"We can’t afford this".

The politically inept Rishi Sunak has passed this comment on the nurses pay claim, unfortunately Rishi nurses did not have the ‘good fortune’ to marry money.

First off, the NHS only survives on the sheer hard work and commitment of nursing staff. Secondly the British public values nurses enormously as they are the main point of contact between them and the faceless bureaucracy hooked on hiring ‘diversity officers’ and other non jobs.

What we really can’t afford is this cult called the NHS with its 1950’s management structure that has proved that it is impervious to change.

The choices are stark; face the collapse of the NHS completely or start root and branch reform.

Looking at health care systems across the world, other than the glib alternative of the United States always trotted out, are a mix of public and private finance. National Insurance, so called, is not an insurance scheme if it treats ‘non policy’ holders across the world who have never paid a penny into NI.

Nothing is free, somebody somewhere has to pay.

So moving from that point, and dispelling the cult myth that it is free, the NHS needs to move towards being a funding organisation rather than an arm of government largesse. Hospitals should be independent taking both private and public patients. If they don’t meet required standards of cleanliness and throughput of patients they should not be operating. Having very expensive medical equipment lying idle outside of 9-5 is a nonsense.

This Party does not claim to have all the answers, but it does insist that fundamental reform must happen. The onset of the plague 2020-21 showed how unprepared the NHS was, despite the warning of exercise Cygnus. The death rate from untreated cancers now threatens to overarch plague deaths.

One would have hoped the public inquiry into 2020-1 would have started the debate. Unfortunately it barely gets a mention.

Let’s have a health providing service not a cult, and stop abusing the people who make the existing system tick.

Andrew Withers FRSA