Votes for populist parties in May elections will put NHS at risk, Streeting says | Wes Streeting
Wes Streeting, who is trying to make the health service a key battleground, said voters in May’s local and devolved elections risk endangering the NHS if they vote for populist parties.
“The founding principles of the NHS are under greater threat than at any time since the NHS was founded in 1948,” the health secretary said.
He warned there was a “particular danger” to the NHS in Wales, where Labor is facing an election wipeout that has been pitched to voters by Reform UK and Plaid Cymru as the best “stop Reform” option.
Streeting calls Labour’s progressive rivals “rookies” and says he has “rejected” them[d] Believing that many people in Wales would vote for Reform if they knew Nigel Farage’s place on the NHS”.
Streeting argued that the NHS in Scotland was weaker after almost two decades of SNP rule, while in England Labour-run councils would have operated more efficiently with Labor in government.
“The choice voters have to make is who do they want in government in Scotland after 20 years of SNP failure?” he said. “Do they really want to take the risk of rookies, Plaid Cymru or the Reform disaster area when there is a Welsh Labor government in Wales working in partnership with a UK Labor government to serve Wales?
“And in councils across England where Labor councils have managed to serve against the Conservative government, we need to keep those councils in Labor so that they can serve in partnership with the Labor government.”
The intervention comes as a new poll by More in Common for the Sunday Times suggests 16 of 22 cabinet ministers, including Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and John Healey, will lose their seats if a general election is held today; 12 seats would go to Reform, three to the Greens and one independent.
In an interview with the Guardian before speaking at the Institute for Public Policy Research (FMPR) On Monday Streeting said the NHS was a “key battleground” in the May election and accused Farage of wanting to “dismantle” the NHS and failing to set out his plans for the health service.
“I shudder at the idea that the country that gave birth to Bevan and the NHS would elect a party to government in Wales that would dismantle it,” Streeting said.
Reform had promised to offer a 20% tax discount on all private health policies if it came to power ahead of the 2024 general elections. During Reform’s Wales conference in 2024, Farage said “fundamentally rethinking” To fix the Welsh NHS, which has much longer waiting lists than in Scotland and England. Earlier this year he he told LBC he was “open to anything” and was considering a “French-style” NHS insurance system.
A Reform spokesman said: “We will always keep the NHS free at the point of use for British citizens.”
Streeting said Reform MPs such as Farage and Richard Tice “don’t believe in the NHS” but were “acting uncharacteristically shy” to avoid losing votes. “They hope voters will go into this election thinking Reform is a safe protest play. They are not. They are a risk to the NHS,” he said.
Streeting said in a recent Guardian article that the NHS was on track to miss key targets to reduce waiting times for help at A&E, cancer care and planned hospital treatment were based on outdated data.
He said despite junior doctors’ strikes there was a “fighting chance” of meeting the government’s target of reducing waiting times for the end of March, adding: “We are seeing significant and sustained reductions in NHS waiting lists.”
Reflecting the extent of the challenge facing Labor ahead of the May election, the street action also targeted the Green party, which it described as “incredible”.
He said: “We’ve done some really good, progressive things in the Labor Party. My disappointment is that we’ve kept our heads down in doing those things. We’ve got to do a much better job of looking up and telling the country what we’re doing.”
While Streeting is widely believed to harbor leadership ambitions, he has insisted he will urge MPs not to try to unseat Keir Starmer if Labor performs poorly in May. “The Prime Minister will stay here,” he said. “Keir Starmer won a huge majority in the last election and has the mandate to change the country. We must continue this work, not give in to ourselves.”
