Blair comes out fighting on the NHS
Prime Minister Tony Blair today told Labour activists they faced a “fight for the future” in the upcoming election as he attacked the Conservatives’ record in government and their healthcare policies.
He said it was “disgusting” to hear the Conservatives claim the NHS had not improved under Labour’s management, and called their leader Michael Howard a “serial opportunist”.
Speaking to a Scottish Labour Party conference, the Prime Minister told activists: “The fight is on. It’s a fight for the future of Britain, it’s a fight between us and them – I mean Labour and Tory.
“And the Tory plan is clear. Get their support out, spread as much disillusionment and cynicism as they can, run down Britain, try to depress our vote.”
Referring indirectly to the political storm over pensioner Margaret Dixon, whose case has been taken up by the Conservatives after it was revealed she had had an operation on her shoulder cancelled seven times, he said: “Yesterday, the Tories took their campaign to the National Health Service.
“They used the case of someone in pain and trying to make a symbol of today’s National Health Service to tell Britain that the money the country voted to go into the NHS and that the Tories voted against has all been wasted, that it has all been spent on bureaucracy, that the case they highlighted has not been the exception but the rule . that’s their plan and today as I speak to you about it, I feel anger.”
Mr Blair claimed hundreds of thousands of people had waited more than nine months for appointments and that hospital building programmes had “ground to a halt” under the Conservatives.
“To say our National Health Service today is worse than it was in those years, to see Michael Howard . take the case of someone in pain and use it to run down and denigrate our National Health Service, should make any right-thinking person turn away in disgust,” he said.
He urged people to trust their own experiences of health services when deciding whether the NHS had improved under Labour, and not to judge it on “one case being ruthlessly exploited by a serial opportunist”.
Promising that public services would be centre stage in the election battleground, Mr Blair said the Conservatives’ planned £35 billion cut in public spending would inevitably end in cuts to frontline services.
“That £35 billion cuts pledge will haunt them every day of the campaign,” he promised.
In a final call to activists, he said much had been achieved in the past eight years, but there was still more to do. For example, on pensions he told his audience: “Since 1997, we’ve lifted two million pensioners out of poverty, but [we must] fight for a future in which no elderly pensioner lives in poverty.”
