Andy Burnham speech on the NHS

Andy Burnham speech on the NHS; ENGLAND: London:INTAndy Burnham MP (Shadow Health Secretary) speech SOT**Speech transcript: please check against delivery**- When people look back, this could turn out to be no ordinary summer for the NHS. In just over two weeks, a group of mums from Darlington will set out from the North East, retracing the steps of the Jarrow marchers.The People’s March for the NHS aims to raise awareness about, in their words, “the Government’s assault on our most prized possession”.It remains to be seen whether it catches the public mood.But I think it might.There is growing anxiety about where the NHS is heading – and anger that people have never voted for such changes.Four years ago this month, Andrew Lansley published his ‘Liberating the NHS’ White Paper.I can remember the shock I felt when I turned through its pages.Just weeks before, I had spoken alongside Lansley at many hustings events and heard him promise no top-down re-organisation.And then this – the biggest bombshell ever to land on the NHS.He had clearly been drawing up these plans in Opposition, with the help of the private health care company which funded his office, but chose not to tell the voters.When they hit the light of day, the problem wasn’t just the danger of a distracting reorganisation when the NHS should have been focusing on the financial challenge – and all the inherent risks to patient care.What was more breathtaking was the sheer audacity of the plan to treat the NHS as another utility to be broken up and privatised.Who had voted for this?Today I want to show what has happened to the NHS in the four years since the biggest reorganisation in its history began.Not with assertions, but evidence.I will then go on to show how that analysis of where the NHS is heading frames the huge choice before the country at next year’s election.At this election, unlike the last, there ...