Can Reform withstand the Burnham bounce?
A couple of polls today point to a recovery for Labour. It just takes a better showman than Farage to rob Reform of its lead. But it is only temporary. Burnham’s comms game is soon going to wear thin, and his gimmicks can only do so much. The Burnham bounce is temporary.
Reform's stagnation, however, is a separate matter and part of a longer trend. It still presents as an unserious party whose fortunes are tired to those of its leader. The ultimate test of a party is whether it can withstand the departure of its current leader, and on that basis, it does not look good for Reform. None of the necessary work commensurate with forming a government has been done. It is still not a serious proposition. Labour can slide south in the polls to Reform's advantage, but that still doesn't address the deep-rooted structural problems in Reform that will prevent it from securing a working majority.
One of the reasons Labour might just make a go of it is Burnham’s apparent seriousness in sorting out social care. In his first major interview since becoming prime minister, Burnham said he would not want to leave office without bringing in “substantial change” to the social care system. If Labour look like they are sorting this out, they'll get a crack of the whip, making an irrelevance of the right while it exclusively grunts about immigration. While immigration remains a top concern, social care is a low level slow burning crisis that has implications for everyone.
We have yet to see the details, not least because this agenda is based on the whims of the leader, but this is where it would have been useful for the right to have an armoury of policies they could use to spell out why the government is wrong and what they would do differently. This is another area where the parties of the right have nothing useful or interesting to say.
Health should have been a priority for the right, because while voters are concerned about immigration, they are equally concerned that close relatives are having to wait months and years for cancer treatments. Routinely, the electorate shows us they will put their immediate self-interest first despite what the polls say about which issue is most important. Something like social care is objectively important in its own right and voters do care about it yet the slop right has nothing to say on this.
This is why one of the main efforts of the Manifesto Project was on health. My view on it is that hospital are over burdened with unnecessary admissions due to the dysfunctionality of the GP system, further exacerbated by delays in discharge because the care system is a mess. It suggested to me the necessity to decentralise hospital functions, not least diagnostic services, to the community level, and centre care on the premise that the best place for recovery is in the home.
Regarding care homes (and I need to do more work on this) the entire system is not only broken. It's corrupt, often serving as visa mills for unwanted immigration, where exploitation and illegal working is rife.
I think the answer lies in restoring care work as a valid career path with structured career progression that can go to the very top of care administration, with possible diversions into qualified nursing. It requires additional incentives. To that end, I propose a system of tied district housing for supervising care nurses to live in the locality, with a view to improving retention and promoting long service. Service amounting to ten years will be rewarded with a discounted right to buy. The care system doesn't work if the people working within it don't care.
The slop right takes the view that the NHS is too broken to fix, thus do not attempt to offer solutions. They make vague overtures to privatisation of various functions and making huge cuts to back office administration, failing to understand that good administration is what makes the system work. They simply don't apply themselves to the actual problems. The fundamental error is talking about the NHS as though it were a single entity, when it is really just an umbrella brand for multiple organisations, some of which work very well. The problem is regional disparities in which case the task is to bring the worst performers up to the standard of the best.
Meanwhile, more needs to be said about the additional strain mental health problems add to the NHS. That requires better local community support to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions and preventative public health policies. If you ask me, it is not unconnected to the unhealthy relationship Brits have with alcohol, but as we have seen with Restore's attitude to smoking, it does not put any stock in public health policies. You find the same prevailing attitudes in Reform.
I'm a long way from having a full stack of solutions because as a policy area it's actually quite complicated, but it should be a priority area of study for any party serious about taking power - not least because as an issue it has the potential to eclipse all the main concerns they gripe about such as immigration, law and justice. In British politics, if you don't have a serious plan for health, you're not even in the game. This is all Reform’s website has to say on the matter…
If this is the best they can do, Andy Burnham need not lose any sleep over Reform.
In the 6th paragraph, you state:
“further exacerbated by delays in discharge because the care system is a mess”
There is another discharge problem, which I recently experienced first hand due to my elderly mother enduring a 9 day spell in hospital (Leicester Royal). This is the fact that the NHS is not a full 7 day service. At weekends, it effectively treads water, and very little happens.
She was waiting to see a physio before they would sign off on her discharge (to her own home), and whilst this could have been done on the Friday it wasn’t. Asking at the ward reception desk if anything was scheduled over the weekend, I was told “if it happens, it happens, but it probably won’t”.
She was not seen on the ward rounds either on the Saturday or Sunday, that was reserved for priority cases. It was only on the Monday morning ward round that the doctor (who was the 3rd, might have been the 4th, different ward round doctor to have seen her) actually got a physio to turn up and she was discharged later that day. She simply wasted three days occupying a bed which could have been used by someone else.
Overall, it felt to me, that there is just no sense of urgency and there is no one who is what you might call the “point man” for a particular patient. Everything felt so lackadaisical and disjointed. In addition, no one could claim that the reason for this is understaffing.
And don’t get me started on the f**king admissions process.
Agree Reform have wasted the head start in the polls - they needed to show a serious interest in serious topics - health, defence, education, justice, prisons, energy, farming and so on. We don’t expect them to have answers but they could have commissions of interest, fact finding and researching - just asking the right questions would be a start. Immigration is not the only issue and talking too much about it puts some people as well as making Reform look like a one-trick pony. In also needs to decide whether it is the Thatcher Party or the SDP/Blue Labour Party - more so now that Burnham is keen to blame all our ills on Thatcher.