General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

Dougie

You don’t realise how much the Labour Party has changed since your grandparents day. They may well have reservations about an automatic vote for Labour if they were here today.
I was chatting to a former a Labour MP a few months ago who doesn’t feel welcome anymore at meetings of the local constituency Labour Party.
In the same way the NHS has changed beyond recognition since it’s inception in 1948.
Talk to anyone of lengthy service in the NHS and they will tell you how much waste and excess cost there is. The cost of second class postage for patient’s letters runs out at over £80 million a year. It’s exactly the same process as in 1948 apart from the scale. Text or email for the patients with those facilities would slash that cost to almost zero as well as the associated administrative costs.
Litigation from patients costs about £2.5 billion a year. There is no quality assurance scheme in the NHS that would reduce that cost of liability.
In 1948 air travel was considered hazardous, nowadays it’s the safest form of travel mainly because of the continuous improvement arising from quality assurance principles.
The NHS needs clinically led reform but it is stymied because any attempt to do so results in mass protests of privatisation.
Back to the election. Very few, if any, electors would vote for an NHS under the influence of the US administration as part of a trade deal.
In my view, as I’ve said before, the NHS faces a future more in Europe rather than across the Atlantic.