Labour’s NHS lies are breathtakingly brazen

Perhaps we should admire Ed Miliband? After all, he’s running a reasonably effective general election campaign on just thin air and lies and may even manage to crawl into Downing Street propped up by the welfare-dependent Scots.

Miliband can’t talk about the economy as it was Labour – the financially-incontinent, economically-ignorant Gordon Brown ably assisted by the equally useless Miliband and Balls – which wrecked the British economy in the first place.

And Miliband can’t talk about the public’s other main concern – immigration – as it was Blair who came up with the idea of opening Britain’s borders to every piece of Third World garbage in order to rub the noses of the middle classes in multi-culturalism (basically an *sl*mic invasion).

So, what does that leave for Miliband to campaign on? Just the NHS.

Miliband’s two main criticisms of Tory management of the NHS are:

1. People have difficulties seeing their GP

2. Waiting times in A&E are too long.

It’s lucky for Miliband that few people read newspapers and even those who do seem to have very short memories. Otherwise voters would remember which party is responsible for the current pressure on the NHS – none other than Mr Miliband’s Labour.

The main drivers for the NHS’s current problems are immigration – over seven million people moving to Britain since Labour opened up the borders in 1997 – and the new GP contracts Labour ‘negotiated’ with the BMA in 2004.

The new GP contract allowed GPs to scrap their responsibility for out-of-hours cover – evenings and weekends – in return for a pay cut of £6,000 a year. However, this cut of £6,000 was insignificant as the new contracts also included a huge increase in payments to GPs which led to a pay increase of 60% cent in three years to more than £100,000 with some GPs earning up to £250,000 a year.

One of the men at the centre of the contract negotiations has admitted they were shocked when the Government let them drop their out-of-hours cover in return for such a tiny pay cut “It was just stunning. Nobody in my position had ever believed we could pull it off but to get it for six per cent was a bit of a laugh.”

He went on to reveal “We weren’t expecting it at all because we knew it would be very difficult for [ministers] to sell it to the public” and to confess “I’m not hiding the fact that doctors are making a lot of money – a 60 per cent rise over three years.”

Since the 2004 contract started, nine out of ten practices opted out of providing out-of-hours care. Many used to provide Saturday morning surgeries and were on call in the evenings. One health expert commented “BMA negotiators must have thought it was Christmas when they were offered relief from out of hours, I’m surprised it got through both the Department of Health and the Treasury. It shows they were pretty short-sighted.””

Primary care trusts now have responsibility for patients in the evenings and weekends, and have brought in walk-in centres and private companies to fill the gaps.

But the clearest result of Labour’s new GP contract getting rid of most out-of-hours care has been a massive rise in people going to A&E, often with relatively minor complaints:

So, you have to hand it to Red Ed – he’s lying and lying and lying and he’s getting away with it too.

Moreover, the Tories daren’t expose Miliband’s brazen NHS lies as that would mean them admitting that the NHS is buckling under the strain of mass immigration (which the Tories pledged they would control) and that it actually is difficult for people to find a GP who will do any work in spite of the huge amounts GPs are now paid.

And as for Labour’s Andy “Mid-Staffs Murderer” Burnham becoming the next Health Minister in charge of the NHS – that would be like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a girls’ boarding school.