Tory health policy is confused and contradictory: so why do they want to talk about it?

I don’t know why the Conservatives released their NHS manifesto yesterday. Can they really want people to read it? Do they think that’s a good idea? I’m not sure it is, you know.

Granted, there’s the promise of a free health pony to every sick kid in the country and plenty of nice-sounding stuff about decentralisation and patients’ rights and accountability and all the rest of it. But there’s also, as I suppose might be expected, an awful lot of “we will” and very little “this is how we will” accomplish all these goals. For instance: “We will give people access to a doctor or nurse when the local family doctor’s surgery isn’t open:. Sounds useful! But how are you going to do this? And doesn’t requiring this – and dozens of other reforms – actually demonstrate the extent to which top-down planning and the setting of targets will continue to be the rule, not the exception?

Some of those plans and targets might well be sensible but they do rather contradict the idea of local control.