You are simply refusing to believe that the Conservative Party’s platform of increasing the number of nurses in the NHS to 330,00 was genuinely their promised target. That target was explicitly set. It’s there in your own cite.
But no you say, it’s not 330,000. It’s some lesser number. Not that you’ll state that number or show how you got to it. It’s just that it can’t be 330,000, because in your head the Conservative’s can’t be genuinely saying what they mean - they’re must be some flimflammery involved. Ah you say it’s in the retention. Except, nobody except you has said there would be 100% retention or any other retention figure. What everyone but you is saying is that retention will increase from the current percentage, which will result in 18,500 nurses, who otherwise would have left the NHS, staying.
Here’s the math from an independent source:
And if case you need to know why it’s 50,000 being explained, here you go:
But hey, if you choose to believe you’re personal dogma over actual cites and actual math, then no one’s stopping you from being wrong.
If you open up the spreadsheet labelled “NHS Workforce Statistics, January 2018 Staff Group, Area and Level”, and go to the Nurses and Midwives tab, you can see that over the nine years from 2009 to 2018, the number of nurses has fluctuated around 280,000. But the nurses who were in the NHS in September 2009 aren’t the same nurses who were in the NHS in January 2018. NHS nurse turnover is fairly high. In January 2018, the BBC estimated it as over 10%. (Which doesn’t neatly correspond with the spreadsheet statistics, but they probably have different data sources).
If 28,000 nurses join the NHS in one year, and 28,000 nurses leave in one year, then assuming the number of nurses in 280,000, you have a 90% retention rate, a 10% leaving rate - which is offset by new joiners, and a growth rate of 0%. If you increase the retention rate to 91.3%, you’re losing 24,300 nurses leaving each year, while still gaining 28,000 joiners each year, a net increase of 3,700 nurses each year. Keep that up for five years, and you have a cumulative net increase of 18,500 nurses. So without any new hiring programs, the retention program increases the number of nurses to 298,500. Add in the hiring program, expected to bring in 31,500 further nurses, and it increases the total to 330,000 nurses.
Is the proposed retention program sufficiently budgeted? I can’t say. Have parts of it already been initiated prior to the Conservatives manifesto? Yes. So there’s plenty about the promise to criticise or gripe about. But the 18,500 increase in numbers from retention isn’t some sort of false accounting by counting people already in the system. Anyone claiming it is either doesn’t understand the numbers or is dedicated to passing along an incorrect assertion.
…except that the number joining the NHS aren’t factored into the number. Your very own cite literally said:
The 50,000 includes 31,500 newly recruited nurses and 18,500 nurses that decided to stay in the profession. Your cite literally says the 18,500 nurses are already there: they already exist. There is no accomodation for the churn rate in the numbers: the churn could very well be accounted for by the training bursaries, apprenticeships and overseas recruits in the 31,500 newly recruited nurses, in fact it is most likely to be accounted for there because it is explicitly defined there.
Okay, I’ve calmed down enough now that I think I can give this a go.
I fully understand your feelings in the wake of the result, but it’s not as hopeless as it seems. Johnson’s a mendacious shit even by Tory standards and it’s no surprise that a campaign run in his image was so despicable. But he’s not a would-be dictator, and nor is he the kind of idiot who will happily watch the country burn just to hold onto power.
Unlike Trump, whose vanity is shallow and desperate, Johnson’s vanity is that of the more vulgar wing of the British aristocracy: deep, confident, and obsessed with its place in history. It’s true that, compared to someone like Cameron, he’s much less concerned about how social and political liberals view him in the present time, which gives him flex to be that much more of a shit when necessary. But make no mistake, Johnson’s goal is to write himself into the history books as one of the Great Prime Ministers, which is not an aim that unbridled authoritarianism can ever serve.
We also do well to remember that the Parliamentary Conservative Party is still the same old nest of ultra-ambitious vipers it always was. You can guarantee that Tory MPs’ desire for personal advancement will remain a major check on his power. This election, they just needed to get back into majority government. But, from this point on, Johnson will have many people on his own side looking to find and exploit his weak spots for their own advantage. As much as they tolerated his bullshit to get them here, as the months and years roll on they will be leaking and briefing against his lies whenever they get the chance.
And, crucially, Johnson is not Thatcher. She had a coherent (albeit, to my mind, unacceptably callous) vision for the country’s moral, social and economic development. She won by selling what she believed, taking enough of the party and country with her. A big chunk of the parliamentary party followed her just for career reasons, but she also had plenty of true believers, who agreed with her diagnosis of the nation’s problems and the solutions she offered. Johnson, by contrast, has presented no real vision beyond ‘Deliver Brexit’ and ‘Not Corbyn’, and I’m deeply sceptical that he’s capable of anything more visionary than the gamesmanship he’s shown this time out.
The tricks he used to secure this landslide will lose traction as time goes on, and if the Labour Party has any kind of game at all, it will offer a much more plausible leader and program at the next GE. They can hardly do worse.
If you want to help the people in Britain who most need it, don’t focus on the dangers of Tory rule.
Don’t call them evil. Don’t pretend that their voters were conned. Don’t forget that the NHS has been run by Tories for most of its existence and yet is still exceptional, or that Right to Buy has been hugely beneficial for a large portion of the population, especially in Old Labour Strongholds.
There are plenty of people who suffer terribly from having the Tories in power. But, while their interests are rightly the highest goal of anti-Tory politics, they cannot be the primary concern of anti-Tory politics simply because those people’s votes are electorally insignificant. Altruism can be a selling point for an electoral program, but the central thrust has to appeal to the interests of the population at large.
Ultimately, the key swing comes from people who aren’t as scared of the Tories as you are. Johnson being Johnson, there’s a decent chance he’ll get caught out doing something awful. But to beat his party, you’ll need to be prepared for them ditching him when he becomes a liability and replacing him with someone better suited to the political moment.
Aside from flubbing brexit and having an awful leader, Labour’s worst mistake this election was building its program around nationalisation. It’s not that you can’t nationalise shit. It’s just that it doesn’t matter to most people. Asked in the abstract, the population is vaguely supportive. But no specific nationalisations will shift any significant number of votes. And a program offering a whole raft of nationalisations will just trigger memories of previous Labour governments getting carried away and burying themselves in well-meaning incompetence.
Nationalising an industry is a perfectly valid choice, but you have to recognise the cost in political work and capital necessary to get it done. This election, I feel like the electorate were more realistic about this than the Labour leadership were.
Of course the 18,500 are already in the system. They’re being retained. The proposal is to increase both the retention rate and the number of new joiners. In the current system, the number of nurses is relatively static and the number of new joiners approximately equals the number of leavers, at least over the medium term. If you reduce the number of people leaving, and increase the number of people joining, then the number of nurses within the system will increase.
Not to take attention away from One Mum’s Weird Accounting Trick (the voters hate her!) talk ; but you know that thing the Tories said they would never ever do, and were caught planning on doing but swore again never to do it ? Yeah, they’re doing it now.
I know, I’m shocked too. Like, who could have seen it coming ?! Anyway, enjoy your upcoming £200 insulin doses, UK.