The Conservative party is in touch with the concerns of everyday NHS users and the professionals who keep the service running. That, at least, is the message of the party’s new health policy paper, The Right To Choose. Indeed, in his introduction, Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley explains that ‘you will read interviews with hard-working doctors and nurses that paint a graphic picture of the stress that the NHS is being put under today’.
But are these interviews all they seem?
Jim Thornton, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Nottingham University, is quoted explaining why NHS targets have to go. However, Professor Thornton is hardly an objective observer. As the document notes, he is also the Conservative party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Nottingham East at the next general election.
Furthermore, Dr Thornton sits on the steering committee of Doctors for Reform, which describes itself as ‘an independent, non-party group, which believes that the time has come to look at new ways to supply and fund healthcare’. Doctors for Reform, far from being independent, is in fact a front organisation for the Reform think-tank, which seeks to introduce a market-based framework into a wide range of public services. Reform advocates an insurance-based system of healthcare funding, and while the organisation claims to be cross-party, its director, Nick Herbert, is a former Conservative parliamentary candidate and was previously chief executive of the anti-euro group Business for Sterling.
Nor does Professor Thornton confine himself to commenting on health issues. He is also heavily involved in an organisation called iConservatives, which promotes individualist, free market ideology. Writing for iConservatives, he has expressed opinions on a wide range of issues, including opposition to the euro and sympathy for the views of the murdered far-right politician Pim Fortyn.
Other interviewees have undeclared links to the Conservative Party. Adrian Johnson is described in The Right To Choose as a ‘nurse in Hampshire’. In fact, he is also a Conservative councillor for the Harefield ward in Southampton, and acts as the party’s education spokesman in the city. Likewise, Geoffrey Rushbrook, an NHS patient interviewed in the document is coincidentally a Tory councillor in St Edmundsbury’s Kedington ward. A further interviewee is David Dandy, a retired knee surgeon whose private practice is still advertised on a number of private hospital websites.
The most mysterious of the interviewees is a Manchester GP described only as ‘Dr Ahmed’. After some background research, it transpires that he is in fact Dr Amar Rauf Ahmed, who stood as a Conservative candidate in this year’s elections to Manchester City Council. Not only that, but Dr Ahmed operates a private clinic, Manchester Independent Family Doctors, which is dedicated to giving children single vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella. The clinic charges parents £460 for all six jabs required to complete the treatment. In 2002, as reported in the Manchester Evening News on 15 Febuary, the clinic was ejected from its premises at the Whalley Grange Bupa Hospital because of Bupa concerns that it was breaching department of health guidelines by administering the vaccines to children in separate doses. The clinic has since moved premises and is still operating – indeed, at the time that Bupa asked the clinic to move, they claimed to have 200 families on their waiting list.
Yet despite all of this readily available information about the interviewees, the only one whose connection to the Conservative party is highlighted is Professor Thornton, whose involvement is given only the briefest of mentions. The others are presented as ordinary health service users and patients. Nowhere does it mention that the interviewees have an interest in the electoral success of the Conservative party, and nowhere does it mention that at least two of them have either advocated or would profit directly from the expansion of private healthcare. Is this what the Tories mean by being in touch?