So the health secretary’s speech was deliberately bland. He talked of his family’s public service background: elder brother was a teacher, another a policeman. He started in the machinery of government – as a civil servant. There was the obligatory reference to the NHS being safe in Tory hands. When it came to the reforms, the health secretary mentioned the independent health sector, not the private one. In short, there were no crowd-pleasers.
This is a deliberate lowering of the tone. In the past Lansley wanted to stir debate about his white paper, but ended up appearing a masochist in the process. Since the reforms came out Lansley has taken hits from every sniper’s vantage point in the NHS.
Nurses, doctors, management consultants and even the private sector have taken pot-shots at the cabinet minister. The whole process threatened to expose the health secretary as a man committed to subjecting himself to a series of unpleasant experiences.
This has alarmed the Tory high command, especially since the first act of Cameron’s leadership was to emphasise that the NHS would remain free at the point of use and patients seen on the basis of need. Jettisoned were rightwing plans to break up and privatise the state-run, taxpayer-funded NHS. This was an electorally popular public relations strategy, and it is one that Lansley is now returning to.
Perhaps the most surprising outcome of this is that the health secretary is emerging a truly post-partisan politician: a Tory who works with Lib Dems and says he is extending Blair/Brown reforms.
At a fringe meeting last night, Lansley said that in opposition he had outlasted four Labour secretaries of state. But from across the dispatch box he had learned the lessons of New Labour. John Reid, for example, was right on choice, he said – able to pinpoint that the “articulate and well-off” were able to negotiate the system, where the poor were not. More surprising was his praise for Gordon Brown, who “believed in competition in the NHS … [to create] best possible value for the state”.
What Lansley is attempting to do is present himself as a continuity politician and his white paper as an example of that. To insulate himself from attack, he will try to pose as the heir to Blair – and say that opponents of change are simply too conservative to reform themselves.
That is why, he will argue, you need the white paper. It’s a canny strategy, but the risk is that by co-opting New Labour as an ally in health, the current health secretary may end up with arguments that have passed their sell-by date.
The Guardian UK