First Minister Carwyn Jones says the Welsh Government does not trust the Department of Health in London and can’t work with it.
Mr Jones made the blunt comments during an exclusive interview with the Wasting Mule in which he defended his administration’s running of the NHS against attacks from opposition parties and professional groups like the British Medical Association
The First Minister referred to a story the Mule ran last week in which Monmouth Conservative MP David Davies criticised the Welsh Government for allegedly “blocking” a comparative study of the NHS in the four UK nations to be carried out by the respected international organisation, the OECD.
The Welsh Government said it wasn’t prepared to participate in the study, and put off a visit to Wales by OECD officials, when the Department of Health said it planned to use statistics in the draft report in next year’s general election campaign.
The Welsh Government said such statistics in the section on Wales would be “unverified” before it confirmed their accuracy.
Referring to the OECD story, Mr Jones said:
“Scotland and Northern Ireland are as annoyed as we are. There was an agreement that this would be a four-nation assessment.“The Department of Health refused to give an assurance that they wouldn’t use unverified figures in the general election.“So ourselves, Scotland and Northern Ireland said ‘let’s follow the usual process here and embargo the figures until after the general election’. They wouldn’t do it – that’s how politicised the Department of Health has become.“We’ve said that if they don’t sort this out, we’ll go ahead ourselves and have an OECD assessment [commissioned by us] rather than wait for them and the political games they’re playing. Hey presto – the story was fed to a Conservative MPI must admit I have some sympathy for Carwyn's position.
With the Tories clearly intending to use the plight of the Welsh NHS It looks very suspicious that a comparative study of the NHS in the four UK nations has been called and would conveniently report before next May giving little time for rebuttal.
Even if Carwyn was confident that the NHS in Wales was preforming better than the rest of the UK (somehow I doubt it) the Number crunchers at Westminster would twist the facts.
But Carwyn as I said only recently told the people of Scotland to put their faith in Westminster even under the Tories/
Now he says Westminster can't be trusted.
On this basis neither can he,
2 comments:
Quite funny (in a non-funny, I told you so kind of way) to see the very papers Carwyn and Labour were very happy to see using scarestories against Yes Scotland use the same tactics against Labour.
It's only going to get worse for Labour.
They made their bed.
Meanwhile, Welsh Labour play the nationalist card in Wales to say Westminster is 'picking on Wales' ... though, of course, Carwyn doens't want any real policies which could be used to improve things here in Wales.
anon is quite correct when he says that welsh labour doesnt want any 'real powers' coming to wales - because if wales got any real powers tories in england could cite it as a reason for preventing mps from wales voting in westminister....as they are seeking to do over scotish mps. so carwyn jones and welsh labour will resist wales gaining meaningful powers because its in the best interest of the british labour party.
as for trusting carwyn jones who could trust someone who volunteered to make wales home to trident? a country that in the 1980s was proud to declare itself 'nuclear free'. it is not for nothing that jones is now known by the epithet carwyn 'strangelove'.
Post a Comment