Andy Burnham's car crash interview on Labour NHS plans

Labour think that the NHS is their issue and that they are the only party who will protect the NHS. But if you want a perfect illustration of why Labour is not fit to govern, the internal contradictions and complete intellectual inconsistency of their approach to the NHS, a subject they believe is their issue, provide it. This is perfectly demonstrated if you watch the egregious performance given by  Labour's last Secretary of State for Health and current Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, when interviewed by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight yesterday.

Wark started the interview by asking Andy Burnham about two inconsistent quotes: one from Burnham himself suggesting that Labour wanted to "call time" on private provision in the NHS and one from his deputy arguing that there is a place for it. She asked which was Labour policy?

Burnham could not and did not give a consistent answer to this question or almost any other question he was asked during the entire ten minute interview because at every stage he was trying to have it both ways

He was trying at the same time to defend the increase in outsourcing he himself had made while Labour was in office and the increase for which Labour is responsible in the proportion of NHS care provided by external organisations while also suggesting that in some unspecified way the similar further increase under the coalition was entirely different and unacceptable.

 

As Kirsty reminded Andy Burnham, during Labour's last four years in government, for much of which he himself was the minister responsible, they increased the share of outsourcing in the NHS from about 2.8% to about 4.4%. The Coalition has increased it by another 1.5% to 5.9% which is a very similar rate of growth.

This modest increase still leaves more than 94% of healthcare directly provided in-house by the NHS. It also means that the great majority of outsourcing which is taking place now was also taking place during the last year of Andy Burnham's stewardship of the NHS.


 

Kirsty Wark repeatedly pressed Burnham to make clear whether he regretted the fact that, when Labour was last in government, he had presided over a moderate increase in the degree of outsourcing in the NHS, and if not, why was that increase right but a similar moderate increase wrong under the present government?

He defended the increase in privatisation which took place while he was minister but inferred, without clearly explaining why or giving even the most vague indication of by how much, that he would like to reverse it.

Burnham insisted almost in alternate breaths that there was a place for the private sector in health provision but that the market was not the answer.

I have rarely seen a more extreme example of someone expressing two opposite views during the same interview.

Burnham was completely unable to give a clear answer to the question of what services he thought should and should not be outsourced, and explicitly refused to answer the question of what proportion of NHS spending should be delivered by the private sector, saying that there was no right level.

Anybody who is considering voting Labour because they like what they think are Labour's policies on the Health service should watch the Newsnight interview below. And having seen this performance by the person who will presumably be running the NHS if Labour win, ask yourself these three questions.

Is this man unwilling to make clear how much NHS spending he will put out to the private sector or bring back in house because he is afraid that a clear answer will upset potential Labour voters?

Or is it because he genuinely does not know what he would do?

And either way, can you really be confident that the NHS would be safer in his hands than those of anyone else?