Newspaper Column – The Cornishman – 17/03/25

• The Prime Minister is right that much of what both NHS England and the Dept. of Health do is avoidable duplication. Shrinking and amalgamating these bureaucracies and releasing more money for frontline staff and patient services is common sense.  

Conservatives left our NHS in its worst crisis in history. The new government’s proposal is a small, but important step on the road to recovery. Our Health Select Committee will question Health Sec. Wes Streeting on this in a few weeks’ time. 

I well remember leading the protest from our benches against the then Health Sec, Andrew Lansley and his damaging Health Act, which created NHSE in 2012. But there’s much more to do to restore both our NHS and social care services. 

 

• We should instead invest to save. The government’s preparing the ground to slash disability benefits by around £5bn. That bill would come down on its own if the government invested to support disabled people; to enable those who can, get back to work. The welfare bill rose unsustainably while the last government left our health and care systems spiral into decline. Earlier diagnosis, cutting treatment waiting times and provision of support is essential to reduce benefit dependency.  

 

• It was disappointing to hear Health Sec. Wes Streeting resort to dog-whistle politics when he implied that some mentally ill are the snowflake products of “overdiagnosis”.  

However, his assertions ignore that our broken health and care systems add not only to the likelihood of adverse diagnosis, but also a worsening of condition of the mentally unwell. Evidenced by a significant increase in suicide. It’s not a matter to belittle.  As Brian Dow, of Rethink Mental Illness, said: ”The crisis in the nation’s mental health is very real and while we do need to distinguish between mental health problems which are common and moderate and give people the right support to ensure their health is not an obstacle to work, no one is in receipt of welfare benefits for a mental health condition who has not been diagnosed by an qualified health care professional.” 

 

• Last week’s government agency report on nano plastics should concern us all. Nanoplastics are 100 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, and are polluting our environment and food, and are now found in human blood, lungs, placenta, and even breast milk. For example, it’s estimated that microwaving food in plastic containers for 3 minutes could release as much as 4 billion nanoplastic particles from just one square centimetre of plastic. Provisional research of impact on human brains is especially concerning.  

Nanoplastics are so incredibly small they slip through our internal membranes and lodge in our brains potentially contributing to rising neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It’s probably impossible to clean up our world from these pollutants. But we can and should act now to avoid making the situation even worse.