Boris Johnson on NHS ‘reforms’ (July 2000): where is the toast?
Boris Johnson has announced a new Health and Social Care tax to help fund the NHS. I don’t have any issue with the NHS being funded by taxes but of course Johnson is proposing one where the least well off will pay proportionally more than the better off. As he would.
The tax would not be required in the first place if the Tories had not spent the last 10 years cutting the NHS.
Johnson also said that the pandemic was not in his Manifesto. A rare true statement. However it should have been because Government planning for just such an eventuality took place the mid-2010s and the Tory did little to implement changes.
Johnson while rightly praising the NHS for his COVID care last year is not someone who has made to say on it down the years.
An exception was at his selection meeting to become Tory candidate (and then MP) for Henley on 13th July 2000. He was asked what his plans were for NHS reform? His answer was to refer to an incident when his then partner Marina Wheeler had been in hospital. He had eaten some toast she had been provided with while she was sleeping. He then complained there wasn’t more for her when she woke up. He went on to argue that this was a key reason to reform the NHS. His biographer Sonia Purnell (Just Boris) notes that this did not go down well with some of the Tory members present.
The reception for Johnson’s latest effort at NHS reform has been much worse.
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