Starmer’s NHS reforms are a promising if limited start to revolution required to drag it into 21st century
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THE NHS reforms announced yesterday are a promising if limited start to the revolution required to drag a system designed for 1948 into the 21st Century. It is depressing to think that diagnostic tests being made available locally 12 hours a day, seven days a week represent a giant leap forward — but that is where we are.
![[Sir Keir Starmer has set out his plans for the NHS]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/POLITICS-Health-10523823jpg-JS961931060.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
Meanwhile expanding the role of private hospitals in our state system is a breakthrough we have urged for years. It is a tad jarring to hear Keir Starmer announce that in this respect the NHS “must be totally unburdened by dogma”. Only last year he said he and his family would never, under any circumstances, go private.
![[NHS reforms are the first step in dragging the service into the 21st Century]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2RWKF32jpg-JS901089048.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
Indeed the very word “private” triggered a murderous rage in Labour’s ranks in opposition. It proved, they shrieked, that the wicked Tories would “sell our NHS to Trump”. Good luck, then, to Sir Keir with all that dogma-shedding — not least among the dogma lovers of the health unions which bankroll his party.
![[Tulip Siddiq has referred herself to the Government’s sleaze watchdog]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2017-hampstead-kilburn-mps-comments-369895228.jpg?strip=all&w=639)
Their unbending belief in endlessly increased NHS funding will be the hardest to break. Already there are calls for billions more on top of the £22billion extra in the Budget . . . as if that will magically fix anything when productivity has collapsed.
![[Half a billion was paid in benefits to the dead]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/crop-30027176.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
When the PM says the NHS is “becoming” a money pit, he’s a few decades late. That aside, waiting lists — for tests through to ops — are a disaster and Labour promised us radical change. This is a first step we welcome. IF a Tory anti-corruption minister was being probed for corruption, Labour would have obsessed over it 24/7.
