As for Wes Streeting’s ambitions (Wes Streeting defends Labor plan to use private sector to tackle NHS backlog, April 12), I worked two sessions a week as a GP specialist in endoscopy in our local NHS Hopital. Two things were a constant source of irritation. Firstly, the work was poorly paid and did not cover my absence from my practice. Second, the lists I worked on were not optimally organized, with elective outpatient cases mixed with urgent inpatient cases, causing several patients to have to wait a long time on the day of their endoscopy.
That’s why myself and colleagues have set up our own community endoscopy service purely for NHS patients. From the beginning, we have offered transnasal gastroscopy, which is relatively new, results in less gagging and rarely requires sedation. We have developed a seamless referral service to secondary care for those diagnosed with cancer, to avoid delays in assessment and treatment. From the beginning, our mantra has been service, quality and training. It is a great example of an innovative private service providing first class care to the NHS.
There are those who will never accept a relationship between the private sector and the NHS on ideological grounds. They would like to acknowledge that the current GP model is also essentially based on a private service provision, where GP partners pay their staff and are themselves rewarded with the profits generated by their practice. In my opinion, the NHS as it currently stands is unsustainable. It needs help and support from other providers as long as they all achieve their goals.
Dr. Mike Cohen
Retired GP and GP specialist in gastroenterology, Bristol
The fact that Wes Streeting indulges in the one-upmanship of the social class is insulting and unfair. “Middle-class leftists” is the language of Tory derision and smug populist inverted snobbery. Does he really want to alienate the middle class, or those with left-wing sensibilities? Does Labour’s eagerness to build an electorally bulletproof facade now require the adoption of the Tory lexicon of othering, monstrosizing and alienating?
The fact that Streeting has also used the meaningless euphemism ‘working families’ when presumably referring to working-class people suggests a distant relationship with a loyalty that dares not speak its name. As a black, presumably middle-class, left-wing man of working class, immigrant descent, and culturally Catholic tastes, I see no contradictions in having multiple identities – aren’t we all stratified? I therefore see no reason why Streeting should have to disavow his middle-class political, left-wing credentials in order to claim working-class authenticity, unless of course it is primarily about strategic faux-class solidarity.
Paul McGilchrist
Cromer, Norfolk
I see that Wes Streeting has said that it would be a ‘betrayal’ of the working class if more NHS services were not outsourced to the private sector. As a working class man and lifelong Labor voter I would say that the betrayal of the working class is being led by Streeting and the Labor leadership.
Would he consider bringing private resources into public ownership? This would be a much better, and financially better in the long term, solution to the current backlog. The NHS’s problems are due to systematic underfunding, privatization and outsourcing. Labour’s proposals seem like good money after bad.
Martijn Coult
London
The reason I can be described as middle-class left rather than working-class left is that the consensus governments of the 1950s, 1960s and, yes, the 1970s took care of me and opened an educational path for me. What does Wes Streeting hope to gain from offending older Labor supporters who look back and see a fairer society being turned upside down by the steady incursion of the private sector into what was once the public sector? Ominous, too, to see Peter Mandelson once again mocking what many would consider Labour’s core values.
Nick Langley
Cambridge
