John McDonnell, Labour's shadow chancellor, defeated George Osbourne in the House of Lords. McDonnell wants to abolish the House of Lords. Ho, hum!
Labour, without a social welfare policy, has holed Tory policy beneath the water-line. Ouch!
Meuse for a moment; a scenario where the public get so fed up with the whole shebang that they'll vote ABCm... Anyone But Cameron's mate. Austerity takes its toll and Osbourne becomes the Treasury version of Andrew Lansley.
'Corbyn is responsible for El Ni�o'. 'Corbyn ate my hamster'. It's not gonna work. Forget the spin. The next election will be a battle of ideas.
The Tory gamble that the economy will come right, may come unstuck.
The EU is going down the toilet; disagreements over migration and borders. Shengen gets shredded, a Franco-Italian-German alliance splits the Union. Balkan states make their own arrangements and move closer to the Ukraine. Mediterranean countries reintroduce their own currencies; devalue like mad, we all go on cheap holidays and make them rich!
In the meantime, the pound becomes so strong no one can export a box of matches and we're back in Austerity Street. Electors say time for a change.
Labour have swapped leaders, Mili-Major storms home and their health policy is.... well... err... Let's have a think. This is tricky; they won't want a huge Bill and parliamentary palaver.
How about some easy, high profile stuff; restrict car parking charges to cost recovery only. Visitors for patients over 65yrs... exempt from charges. Make all trips to hospital, by bus, free. Dump prescription charges, scrap the panoply of admin required to collect them. Reintroduce a proper school nurse service to every school. Put cooking and home economics back on the curriculum for boys and girls.
Tougher stuff; require every care home to have HCA mandatory, in-post training on a SEN curriculum and one qualified nurse to every 6 residents, on every shift. Scrap OOHs, give the money to the Trusts and let them provide cover.
Reduce the CCGs to 10 and call them strategic health authorities. Dump commissioning, switch to vertical integration and develop population based, capitated budgets. Fund health economies, not organisations.
Go back to the DH running the show; park Monitor with a desk out someplace like Micklewallop. Pay PFI back centrally. Dump the market; go back to AQP where appropriate.
Scrap targets; publish performance figures for benchmarking and comparison. Close the CQC; set up Trust audit-families, arrange 'See, Speak and Share' visits... focussing on what good looks like.
Merge social elder-care with health. Create a 'silver service'; a sub-ministry for health and aging. Issue 'Silver Bonds' for people and their families to syndicate, prepare and fund the cost of their relatives later years. Money in and money out tax free. Allow capital assets to be pledged and at the end, make unused funds exempt from inheritance tax.
Yes, lots of loopholes but that's the idea; make it very tax attractive to save for old age.
And, what about a 'national conversation' culminating in a referendum; committing future governments to baseline health spending at the OECD, or whatever, average.
Whack a bigger tax on fags. Tax sugar at the refinery or when imported. There is a neat instrument called the 'Inter-Professional Agreement' that could be remodelled to include a source-tax.
Move incentives to early intervention for mental health, public health and health education.
Dump Trust Boards; elect hospital chief executives every five years. Move all GPs onto a franchise model; just like McDonalds. They pay for the right to use the NHS brand. No doctor can hold more than five franchises and force up-scaling; each franchise must employ 30 doctors.
Barmy? You couldn't make it up. Actually, I did!
Seriously, what would Labour health policy look like? We might have a chance to find out and at the same time have a peep behind the curtain and see what really happened when the Health and Social Care Act was grinding through the Lords.
This is one not to be missed.
