Wes Streeting. (Parliament)
Gay Labour MP Wes Streeting has predicted that the Conservative party is “planning to lose the next general election”.
Earlier this month, the Tory government said it would be sticking to a cap on medical student places, despite the NHS facing a severe shortage of healthcare staff.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020 and 2021, the government lifted the cap, but said that this year it will be reintroduced.
In an interview with the The Telegraph, Streeting said that the cap was proof that the Conservative party has “concluded there’s no point recruiting medicine trainees because they’re not going to come into work until there’s a Labour government in place”.
He added that turning away “bright young people from university places they desperately want to take up” was “recklessly shortsighted”.
Wes Streeting accuses Liz Truss of being ‘dishonest’ about future of NHS
As the Conservative party prepares to name its new leader and Britain’s next prime minister on Monday (5 September), Labour leader Keir Starmer is also preparing to lay out his “roadmap” for the UK at the Labour Party Conference later this month.
Wes Streeting is confident that Labour can deliver vital NHS reforms, and accused Tory leadership hopeful Liz Truss of being “dishonest” about the NHS’s future.
Truss has promised to rescue the NHS with bizarre policies, including encouraging healthcare workers to come out of retirement and return to work in the NHS without “unnecessary” training schemes, while diverting billions of pounds worth of funds into social care.
But Streeting said: “There’s no doubt in my mind – and this is why Liz Truss is being dishonest with the public – that there isn’t a fix to the NHS crisis that doesn’t involve more investment.”
Streeting, who last year underwent NHS treatment for kidney cancer, said: “We can’t let our reverence [for the NHS] prevent us from making the changes that are needed.
“There will always be people in the system who say, ‘But that’s not how we do things’.
“I want to work with the system rather than to fight the system. But, ultimately I’ll always do what’s in the best interest of patients.”