Why Scottish independence would make NHS crisis even worse – Ian Murray MP

It is sickening that the SNP wants to divide people, rather than heal them, as patients suffer from their mismanagement, writes Ian Murray.

Health Secretary Jeane Freeman (Picture: John Devlin)

The word ‘crisis’ doesn’t do justice to the scale of the problems facing NHS Lothian. In the past few days alone, we’ve discovered that another £36 million is expected to be cut from already overstretched health and social care services in the Capital next year, with a direct impact on frontline care.

One-in-five A&E patients are not seen within the four hours standard in our local hospitals, despite the incredible efforts of over-worked and under-paid NHS staff.

As many as 11.5 per cent of beds are occupied by people who are fit to go home, despite an SNP promise to eradicate ‘delayed discharge’ in 2015.

Ian Murray is the Labour MP for Edinburgh South. Picture: Ian Rutherford

Staffing costs at the city’s delayed Sick Kids Hospital have reached almost £140,000 a month, and this paper yesterday reported there could be another six-month delay to the project.

“Worse than the trams”, as the headline suggested. Tens of millions of your tax pounds wasted and mismanaged.

Earlier this month, the NHS Lothian chairman quit over “fundamental and irreconcilable differences” with SNP Health Secretary Jeane Freeman MSP.

Our local health service is in utter disarray and the blame lies squarely with the Scottish Government.

Fixing this should be top of the to-do list for everyone in the SNP.

They are letting down patients and staff and it simply can’t go on. But, instead, they want to talk about Scottish independence.

Nationalists don’t want to draw attention to their woeful mismanagement of our cherished NHS and other valued public services. Waving a flag won’t wave away the problems in our hospitals and schools.

They would much rather pick a fight about a divisive and unwanted second independence referendum. So instead of addressing this crisis, Holyrood is being subjected to debates about which flags should fly in front of the building and when we should have another referendum that the public don’t want.

But flags aren’t going to ensure patients are treated on time, or help the elderly patients who are stuck in hospital, or justify paying for an empty hospital that is already years late.

An endless debate about how to divide communities at the precise moment we should be trying to unite people isn’t going to help the 7,252 children living in temporary accommodation across Scotland.

And it won’t close the gap between children from the most affluent and most deprived backgrounds in primary school literacy and numeracy.

But constitutional division is all the SNP is interested in, treating the calamity of Brexit as naked opportunism. Appropriating my vote to remain in the EU to agitate for more constitutional chaos.

Yes, many people in this city are hurting after losing our EU citizenship. I fought tirelessly to prevent it, working for a People’s Vote long before the SNP half-heartedly came on board. Today, I am the only person in the Labour leadership contests saying we need to be ready to campaign for the entire UK to rejoin the EU if it’s in the national interest.

The SNP’s solution of an independent Scotland in the EU fails to address the inevitable hard border this would create with England.

All the same wrong-headed arguments for Brexit are the same wrong-headed arguments for Scexit.

Breaking away from our closest partner would lead to years of economic pain and fewer opportunities, especially also being out of the EU and ditching the pound.

Ultimately, an independent Scotland would have less to spend on services like the NHS, compounding the crisis created by the SNP in their 13 years in power.

Sick patients across Edinburgh are being let down by the SNP. It’s sickening that the Nationalists’ priority is dividing people; not healing them.

Ian Murray is the Labour MP for Edinburgh South