Keir Starmer’s conference speech will probably be best remembered for the heckling he received from a strange bunch of Labour delegates – and for the way he faced them down. The theme of the conference was that he wanted Labour to be a serious party again, even if some of its members don’t agree. “Shouting slogans, or changing lives, conference!” he retorted after one heckler continued to harangue from the floor.
He gave us a glimpse of one way in which he wants to change lives – and if he manages to end up in government and if he really does know how to realise this pledge, then it really will change lives. “I want Britain to be the healthiest nation on earth… We would shift the priority in the NHS away from emergency care, towards prevention,” he said. He also promised Labour would guarantee that support for a mental health problem would be available in less than a month. Neither of these pledges are tiny, simple things to realise. They will cost a lot of money and take up an enormous amount of bandwidth for a Labour government to even come close.
Guaranteeing proper support for a mental health problem within a month almost defies the laws of physics, given the lengthy waits for almost all mental health services in this country. Everything has got worse because of the pandemic. But it was terrible before any of us had even heard of Covid.
Labour plans to change the way waits are measured so the focus is not on the first appointment where someone’s needs are assessed but treatment doesn’t start, but on the second, where patients start receiving their regular therapy. At the moment, the gap between those two can be lengthy, with doctors advising patients that if they can afford it, they will need to go private.
It is a situation reminiscent of the Blair years, where waits for physical health problems were so long the Government feared public support for the NHS was crumbling. It led the then health secretary Alan Milburn to warn the health service was in the “last chance saloon”, and then to the creation of tough targets to drive down those waits.
The NHS generally still commands huge public support. But its ability to treat mental illness in a timely fashion means many people just don’t trust it to look after them, or worse, their children, when their minds are sick. A party that truly loves the NHS as much as Labour claims to should worry about this and work on policies to remedy it.
Another shift from Labour’s comfortable habit of merely paying tribute to the health service and questioning the motives of the Tories comes in Starmer’s emphasis on prevention. He has been telling meetings with colleagues he thinks the key is ‘preventative public health’ – though he was wisely advised that no-one would have a clue what he meant by that. In the conference hall, he framed it as aiming to “prevent problems before they bite”.
Starmer is personally interested in this, as is his director of policy Claire Ainsley. At the start of conference, the leader held a Q&A session with Love Island star Amy Hart and young people where they talked, among other things, about mental well-being. His frontbenchers keep bringing it up too.
In fact the need for government to create a healthy society was one of the few clear themes throughout this conference. Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth talked about it a lot in his speech on Tuesday. He has held meetings with New Zealand government officials on their work on wellbeing, and has been heavily influenced by the work of former NHS chief executive Nigel Crisp, who has written a book called Health is made at home, hospitals are for repairs. Ashworth quoted it in the conference hall: “There is a saying: ‘Health is made at home. Hospitals are for repairs.’ It captures a fundamental truth: that health is created in our communities and depends upon the conditions in which we live.”
Ashworth and other frontbenchers, including Ed Miliband who acts as a ‘key thinker’ for Starmer, are very taken by the Welsh Future Generations Act, which requires public bodies to take account of long-term wellbeing in their decision-making.
If some of this sounds eerily familiar, it’s because David Cameron used to waffle on about it when he was an opposition leader. His party even produced posters with “general wellbeing” emblazoned on nice pictures of blossom. They wouldn’t have looked out place in a yoga studio next to a cabinet of green juices. They also seemed to evaporate when the Conservatives entered government.
Things have changed in the intervening decade. People understand – partly as a result of the pandemic – that wellbeing isn’t just important but is also a serious subject. But ensuring that it doesn’t suffer the same fate as it did under the Tories will be much harder work than staring down some eccentric hecklers.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of ‘The Spectator’ magazine. She writes a monthly column on health policy for i
