It tells us the Conservative Party feels confident enought to have internal debates about policy. It tells us that they are not afraid to do this in public (albeit the existence of say David Davis or Douglas Carswell suggest they were happy to do this before anyway…). What will be interesting is to see if the Conservative leadership are happy to debate straight back again.

Are you telling me that every Labour Party MP agrees with all of Mr Milliband’s policies and declarations? Because if so, there may be a point here. And if so, I just saw a winged porcine beast outside the window.

I think more damning is this:

I met just such a “bureaucrat” recently and it was clear that he will be staying because he knows that without some experienced guidance and continuity, the consortia are doomed to fail and will have to hand over their commissioning to the private sector. An organisation responsible for over £100billion needs people who seriously understand accountancy and, trust me, GPs do not.

I have heard this many times. Either Lansley is an idiot who does not know what he is doing, or he has designed the system to fail so that he can replace the NHS with something else. It is unclear at the moment what Lansley expects would happen when the system fails. The private sector are currently suffering from the recession with some US companies pulling out of the UK altogether.

It is high risk, people’s lives are at stake.

They can come out against their own party but it won’t change anything. The only people who can change it is the public. If both can come out and support the public then their words will be seen as also action rather than just words.

Yes what Lansley maybe doing is creative destruction of the NHS so in the end it leads up to a privatised service, something the Tory party have always wanted since it’s inception.

Are NHS “reforms” subject to a free vote?

@ Richard Blogger

Either Lansley is an idiot who does not know what he is doing, or he has designed the system to fail so that he can replace the NHS with something else

The latter. An insurance-based system. In fact I’d add New Labour paved the way. Look how much of trhe ridiculous Connecting for Health waste was on ‘transaction’ tracking, rather than clinically-necessary data. A cynic might say that that was the use of vast amounts of public money to pay for an IT infrastructure to suit the private sector.

The national social insurance schemes for healthcare costs function well in most other west European countries when assessed in terms of patient outcomes – such as relative cancer survival rates compared with the UK – as well as patient satisfaction.

The UK comes quite well down the global league table of life expectancy at birth – with America even lower despite the high spending on healthcare there compared with the other affluent OECD countries.

the “set up an unworkable system guaranteed to fail” approach is also higher ed policy – they’re intentionally making the state system unworkable so unis go fully private…

A third to add to the list of Conservative MPs criticising government in areas where they are expert – Helen Grant MP was a legal aid solicitor before being elected in 2010, and wrote a powerful piece arguing against government’s proposed reforms to legal aid in the Guardian a couple of months ago. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/02/legal-aid-last-line-defence

She said: “These proposals could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, effectively dismantling an established infrastructure which achieves an amazing amount with very little.”