The NHS is standing up for itself about underfunding. About time too | Rachel Clarke

Perhaps tired of being the government’s whipping boy, the health service head, Simon Stevens, is speaking out. Jeremy Hunt should be worried

When the NHS excels, the government is only too keen to grab a slice of the glory. Manchester, Westminster, London Bridge, Grenfell. This year has been punctuated by acts of terror and disaster to which the NHS has stepped up magnificently – and ministers have flocked for their photo ops, like flies to nectar, full of gushing tributes and praise.

Only a fortnight ago, the prime minister described her “humbling gratitude” for the “incredible people” who staff the NHS when she visited the hospitals who cared for the victims of each of these atrocities. “In every instance,” she wrote in the Daily Mail, “what struck me was not only the medical expertise of the staff, but the compassion with which people were treated and the way the NHS, in an emergency, clicks into action.”

No more is Stevens colluding with Hunt in the fiction that the NHS is performing safely

Related: Hunt 'risking repeat of junior doctors row' with plan to change NHS pay

Continue reading... November 29, 2017 at 10:01PM