Tory MPs slam govt on NHS & Afghanistan
12:30 pm - March 21st 2011
| Tweet | Share on Tumblr |
Two “rising stars” of the Conservative Party, elected in 2010, have gone public with criticisms of government policies in areas where they are experts.
Dr Sarah Wollaston, selected as a Tory candidate through an open primary, slammed David Cameron’s plans for the NHS as ‘dangerous’, describing the plans as a ‘Trojan Horse’, ‘the worst of both worlds’, and wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that:
“I cannot see that it makes sense to foot the bill for redundancies for the entire middle layer of NHS management only to be re-employing many of them within a couple of years. Commissioning consortia will be overwhelmed trying to adapt to their new roles. Someone needs to get a grip or we will continue to haemorrhage the best staff as a result of intolerable uncertainty and pointless morale-sapping denigration. It all risks going ‘belly up’ rather than ‘bottom up’.”
Meanwhile, Rory Stewart, writing in the London Review of Books, described himself as “traumatised by the failure to stop more troop deployments to Afghanistan”, and argued that “though I am in favour of the no-fly zone, it seems as though the real danger remains not despair but our irrepressible, almost hyperactive actions: that sense of moral obligation; those fears about rogue states, failed states, regions and our own credibility, which threaten to make this decade again a decade of over-intervention.”
Wollaston and Stewart are two of the brightest talents amongst the new Tory MPs. What does it tell us that in the areas where they are experts, they are “traumatised” by government policies, which they think are ‘dangerous’ and ‘risk going belly up’?
| Tweet | Share on Tumblr |  |
Don Paskini is deputy-editor of LC. He also blogs at donpaskini. He is on twitter as @donpaskini
· Other posts by Don Paskini
Story Filed Under: News
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Reader comments
It tells us the Conservative Party feels confident enought to have internal debates about policy. It tells us that they are not afraid to do this in public (albeit the existence of say David Davis or Douglas Carswell suggest they were happy to do this before anyway…). What will be interesting is to see if the Conservative leadership are happy to debate straight back again.
Are you telling me that every Labour Party MP agrees with all of Mr Milliband’s policies and declarations? Because if so, there may be a point here. And if so, I just saw a winged porcine beast outside the window.
I think more damning is this:
I met just such a “bureaucrat” recently and it was clear that he will be staying because he knows that without some experienced guidance and continuity, the consortia are doomed to fail and will have to hand over their commissioning to the private sector. An organisation responsible for over £100billion needs people who seriously understand accountancy and, trust me, GPs do not.
I have heard this many times. Either Lansley is an idiot who does not know what he is doing, or he has designed the system to fail so that he can replace the NHS with something else. It is unclear at the moment what Lansley expects would happen when the system fails. The private sector are currently suffering from the recession with some US companies pulling out of the UK altogether.
It is high risk, people’s lives are at stake.
They can come out against their own party but it won’t change anything. The only people who can change it is the public. If both can come out and support the public then their words will be seen as also action rather than just words.
Yes what Lansley maybe doing is creative destruction of the NHS so in the end it leads up to a privatised service, something the Tory party have always wanted since it’s inception.
Are NHS “reforms” subject to a free vote?
@ Richard Blogger
Either Lansley is an idiot who does not know what he is doing, or he has designed the system to fail so that he can replace the NHS with something else
The latter. An insurance-based system. In fact I’d add New Labour paved the way. Look how much of trhe ridiculous Connecting for Health waste was on ‘transaction’ tracking, rather than clinically-necessary data. A cynic might say that that was the use of vast amounts of public money to pay for an IT infrastructure to suit the private sector.
The national social insurance schemes for healthcare costs function well in most other west European countries when assessed in terms of patient outcomes – such as relative cancer survival rates compared with the UK – as well as patient satisfaction.
The UK comes quite well down the global league table of life expectancy at birth – with America even lower despite the high spending on healthcare there compared with the other affluent OECD countries.
the “set up an unworkable system guaranteed to fail” approach is also higher ed policy – they’re intentionally making the state system unworkable so unis go fully private…
A third to add to the list of Conservative MPs criticising government in areas where they are expert – Helen Grant MP was a legal aid solicitor before being elected in 2010, and wrote a powerful piece arguing against government’s proposed reforms to legal aid in the Guardian a couple of months ago. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/02/legal-aid-last-line-defence
She said: “These proposals could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, effectively dismantling an established infrastructure which achieves an amazing amount with very little.”
Reactions: Twitter, blogs
-
Liberal Conspiracy
Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan http://bit.ly/icMKhW
-
Gemma Handford
RT @libcon: Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan http://bit.ly/icMKhW
-
John West
RT @libcon: Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan http://bit.ly/icMKhW
-
bryan
Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan | Liberal Conspiracy: http://bit.ly/g8UYd7 via @addthis
-
leeds_green_stokie
RT @libcon: Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan http://bit.ly/icMKhW
-
Afghanistan
Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan: Source: liberalconspiracy.org — Monday, March 21, 2011Two “risin… http://bit.ly/fhJtjV
-
yituagar
Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan: Source: liberalconspiracy.org — Monday, March 21, 2011Two “risin… http://bit.ly/fhJtjV
-
Jane Phillips
RT @libcon: Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan http://bit.ly/icMKhW
-
Kelvin John Edge
RT @libcon: Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan http://bit.ly/icMKhW
-
Pucci Dellanno
RT @libcon: Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan http://bit.ly/icMKhW
-
Safe Asian Traveling Tips and News - Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan
[…] Source: https://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/03/21/tory-mps-slam-government-on-nhs-afghanistan/ […]
-
Alan Hurt
Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan | Liberal Conspiracy http://t.co/V9eyt1K via @libcon
-
lesa
RT @curmudgeon_1: Tory MPs slam government on NHS, Afghanistan | Liberal Conspiracy http://t.co/V9eyt1K via @libcon
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
