Wes Streeting is facing intense criticism on different fronts this week, after a number of recent controversial statements.

On Monday, the Shadow Health Secretary took to the pages the Sun newspaper to announce that the NHS will get no extra funding from Labour without “major surgery”, including more use of the private sector. He said he would not be put off by “middle-class lefties” who cry “betrayal”, adding he was “up for the fight” with NHS unions.

His outburst drew widespread criticism, including from Momentum Co-Chair Hilary Schan, who described his denigration of those asking for more funding as “middle-class lefties” as “a slap in the face to hundreds of thousands of nurses, doctors and other NHS staff in desperate need of a pay-rise, and a recipe for a continued recruitment and retention crisis.”

Follow the money

The left wing group further pointed out that Wes Streeting has received tens of thousands of pounds from corporate donors linked to private healthcare. In January 2023, Sky News revealed that shell company MPM Connect Ltd had donated £60,000 to Streeting, alongside even larger sums to other leading Labour figures.  MPM Connect is owned by Labour financier Peter Hearn, who reportedly has interests in outsourcing contracts.  

Streeting was also reported last year to have accepted a £15,000 donation from the boss of a hedge fund which holds investments in the US’s largest private healthcare insurer.

Labour’s official health affiliate, the Socialist Health Association, has slammed Streeting over private sector links and proposals to use ‘spare’ private sector capacity.  Others have raised concerns about the quality of patient care in private hospitals. In 2018, the Care Quality Commission found that two-fifths of private hospitals in England were failing to meet the expected standards.

A recent BBC TV Panorama investigation highlighted some of the safety concerns around private hospitals, also pointing out how they send back 550 patients to the NHS every month, “A&E dumping” them while they profit from the easy cases.

Outsourcing is also expensive. Private hospitals contribute little towards clearing the NHS backlog, because the doctors and nurses who work in them are themselves largely drawn from the NHS, which also bears the cost of training them. This amounts to a government subsidy of about £8 billion for private hospitals each year.

This week’s diatribe was not Streeting’s first attack on NHS unions. In December 2022, he gave an interview to another Tory paper, the Daily Telegraph, saying health workers’ pay demands were unaffordable and promising to take on “hostile” health unions holding back the NHS.

We own it – or do we?

Writing yesterday on Labour List, Cat Hobbs, founder and director of the pressure group We Own It, said: “Wes Streeting could be telling a straightforward, easy-to-understand story. Labour created the NHS, the Tories have trashed it. People are dying as a result. Labour will take back control of our NHS, fund it properly and stop wasteful privatisation.”

She went on: “Instead, Streeting seems to be trying to rustle up working class resentment against middle class NHS campaigners, stoking the divisive, destructive culture wars that so much of the media revels in… Why not rise above the mean-spirited debates and do grown-up politics, bringing people together in a coalition to achieve results? 77% of Conservative voters want a fully publicly-owned NHS.”

Well, why not? One possible reason is highlighted later in her article: the Shadow Health Secretary has promised a miserly £1.1bn of investment for the NHS – “a drop in the ocean compared to the £40bn a year we need to match equivalent European countries.”

Since Monday, 15,000 people have signed a We Own It petition calling for more NHS investment.

The Cass Review

Wes Streeting came under further fire today after tweeting support for the controversial Cass Review into the NHS’s gender identity services.  The report has been seized on by right wing media to pursue their culture war against trans people. The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson gives a flavour of the toxic tone of the debate: “The Cass report lays bare what we all knew about the trans brainwashing cult.”

Streeting’s enthusiasm for the report was slammed by Labour For Trans Rights who retorted: “The Cass Review disregards years of evidence, proposing implementations that would have potentially disastrous consequences for both trans youth and adults. No way should a report with uncited claims and limited research scope be accepted so nonchalantly and uncritically.”

They concluded: “Labour should not, in a million years, immediately agree to implement recommendations from a report that has had – at best – very little input from the actually existing trans community and LGBT+ organizations.

Young Labour LGBT representative Chloe Brooks added: “This report is a poor basis from which to fix our broken trans healthcare system – I urge Wes to listen to young trans voices, who continue to be shut out of discussions on their own lives.”

Momentum said Streeting’s statement was “highly disappointing,” adding: “The Cass Review ignored dozens of scientific studies, coming to a harmful conclusion of limiting access to gender-affirming care for trans youth.”

 Even the new National Labour Students Chair, Ruby Herbert, elected on a right-wing slate, denounced the report as “unscientific”, adding, “the Labour Party must stand up for trans people” 

Willow Parker, the similarly Starmerite Labour Students Trans Officer, agreed: “Labour can and must be better at standing up to the toxic political culture that has developed in which trans people are dehumanised, stigmatised, and generally treated like dirt.”

Image: Wes Streeting. Source: https://api20170418155059.azure-api.net/photo/RBW45CFG.jpeg?crop=MCU_3:2&quality=80&download=trueGallery: https://beta.parliament.uk/media/RBW45CFG. Author: .