Stephen Hepburn: Tories are wrong about the NHS

Theresa May's disastrous two years in office have been defined by a series of U-turns and stumbling from one disaster to the next.

She’s failed on education when the Tories are depriving our children’s schools of money needed for teachers, books, desks and classrooms.

She’s wrong on her cruel dismantling of the welfare state when most poor people work and benefit cuts will empty the wage packets of the grafters.

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But what sticks in the throat even more is she’s horribly wrong on the National Health Service.

Her handling of the NHS has been nothing short of a disaster. Her smoke and mirrors pledge to invest an extra £20billion on our NHS in its 70th anniversary will fool nobody when she continues to run down our local South Tyneside Hospital.

It’s a ploy to hide the fact that she and her Government are hanging on by their fingernails in a weak and divided Government propped up by the DUP in a hung Parliament.

The extra funds May is promising does not hide the fact that since 2010 the Tories have underfunded the NHS with miserly annual budget increases of about one per cent each year compared to four per cent under the previous Labour Government.

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These cuts in part helped them to stuff the pockets of the filthy rich, who don’t need the NHS, with billions of pounds in tax cuts.

The Tory record of starving the NHS of funds screams at you and me that they still fundamentally do not believe in Labour’s greatest gift to the nation because it is the best example of socialism working in practice.

May’s supposed spending is way less than what NHS chiefs say they need and what Labour and Jeremy Corbyn are committed to when we are in Government.

Labour will do things better and will find the money needed by upping taxes not on decent grafters but on the highest earners and most profitable corporations.

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Rich individuals and wealthy corporations paying fair share would revive the NHS when saving health is central to Labour’s drive to transform a rigged economy into a country working for the many not the few.

Finally, if Theresa May and the Conservatives are serious about the NHS then they’d halt the cuts at South Tyneside Hospital.

It’s our NHS, not theirs. Let’s redouble the fight to save our hospital and call the bluff of Theresa May and the Tories. Don’t believe the hype. Our NHS is not safe in their hands.