Jhe sound and fury of the sordid scramble to lead the evil party ignores all real crises. The burning planet is nowhere on the agenda except for the confinement of climate protesters. As the wage crisis heads into mighty strikes as the public sector falls even further behind private wages, their remedies are agency scabs and tax cuts that reward the most. the best off.

But strangest of all is that so little is said about the NHS gasping on a life machine, despite it looming large on voters’ minds. A devastating report from the Commons health and social care select committee reveals ‘the biggest workforce crisis’ in its history, with long waiting lists caused by a shortage of 105,000 doctors, nurses , midwives and others.

The current cabinet may dismiss this as a revenge grenade from committee chairman Jeremy Hunt after his rejection in the leadership race. But the sheer scale of the exposed staffing shortages is so gigantic that there’s no denying what voters themselves can see. In the future, the situation is rapidly worsening: with a growing and aging population, 475,000 additional clinical staff and 490,000 additional social staff will be needed over the next decade.

When Tory Essex’s biggest hospital trust says its cancer waiting list is ‘unmanageable’ and ambulances stuck outside hospitals across the country fail to reach heart attack and stroke cases stroke, it looks like a service sinking under a backlog of defeats. No wonder the number of patients raising money to buy one-time private treatments has increased 39% since before the pandemic. It doesn’t help that the government claims Covid is over, when the rare joint editorial by the editors of the British Medical Journal and the Health Service Journal raises the alarm that weekly hospital admissions of Covid-positive patients in England have has averaged 9,000 so far this year – compared with an average of under 6,000 last year and under 7,000 in 2020 – and with more than 28,000 deaths.

Politically, Covid has descended into the Tory’s culture war: To say the NHS fails to ‘live with Covid’ is to say Brexit doesn’t work. Yet having so many beds occupied by Covid patients means that the waitlist backlog targets are further behind, and there are an estimated 2 million people living with long Covid United Kingdom. But says Alastair McLellan, the editor of the HSJ, the government is “pretending that Covid no longer exists”.

As for the hoax, in Boris Johnson’s bizarre statement about his achievements in the House of Commons last week, he dared to include the NHS: ‘more doctors and around 30,000 more nurses’ (although far too few) and “the start of Britain’s biggest hospital building scheme” (with cash for its mythical 40 new hospitals). This week’s Sunday Times editorial is a stark example of the conservative thinking of the NHS He admits the crisis, but says the cause is that ‘successive governments have dodged real reform of the NHS’ This ignores David Cameron’s disastrous and costly fragmentation ‘reform’, qualified as the then head of the NHS of ‘big enough to be seen from space.’ Are they oblivious to the Tories’ second almighty NHS Reform Act now underway, revamping everything into integrated care systems?

But ‘reform’ is Torydom’s coded and perennial NHS threat, never spelling out what they mean because voters wouldn’t like it. The salient point of this editorial is that money is not the answer, but this untruth needs to be skewered: “The New Labor era has shown us that pouring money into the top of the NHS funnel does not work.” Yet deprived of money since 2010, the NHS is failing like never before. In 2010 Labor bequeathed an NHS with its lowest ever waiting times, highest patient satisfaction, lowest reliance on private operations and yes, it has almost reached the spending levels of the EU, according to John Appleby, director of research at the Nuffield Trust. Today, France has 11% more doctors per capita and Germany 48% more, and virtually all EU countries have more beds.

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss claim that the past is another country. But they can’t whitewash the story: they voted for the austerity spending and training cuts that caused this crisis. Sunak says he will put the NHS on a “war footing”, with a “backlog task force” to set even tougher wait time targets than were already badly missed before the pandemic. He tells the Daily Express that patients will be entitled to have a designated family doctor if they want one rather than just being tied down to surgery, a fantasy he cannot believe, since Hunt told him truths about medical staff, including 6,000 GPs missing and numbers still falling.

Hunt tells me that when Sunak was Chancellor he showed him how underfunding training is a false economy when £6billion a year is wasted on substitutes to fill vacancies. But Sunak was adamant in refusing to authorize an independent workforce plan for future NHS staffing, for the usual Treasury reasons: stating the numbers would force the Treasury to fund NHS needs. Hunt admits that as health secretary he failed training. We now have a health secretary, Stephen Barclay, who belongs to the ‘NHS is a bottomless pit’ school of punishment.

A strong economic case for funding the NHS came from research of Financial Times data last week. Why has Britain alone lost so many of our workforce, which we urgently need to increase growth and productivity? The number corresponds to people of working age with chronic conditions who are waiting for surgery – a number not found in other countries, according to the FT. Long wait times hurt the economy.

So what would Labor do when there is no immediate remedy for the past 12 years of damage? Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, tells me he will immediately launch massive training programs for future NHS staff: many qualified candidates are applying to train. But it takes years to show results. An urgent need is to prevent the departure of so many exhausted personnel; seeing help on the horizon is a milestone. As a purely temporary measure until more consultants are trained, it would relax the retirement rules that are causing many people in their 50s to quit: it’s costly, until a new group of valuable doctors be trained.

But the fastest way to increase capacity is to free up NHS beds stuck due to lack of social care. Labour’s promised National Care Service would train care staff on the same career path and pay levels as the NHS, stemming the alarming flight of care workers – 50,000 more left last year. This would treat valuable caregivers as they deserve. I joined Citizens UK who were demonstrating last week in front of big care companies, all reaping bigger profits than before the pandemic, while paying staff below the actual living wage. One by one, social workers recounted their struggles with miserable pay, even though “you applauded us”. And yet Tory leadership favorite Liz Truss is reportedly giving £30billion in tax cuts to the wealthy. This money would go a long way towards the NHS and paying for social care.