THE present and incessant coverage around failures in the NHS is alarming. It has gone beyond the reporting of real-life events to drive a political narrative that serves the immediate interests of the private health lobby with which many politicians are associated.

When health workers go on strike, ministers routinely blame the strikers for delays in treatment.

Health unions point out that the increasing waiting lists date from the Tories accession to office and while many people — based on their experience and understanding of the situation in the NHS — grasp this essential fact it is inserted into a powerfully induced narrative about a failing NHS.

Similarly with failures of NHS management, flawed medical procedures, and the actions and omissions of malign or incompetent health staff.

Nearly one-and-a-half million NHS staff work in hospitals and community health services, while getting on for 200,000 general medical practice staff work in primary healthcare.

This is a human enterprise on a massive scale but staffing shortages and a cuts regime inevitably have an effect. The Health Foundation estimates that spending on our healthcare lagged behind comparable European countries to the tune of £40 billion each year over the decade before the Covid pandemic.

Just for the moment the British Medical Association thinks that an extra £7bn investment beyond the the £10bn already committed is necessary.

Britain’s neoliberal economic orthodoxy sees every human and social activity as a revenue stream and a profit opportunity. Among the political class this is almost unchallenged, with Westminster Labour as committed to further inserting private capital in the NHS as are the Tories.

Opposition to this is deeply embedded in the consciousness of the nation. The evidence is that opposition to privatisation rather than being principally concerned with services being free at the point of delivery is instead mainly opposed to the extraction of profits.

This undermines the key assumptions of those committed to private-sector “solutions” to public service delivery.

Public won’t be fooled again

EVEN before a TUC audience Labour’s deputy leader would not commit the party to raise the state pension in line with the “triple lock.”

Angela Rayner said it could not commit to the policy — under which pensions rise by the highest of prices, average earnings or 2.5 per cent, until an election — and that a decision would depend on the state of the country’s finances.

This line from the Labour leadership is designed to strengthen the carefully constructed narrative that we cannot afford decent pensions and that the slow, erratic progress to raising state pension levels that the triple lock entails is unaffordable.

National Insurance contributions — originally conceived of a the funding foundation of the social safety net and our collective pension pot — has been reduced to being simply an extra tax, and the costs of pensions are met out of general taxation.

Like national spending on health, the funding of state pensions needs a super-charged boost both to match other developed countries and to meet the real needs of our people.

Instead the political consensus favours a shift to private pension schemes where there is profit to be made.

Labour needs to understand that a failure to distinguish itself from the ruling class consensus carries an electoral cost.

“People always have been and they always will be the stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics, until they learn behind every kind of moral, religious, political, social phrase, declaration and promise to seek out the interests of this or that class or classes,” wrote Lenin in 1913.

Where many were bamboozled by the Thatcher and New Labour line-up on privatisation they will not again.