Julie Ann Claxton(nee Carey)

"Our plan for the NHS is working." That was the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, this week, announcing that the NHS waiting list had fallen by 515,000 since Labour took office in July 2024. There's a small problem with the figure - well, a large one, actually; no problem with Labour is ever a small one. According to data uncovered earlier this year, NHS England has been paying hospital trusts £33 per patient removed from the waiting list under "validation exercises". Between April and September 2025 alone, NHS England paid trusts £18.8 million for this work. That is roughly 570,000 patients removed in six months. In January 2026, the trusts struck a quarter of a million more off in a single month. The patients removed include those who chose to go private rather than wait, those who failed to respond to a text message, and those who died waiting. The half-million reduction in the waiting list since Labour took office is, on the arithmetic, fully accounted for by the validation deletions. But no one is getting treated. You know this. You've seen things in your NHS ward stand blandly still across this whole period. You've probably heard Streeting crow this nonsense and thought "Well, it's not bloody working for me, I'm still waiting." That's because, to our Health Secretary (and, unbelievably, perhaps our future PM), you, the patient, are but a mere incidental data point, my dear, and if Labour can pay NHS hospitals to delete your name from a list you belong on to serve themselves, they will. Rishi Sunak's government, to just about the only morsel of credit it it could reasonably command, actually vetoed an identical scheme on the grounds not that it was fundamentally dishonest but that it was paying the NHS for "doing something it should be doing anyway" and "artificially reducing" the waiting list. It merely illustrates a principle with which almost every voter in Britain is now familiar. As bad as the Tories were, Labour are even worse; for the voter, for the NHS, and for everything and everyone else.