Labour’s Wes Streeting, the man who fancies himself as the saviour of the NHS (Image: Getty)
The NHS budget is soaring, yet the system is failing. NHS England’s ring-fenced revenue budget is set to rise by 4.7% this year to a staggering £181.4 billion, climbing further to £192 billion next year.
But with all this money flowing in, what do we get in return? An annual winter crisis, appalling waiting lists, and an ever-bloated bureaucracy that delivers diminishing returns for the British taxpayer.
Labour’s Wes Streeting, the man who fancies himself as the saviour of the NHS, is floundering in his priorities. One week, he says the NHS must focus on emergency care.
The next, he’s championing GP surgeries as the system’s backbone. Meanwhile, parrots on about reducing waiting lists and tackling social care. But if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.
Throwing more money at a failing system isn’t reform; it’s surrender.
With an apparent £22 billion black hole in the country’s finances, why does the government’s solution always involve spending and borrowing more?
Surely the answer lies in making the system more efficient. But no, this government has no appetite for meaningful reform.
Instead, they’re content to pour hundreds of millions into meaningless roles like diversity, equity, and inclusion officers and art curators.
Is it any wonder frontline staff are overburdened while the bureaucrats are laughing all the way to the bank?
Procurement, too, is an unmitigated disaster. Disposable medical supplies are grotesquely overpriced, surplus orders sit unused, and wastage is rife.
Entire warehouses full of perfectly good equipment go straight to landfill because the NHS has no mechanism for returns. This isn’t just a failure — it’s negligence on an industrial scale.
Wes Streeting’s jaw-dropping incompetence. His first major act as NHS minister? Offering junior doctors an inflation-busting 22.3% pay rise with no strings attached.
No requirement for improved services, no demands for efficiency, no accountability. It’s a giveaway that epitomises Labour’s spend-now-think-later ethos.
As we approach yet another winter crisis, the same old question looms. Why do we tolerate this predictable, avoidable failure year after year?
Britain spends more on healthcare than many comparable nations, yet our outcomes lag far behind. No one disputes the need for investment, but blindly hurling money at the problem is a for disaster.
The stark reality is that the NHS is being suffocated by a bloated and mostly incompetent middle management. The dedicated frontline staff — the true lifeblood of the system — are being betrayed by an archaic, convoluted, and wasteful bureaucracy.
What the NHS desperately needs is radical reform: a ruthless stripping away of unnecessary layers, a drive towards efficiency, and a focus on patient care.
Yet, tellingly, none of this featured in ’s hollow rhetoric during Monday’s grandstanding announcement. His so-called reform plan was long on soundbites but woefully short on substance.
If this trajectory continues, the NHS will implode — and it will likely happen under this government.
Labour and the are two sides of the same coin: timid, visionless, and utterly incapable of tackling the systemic rot.Britain deserves better.
We need a government with the courage to reform the NHS, cut through its inefficiencies, and put patients first. Until that day comes, this once-proud institution will continue its slide into failure.
The NHS doesn’t need more money — it needs a total overhaul, or it will collapse under the weight of its own wastefulness.
Richard Thomson was the Reform UK candidate for Braintree in the 2024 General Election and served as a Royal Marine for eight years