Wes Streeting

The right hon. Lady wants to compare experience. It took me three weeks to agree a deal with junior doctors—she had not even met them since March—and in the two and a half years that I was the shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, she was the fifth and among the worst. Does it not just tell us everything we need to know about the Conservatives’ priorities? She does not ask me what we are doing to cut waiting lists. She does not ask about the action we took to end strikes. She does not ask about the action that has been taken to hire a thousand GPs, who she left to graduate into unemployment. She has not asked me about the news on the front page of The Daily Telegraph that, on their watch, 50 years of health progress is in decline. And funnily enough, there was nothing on the news from The Observer this weekend that the NHS was hit harder than any other health service by the pandemic because it was uniquely exposed by a decade of Conservative neglect. Having broken the NHS, all they are interested in now is trying to tie this Government’s hands behand our back to stop us cleaning up their mess. What the right hon. Lady is implying in this question is that, as Health Secretary, she never sought the advice of people who did not work in her Department, which would explain quite a lot actually. I feel sorry for her, because when I need advice, I can call on any number of Labour Health Secretaries who helped deliver the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in history. But she never had that luxury, because every single one of her Conservative predecessors left NHS waiting lists higher than where they found them—except, of course, for Thérèse Coffey, who was outlasted by a lettuce. In fact, it says a lot about the modern Conservative party’s anti-reform instincts that the right hon. Lady is so opposed to Alan Milburn. They used to hug him close when they were cosplaying as new Labour. Andrew Lansley even asked whether Alan Milburn would chair the new clinical commissioning board that his top-down reorganisation created, although Alan sensibly turned him down and labelled the reorganisation “the biggest car crash” in the history of the NHS, which just goes to prove that Alan Milburn has sound judgment and is worth listening to. But if the right hon. Lady wants to lead with her chin and talk cronyism, let us talk cronyism. Why do we not talk about Owen Paterson lobbying Health Ministers on behalf of Randox? The Conservatives care so much about cronyism that they welcomed Lord Cameron back with open arms following his paid lobbying for Greensill. For reasons of ongoing court cases, let us not even get into Baroness Mone and the £200 million contract for personal protective equipment. Where was the right hon. Lady during those sorry episodes? Cheering on that Government and presiding over a record of abysmal failure that has put them on the other side of the Chamber. This Government are having to rebuild not only the public services that the Conservatives broke and the public finances they raided, but the trust in politics that they destroyed. We will put politics back into the service of working people and rebuild all three. Clearly, we will have to do it without the support of the Conservative party’s one- nation tradition, who are not even running and have abandoned their flag. It is clear that the Conservatives have not learned a thing from the defeat they were subjected to on 4 July, and we will get on with the business of clearing up their mess.