There’s a great temptation for an opposition leader to give answers praising motherhood and apple pie when taking part in a Q&A with members of the public. Especially when that session marks the start of your party’s conference season and your party has set out very few formal policies so far.
But Ed Miliband today, as well as announcing crowd pleasers on energy and pensions, caused a bit of a stir by accepting that a Labour government would not ‘spend another’ £3 billion dismantling the frameworks created by the Government’s Health and Social Care Act.
He said:
‘There’s no more important institution that expresses, I think, the real soul of the country than the NHS, because I think it expresses a whole set of values which I think the British people share in common. On the Bill, let me give you a direct answer: I think what would be not sensible is for us to come along and say, ‘well, Andrew Lansley, now Jeremy Hunt, they’re changing all the arrangements, have these new clinical commissioning groups and so on, and we’re just going to reverse it all back and spend another £3bn on another top-down bureaucratic organisation’.
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