The conventional wisdom is that among Labour’s dullard front bench, Health Secretary Wes Streeting is the rising star. Yet it is hard to understand why.
On holiday in Cornwall last week, a family member with severe asthma needed immediate medical attention.
Our surgery in south-west London had shut up shop for the bank holiday weekend and advised callers to dial 111. Which we did. After a brief mid-morning wait, we were put through to a helpful person.
She listened patiently to our needs, recognised prescriptions would be required and promised to phone back ‘within the hour’. Eventually, the callback came at 3am. The ring was missed, but a follow-up came at around 9am with apologies for the delay. So much for the improved appointments, one of Labour’s familiar boasts, along with ‘economic stability’ and ‘smashing the gangs’.
By the time the NHS finally contacted us, remedial action had been taken. A thorough consultation with a private online doctor service took place – at a cost of £53.
The clinician assessed the needs and emailed the nearest Boots (incidentally open until 9pm on a bank holiday Sunday) where the duty pharmacist could not have been more helpful.
Waging war: The conventional wisdom is that among Labour’s dullard front bench, Health Secretary Wes Streeting is the rising star
A year might seem too soon for Labour to deliver on the NHS despite the lavish £29bn of extra cash tipped in by Rachel Reeves last October. Moreover, so far, the generous pay increases lobbed into the NHS less than a month after Labour took office has done nothing to calm the grasping demands of resident doctors or other NHS unions.
As disturbing is Streeting’s clunky handling of Britain’s trailblazing pharmaceutical sector.
Under the terms of the VPAG – the ‘voluntary’ scheme for branded medicines pricing, access and growth – Britain’s drug companies return a proportion of their income from drugs supplied to the NHS. This funding is intended to support medical innovation within the UK’s health system.
Streeting’s department increased the levy – in effect a stealth tax on UK pharma – from 15 per cent to 22 per cent. The dispute has become an open sore, with Labour now at odds with one of Britain’s most important economic sectors.
The Health Secretary is playing with fire. Big Pharma – namely AstraZeneca (AZ) and GSK, among the UK’s most profitable companies – on paper at least has the capacity to pay more. But every pound extracted from them by a tax-and-spend government weakens the ties to the UK, where they earn a fraction of income.
Britain’s largest listed firm, AZ, is already alienated from Labour.
It has not forgiven Sir Keir Starmer for declining to provide modest financial backing for a vaccine plant in Liverpool, which would strengthen the nation’s health security.
Consequently, AZ has tilted research spending to the US and its chief executive Pascal Soriot privately let it be known that he may shift the group’s listing to New York.
That would be a catastrophe for the London stock exchange. GSK also is doubling down on R&D and investment in the US.
Brexit offered Britain, in charge of its own fate when it comes to drug approvals, the chance to become a global medicine-discovery powerhouse.
The NHS would be its test bed. Instead, backdoor taxation, a refusal to back a UK vaccine facility and obstacles to the use of new drugs by NICE threatens the future of our life sciences.
That represents economic vandalism.
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This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .