I confess to having no instinctive empathy with the views and policies of our current Government but hope that I have the integrity to acknowledge that all sides of the political spectrum are capable of having ideas that can strengthen and sustain the life of our nation. However at a time of financial pressure, waste and a loss of momentum in social provision is even more obscene than in times of plenty. 

I spent this morning in a meeting listening to accounts of the new mechanisms and processes that are being put into place in parts of Sussex to replace the Primary Care Trusts that this Government has decided to replace. Andrew Lansley and many on the Government front bench are clearly very gifted and intelligent people. He claims to have been thinking and planning for change in our health system for many years and it is clear that the Conservative Party don’t lack resources (human or financial) to enable their ideas to be tested and developed away from the place where peoples lives can be damaged by ill thought through concepts. In the light of this, how has a party that campaigned on the basis of securing the NHS and promised not to impose any major changes to the Health System failed so severely.

There are parts of Sussex where no GP Consortia have yet agreed to take up the ‘offer’ of commissioning services from 2013, and it is hard to find fault with this response. However the failure to accept this chalice (poisoned or otherwise) means that decisions will be imposed by people and organisations that are even less connected to the communities concerned than GPs who are at the end of the day private businesses whose objectives are to make a profit. It is hard to imagine that Andrew Lansley had this in mind for local people across Britain, but equally hard to see how this tragic state of affairs could have been avoided with such an incoherent slash and burn set of directives from Andrew and his colleagues.

Despite the 8 week long pause, there is little to indicate that the damage caused by the  proposals in the white paper could be corrected in time to avoid the destruction of health infrastructure that we are all used to relying on.