacceptable and repeatedly promised us 'a national care service on a par with the NHS'. Little did we know she intended to diminish the care provided by both!
Today's NHS is unquestionably performing poorer than it was prior to the SNP's first Holyrood victory in 2007. That is something Nationalists must honestly face up to across Scotland.
Meanwhile, back in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, people awaiting the vote on June 5 recognise that Reform UK have the wind in their sails after the English local election results.
I fear we could see a sizeable increase in support for them because of the failures of the parties of the 'extreme centre' who have angered people with their insipid managerialism in office.
READ MORE: Andrew Bowie panned over 'contempt for scientific evidence' with climate comments
While I detect no great admiration for the SNP, Geoff Aberdein, the seasoned political strategist and former adviser to Alex Salmond, asked on his podcast recently: 'Where else in the western world is a party in government for almost two decades, and facing a by-election, the favourites to win?'
He has a point. But it says more perhaps about the calibre of the opposition than anything else.
Labour are under more pressure than the SNP to win this contest, yet they are haemorrhaging support under the dull leadership of Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar.
As we have seen this week, Labour fully intend to embrace the reactionary politics of Reform UK on issues such as immigration, the economy and climate change.
Instead of offering even a mild left-of-centre alternative, they seem to believe Scotland needs more privatisation, inequality and division.
The middle-aged woman I met in Union Street, Larkhall last Saturday weighed up the Scottish Socialist Party's case presented to her, and perhaps summed up the mood in the constituency when she said: 'Right enough. It's time someone else had the chance to show what they can do.'