There’s very little point to our political class right now. The response to the NHS crisis has been nothing if not tediously predictable. The government roused itself from its slumber to say, in turn, that there’s no problem, and anyway the problem is caused by feckless overusers of the NHS who show up at A&E with a broken nail.

Labour has shifted focus away from the NHS crisis. For what? | Owen Jones Read more

Meanwhile, MPs from both major parties had the switch flipped in their heads that makes them link everything to immigration, causing their jaws to mechanically flap open and say: “Well, Nigel Farage is basically right about everything but you should still vote for us because $ERROR (Reason not found, please restart your political process).”

Nadine Dorries tweeted: “It’s a reason why so many in northern Labour seats voted for #Brexit to stop spiralling levels of immigration and reduce pressure on #NHS”. It would be nice to think that Tories actually did care about “pressure on the NHS”. Just as it would be nice to think that when Labour politicians point out that immigration can have negative effects on the earnings of the low-waged, that their hearts really lie with the low-waged. But for that to be believable, we’d have to ignore the fact that the policy consensus on every other issue produces the opposite effect.

We keep hearing about “our ageing population” putting particular strain on health services in the winter months. You’d think a reasonable policy response, even before we look at the numbers of beds in NHS A&E departments, would be to increase and improve the provision of social care that would keep elderly patients out of hospital in the first place.

Yet George Osborne’s myopic focus on “reducing the deficit”, combined with David Cameron’s political cowardice in passing the responsibility for implementing those cuts on to local government, have put the social care sector “beyond the crisis point”. Hospitals are full of people who should not be there because the services which were supposed to act as first lines of defence no longer exist.

Add this to the expensive, top-down NHS reorganisation, which has seen a reduction in the number of hospital beds, and you are left with a situation in which the national provision of healthcare is simply inadequate to cope with peak demand.

Indeed, one of the issues with the way we approach the NHS politically, and the reason we see so many crises, is that we aim for “efficiency improvements” that cut vital services down to the bone, leaving providers with no slack capacity. If you want a system capable of dealing well in 95% of situations, you accept that it won’t cope 5% of the time. If you want a system that will cope with that 5% of peaks and outliers, you must accept that 95% of the time it will be “inefficient”. No amount of clever management can achieve the mathematically impossible.

Jeremy Hunt claims that the UK spends “a little bit more than the average for rich countries on our health services”. This is either a barefaced lie or a sign that he does not know what he is on about – and since he’s both smug and incompetent, it’s impossible to know which is true.

On a per-person-per-capita basis, the UK sits just over the OECD average for healthcare spending, which is not an average of “rich countries” by the standards most people would understand it, as it includes Mexico, Slovenia and Greece. If we were to take a broad metric of matching per-person healthcare spend with, say, France, that would result in an approximate boost of around 12%, another £12bn a year (this year, not in 2020). If we were to match spending with Germany, we’d be talking almost 36%, a year-on-year increase of over £35bn. These are broad and ballpark figures and there’s room to debate the specifics, but it’s a stark reminder of just how little we really spend on our health system.

Corbyn has been talking about these issues for months, perfectly setting himself up to take full advantage of this and show how he’s been playing a long game. Now in the midst of a crisis that is seeing people dying on trollies in hospital corridors, he’s decided to capitulate to the Andy Burnhams and Steven Kinnocks of the party. Even for Corbyn, this is something special. Yes, it is trivially true to say that the additional demand caused by immigrants using the NHS does not help the situation, just as throwing pebbles down after an avalanche doesn’t help. But it is absolutely unsupportable to suggest that immigration is either a causal or a significant contributor to the current crisis.

The truth is that immigration only has negative impacts on people when they are already in trouble. If you’re in an area where one job in McDonalds gets 6,000 applications, kicking out some Lithuanians won’t suddenly reinvigorate high-tech manufacturing.

The inconsistency exposes just how opportunistic the supposed “populism” of anti-migrant policies is. What’s worse is that the voters Labour is trying to win over with this ignorant blather don’t even believe them. They think they’re just putting it on to win votes. Labour are pushing a destructive line that scapegoats migrants and takes the pressure off a government which constantly demonstrates it is unfit for purpose. And the worst part of it all is it’s not even a good political strategy.

The only reason that migrant populations are even capable of putting pressure on our failing infrastructure is that it was failing before they got here. The “two-tier” “fair immigration” nonsense won’t fix the NHS, it won’t make wages higher in Stoke-on-Trent, and it won’t even win Labour the next election.

If our MPs really cared about these issues, they wouldn’t constantly try to pass the blame for their own failures on to people from other countries. They would hold their hands up, admit that they’ve been bungling it for decades, then get to work on the decades-long project of trying to fix their own mess. I’m not holding my breath.