Labour election chaos over NHS as Ed Miliband accused of running 'comfort zone campaign'
As both parties stepped up their election campaigns, the Labour leader’s efforts to put the NHS at the heart of his party’s strategy appeared to backfire
By Laura Donnelly, Ben Riley-Smith and Steven Swinford
27 Jan 2015
Ed Miliband’s attempts to make the NHS his key election weapon have descended into chaos after he was accused of running a “comfort zone campaign” and refused to endorse the shadow health secretary.
As both parties stepped up their election campaigns, the Labour leader’s efforts to put the NHS at the heart of his party’s strategy appeared to backfire.
At a speech in Manchester on Tuesday, he set out a 10-year plan for the health service. But within hours, he came under attack from party heavyweights, with the former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn accusing him of running a “pale imitation” of Neil Kinnock’s doomed electoral operation in 1992.
The leading Blairite said that Mr Miliband was sticking too closely to Labour’s “comfort zone” in its campaign, and was at risk of making “a fatal mistake” in its approach to the NHS, by failing to promise real reform.
The attack came as Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, made a speech in London setting out the detail of Labour’s NHS plans. But he was left pleading for a place in a future cabinet, after Mr Miliband pointedly refused to say whether Mr Burnham would become health secretary in the event of a Labour victory.
In a further embarrassing slip, Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary, was revealed to have been discussing the depths of the party’s dark mood.
“Some of our colleagues think optimism is an eye disease,” Mr Johnson was recorded as saying at a fundraising event last week.
With the NHS set to take centre stage in the battleground between the major parties, Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, has offered a pay rise to more than a million workers, resulting in the suspension of major strikes across the health service which were due to start tomorrow.
The offer means that NHS staff earning up to £56,000 will receive a one per cent pay rise in 2015-16, with an increase of more than five per cent for the lowest paid. Officials said the costs would be paid by freezing incremental pay rises – a controversial system that gives staff automatic increases linked to time served – for those earning more than £40,000 during the year.
In addition, reforms will be made to NHS redundancy rules for the highest paid, capping payouts at £160,000 rather than the current £500,000.
The proposals agreed will now go to union members for consultation. They will affect more than 1.1 million nurses, midwives, ambulance workers, administrators, porters and cleaners.
The suspension of planned strikes, which could have badly disrupted NHS services at a time when they are under unprecedented pressure, is likely to insulate the Conservatives from attacks over their handling of the NHS.
The plans detailed by Labour promise 10,000 more nurses, partly funded by a mansion tax on homes worth more than £2 million, and a system combining health and social care, to keep more older people out of hospital.
Mr Miliband said the election campaign was “a fight for the future of the NHS” and suggested that a Conservative victory could leave the NHS “sunk by a toxic mix of cuts, crisis and privatisation”.
But the Tories questioned Mr Miliband’s sums, accusing him of promising the same money twice, having said in Tuesday's speech that the mansion tax would be used to cut the deficit.
Mr Miliband also said that he “honestly can’t remember” using the word “weaponise” to describe his party’s strategy of fighting on the issue of the NHS in the run-up to the general election.
The Prime Minister has said the use of the term was “disgusting” and accused him of treating the NHS like a “political football”.
Meanwhile, in an interview with the influential magazine Health Service Journal, Mr Miliband refused to promise Mr Burnham the post of health secretary if Labour were to win the election.
Mr Burnham has been in the shadow post since 2010, but has repeatedly come under fire for his handling of the NHS when he was health secretary before that – most notably for refusing a public inquiry into the Mid Staffs hospital trust scandal.
While praising Mr Burnham’s current work, Mr Miliband told the journal that his policy was “never to nominate anybody for government” because it suggests he is presuming victory or “measuring the curtains”.
The shadow health secretary was left making a desperate plea for the post, saying he hoped his “passion” for his policies and the 10 to 15 years he had spent working on them would give him the chance to deliver his plan. He told a press conference: “Of course I want to see these plans through – I’ve put a lot of my thinking and myself into them, it’s been a long process.” But he conceded that the decision would be made by Mr Miliband.
At the same time, speaking on BBC Radio Four’s World at One, Mr Milburn – who is credited with being a reforming health secretary during his tenure from 1999 to 2003 – raised fears that Labour was set to repeat the 1992 defeat, when a victory was widely expected. “I think the biggest risk for Labour on health, and indeed more generally, is that we could look like we’re sticking to our comfort zone but aren’t prepared to strike out into territory that in the end the public know any party of government will have to strike out into – which is to make some difficult changes and difficult choices,” he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/gen...accused-of-running-comfort-zone-campaign.html
'Tax them at a more reasonable level'? The whole idea of incentivising people to save for their retirement and not be reliant on the state is to offer tax incentives. Brown's taxation of dividends has creamed about £120bn from defined benefit schemes- the overall deficit of DB schemes is about £170bn. If he hadn't done that, a lot more of these schemes would be open enabling people to retire much more comfortably. I'm not talking about the super-rich either, just every day workers. Brown out-Tory-ed the Tories with that one.