Lord Darzi was a health minister when Gordon Brown was the Prime Minister. He produced his much anticipated report into the state of the NHS.
It doesn't really tell us anything that we didn't already know. The health of the nation has deteriorated. Spending is poorly distributed. Waiting times have become unsustainable. Cancer Care has declined. Austerity hit the NHS hard.
Yes, of course, we've inherited a situation that was worse than we thought, and there is a rising demand for healthcare which is put down solely to the ageing population.
Now off the back of this, Keir Starmer picked up and gave a very major speech today.
Nigel Farage claims Labour 'doesn't have the guts' to reform the NHS
GB News
This was the key line: "So it’s reform or die."
Now, of course, I agree with the sentiment reform or die, but let's talk about this in a context shall we, of the National Health Service.
Starmer goes on and talks about the fact that it's not working. And as I said at the start of this, we all know that.
No mention made at any point about the harm that lockdowns did, apologies from anybody in either party, actually, or anybody in the NHS, the fact we closed it down, the fact we stopped testing people for diabetes, for cancer, for much else, and that's one of the reasons why we've got this enormous backlog.
And absolutely zero mention of the fact that the population is now 10 million people bigger than it was when Tony Blair came to power.
It's as if we have these conversations, whether it's on housing, whether it's on health, whether it's on crime, and we've completely forgotten the impact that mass immigration and population growth has had on this country.
But I wonder just how radical is the Labour Party going to be. Now Wes Streeting the Health Secretary wrote a piece in The Times last year that I found really very, very encouraging.
But will his boss really let him put in place the reforms that are needed? Well, I don't think so.
And here's why, Starmer said this morning: "So the problem isn't that the NHS is the wrong model. It's the right model. It's just not taking advantage of the opportunities in front of it, and that's what we need to change."
Well, I don't agree with that. I think the model is wrong. I think the funding model is wrong. The principle of healthcare being free at the point of delivery, that's all anybody cares about. I don't think the Labour Party actually got the guts to do it.
