National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Debate between Clive Efford and Dennis Skinner

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: the claim that this Government, whose top-down reorganisation has caused so much chaos in the national health service, are responsible for the standards of the NHS now is laughable. They claim to have turned the NHS around in a short space of time, but they are standing on the shoulders of the achievement of the previous Labour Government.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct, and another way of putting it is as follows: we dragged the national health service, between 1997 and 2010, from the depths of degradation that the Tories left it in and hoisted it back to the pinnacles of achievement. I have got a united nations heart bypass to prove it—it was done by a Syrian cardiologist, a Malaysian surgeon, a Dutch doctor and a Nigerian registrar, and these two people on the Bench behind me talk about sending them back. If you did that in the hospitals in London, half of Londoners would be dead in six months. Those are the facts about the United Kingdom Independence party.

[Clive Efford]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right.