Stoate attacks PM over citation

GP Howard Stoate, who stood down at last election, says claim that he supported NHS reforms was ‘entirely misleading’ Howard Stoate, the former Labour MP who left parliament to return to work as a GP, has attacked David Cameron for citing his support for the government’s controversial health bill. The claim was made during heated exchanges on Wednesday that saw Cameron tell a female shadow cabinet member to “calm down, dear”. Stoate, the former MP for Dartford, writes in the Guardian that doctors do not “glibly accept every aspect of the health bill; it clearly has many inherent problems”. He says Cameron “should stop using the health service as a political football and allow GPs to get on with the job of improving health services”. “I [had] said many GPs were enthusiastic about the chance to help shape services for patients,” he writes. “I was referring to GPs in my own borough of Bexley, south London, and qualified this by saying GPs in the borough had a head start, building on their experience of commissioning over the last four years. Taken out of context, and interspersed with condescending comments to backbench MPs, Cameron’s quote is entirely misleading.” With senior Labour figures claiming that the the prime minister lost his cool because he has lost “the argument over the NHS”, the intervention by Stoate – the only practising GP to serve in parliament when he stood down at the general election – robs Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, of a line of attack: that the government reforms had high-profile defenders in the medical profession. Writing on his blog , Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former director of communications and strategy, said that Cameron was rattled over the dispatch box because of the unpopularity of the coalition’s health reforms. “On the NHS, the government’s reform plans are not thought through, not popular with those who run the NHS or those who use it, and politically toxic, not least because they have no mandate for them,” says Campbell. Read Howard Stoate’s article David Cameron NHS Labour Conservatives Health Randeep Ramesh guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 28, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.