Has the NHS finally stopped being a political football?

Five years ago, Labour was investing huge sums in the NHS while the Tories were arguing that the middle classes should be ‘passported’ into private provision. I vividly remember a fringe meeting at which a prominent Conservative politician argued that public services actually caused ill-health.

Two years ago things looked different again, as Labour was blamed for huge budget shortfalls that saw NHS staff laid off, trainee doctors sent on a merry go-round with no job at the end while the Tories joined local protests around the country at the closure of local services.

Today we still get the shadow boxing, as we saw with the launch and response to Ara Darzi’s 10-year review of the NHS last Monday. But have the policy differences disappeared? Both Alan Johnson and his shadow Andrew Lansley, (the only Tory to know what job he would get if Cameron becomes PM), are steeped in the values of an NHS free at the point of use. Both want an end to ‘re-disorganisation’ of the NHS and the development of quality outcome measures at local level. Practice-based commissioning, payment by results, foundation hospitals and patient choice feature prominently in both parties’ thinking.

One Tory frontbencher told me earlier this year that Labour had finally adopted the last Conservative government’s policy prescriptions for the NHS. The Conservatives have even adopted the slogan ‘NH Yes’ to show that they are now a party of the NHS and not alternatives to state-funded health.

There are gaps of course. Labour is championing radical reforms of social care, which the Tories have not yet said they will support. Andrew Lansley’s comment a few months ago that health must take a growing proportion of public spending stirred up a hornet’s nest inside Tory ranks, with the party committed to sharing proceeds of economic growth between public services and tax cuts. And it is not clear what either party is going to do about health inequality.

So if we want to see real political differences on health policy, maybe we have to look beyond English borders. At Wales and Scotland, for example, who have abolished their markets – the famous purchaser-provider split – and where equality is a bigger theme than choice.

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