Nigel Farage has responded to today’s British Attitudes Survey showing the lowest ever satisfaction for the NHS by asking if 'now is the time we can actually have a proper debate about how we reform the National Health Service’
Speaking on GB News, Nigel Farage said: “The first show I did for GB News was on the 21st July 2021 and the first sentence I uttered was that I felt that public confidence in the National Health Service was about to fall off a cliff.
“Well goodness gracious me, I got that one right.
“The British Social Attitudes survey published this morning shows that now, when asked the question, ‘Do you have confidence in the NHS’, the figure has fallen to 24 percent.
“And that actually is astonishing when you put it in this context. That is that in 2010, people who answered yes to that question was 70 per cent.
“Confidence has completely fallen off a cliff. Part of it, of course, is getting access to GP services. Much of it is to do with a waiting list for procedures of 7.6 million people.
“And there are some areas such as mental health where the numbers have simply gone into the stratosphere.
“So we have a very, very major problem: this institution that the late Nigel Lawson once said was the nearest thing we genuinely have to a state religion, suddenly, attitudes are different.
“Yet, when the public are asked, would they be prepared to pay more taxes to put more money into the NHS? About half of people still say, yes, just keep pumping in more money.
“What's not really fully understood and what I've tried to tell you before, is that five years ago we were spending about 7.5 percent of our gross domestic product on the National Health Service. We're now spending over 10 per cent.
“So we're pumping in more and more money. And yes, of course, we have an exploding population and we've discussed the reasons for that many times before.
“But we're pumping in more and more money and yet becoming more and more dissatisfied. So how do we turn this around? Can it be turned around? Can it get better?
“Any maybe, just maybe, if the figure has gone from 70 percent to 24 percent maybe now is the time we can actually have a proper debate about how we reform the National Health Service.”
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