Rebecca Long-Bailey: The Labour Party I will lead will fight for aspirational socialism It’s how we will win

i approached all three Labour leadership candidates to pitch to our readers.

Lisa Nandy’s piece can be found here.

Keir Starmer will write next week.

Britain’s greatest institution is also its most socialist. In poll after poll, the NHS wins out as our people’s favourite institution. It plays such a central role in our national identity that if Bruce Springsteen were British, he would probably sing “born in the NHS”.

Yes, the NHS is under pressure, forcing staff to go above and beyond. It needs more support through increased funding and kicking out the privatisers. But, still, clearly, the model works. So we should look to apply it to more of the challenges of our time.

i's opinion newsletter: talking points from today Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription.

We love the NHS because it’s ours; we built it together these past 70 odd years. But it’s also because it gives us the freedom not to worry that we’ll go bankrupt if we get ill, like many Americans are forced to a year. That individual freedom makes us all safer. If you think you might have coronavirus, you can just get tested; in the US, that could set you back thousands of dollars.

The NHS model is efficient. Rather than trying to buy healthcare as individuals with limited information or bargaining power, we do it collectively, with lots of information and power. That’s why medicines are on average two and a half times cheaper here than in the US.

And the NHS model is fair. We all pay in through a progressive taxation system and we all get the service. I believe that we should make our taxation system more progressive, with all earnings above £125,000 taxed at 50 per cent. We all benefit from the society we’ve collectively built so we should all give back to it, according to our ability to pay.

That’s not up for debate. The question now is how can we expand this model to meet our contemporary challenges.

I’m a socialist, so I always look for the social case for a policy, but as the Shadow Business Secretary I always look for the economic case, too. A good policy satisfies both, which is what applying the NHS model to children’s mental health, adult social care and a publicly owned medicines company would do. We could save money by tackling the huge crises in mental health and social care and widen access to vital medicines.

The social case for action on children’s mental health is obvious and growing at an alarming rate. One in eight children were diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder in 2017, 60 per cent of teachers believe they’ve taught a child who was self-harming and over 100,000 children referred to a mental health specialist in 2017 did not receive treatment. And while local authorities and the NHS provide services, they are under serious strain. Nearly 60 per cent of local authorities have seen a fall in low level mental health services and in 2017 approximately 185,784 young people were referred to specialists NHS CAMHS services yet only 78,847 received support.

The economic case for expanding mental health provision is likewise clear: not doing anything is costing us billions, with the OECD suggesting mental ill health costs £94billion per year, while a source quoted by the Department of Health estimates £105billion.

So we should roll out a national young people’s mental health service, which we could more than pay for by reversing Tory tax cuts to bankers, which cost us well over £1billion per year. For less than £1billion per year, we could have a fully trained mental health counsellor in every secondary school, visits to every primary school by a fully trained professional at least once a week, and set up a network on safe and welcoming mental health support hubs in every local authority.

Likewise on social care for our older people, we have the crisis of 1.4 million older people not getting the care they need. Instead of forcing people into a life lottery, where if they get dementia, they could lose everything, we should pool our risks. So we should work towards a National Care Service that provides a service that is genuinely universal and enables independent living for all. But creating such a service is highly complicated, so while we do it, we should immediately fund free personal care for older people, as an immediate first step.

Another way we can build on the NHS model to get better outcomes and save money is in medicines. Through the collective purchasing power of the NHS, we already are able to keep drug prices lower than in many other countries, but there are still vital drugs that are too costly or not being made available. If we were able to manufacture our own generic drugs or support specific areas of medicine development where the existing costs are high, we could improve health outcomes and reduce costs.

We created the NHS over 70 years ago. It works and we love it. It’s time to make the common sense case to expand that principle in the interests of everyone, so people’s hopes and dream can be secured through solidarity – that’s aspirational socialism.

That’s the Labour Party I want to lead. One that applies our values and lessons from the victories of the past to contemporary challenges, fighting for an aspirational socialist society where everyone can achieve their hopes and dreams. That’s not just the right thing to do, it’s how we’ll win.

Rebecca Long-Bailey is the Labour MP for Salford and Eccles and is running to be leader of the Labour Party.