Streeting’s Precious Shiny Things: Plenty of Gadgets, No Vision, Strategy, or Plan

Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, seems to think the NHS can be saved by tech gadgets and trendy solutions. It’s all about smartwatches, apps, and fat jabs—shiny promises that sound exciting but fall apart when you dig deeper. What Streeting is offering is a grab bag of buzzwords rather than a coherent vision for the future of healthcare. It’s like giving a patient a Fitbit when they really need a doctor. There’s no real strategy here, just a collection of flashy ideas with little substance.

Labour’s latest NHS "plan" is, in fact, not much of a plan at all. We’ve been told it will take ten years to fix the health service—an entire decade to deal with the crisis. But what exactly are they proposing to do during that time? Wearable tech? Fat jabs? And perhaps the most head-scratching element of all: consulting the public on how to fix the NHS. Yes, the same public who are currently stuck in A&E for 12 hours are supposed to come up with the solutions. That’s not a strategy—it’s political punting.

Let’s not forget how we got here. Tony Blair’s New Labour already had a crack at transforming the NHS, giving GPs lucrative payments that allowed them to cut their hours and dodge out-of-hours work. The result? Longer waiting lists and fewer appointments. Then came Foundation Trusts—sold as local control and innovation, but which turned out to be little more than bureaucratic nightmares that turned hospitals into mini-corporations. All the while, the core issues—staffing, infrastructure, and patient care—remained neglected.

Now, Streeting is leading the charge with his shiny new ideas: smartwatches to monitor your steps while you wait months for treatment, and weight-loss injections as the answer to the obesity crisis. Sure, obesity is a real problem, but pretending that jabs alone will fix the nation’s health is nothing short of fantasy. The NHS is crumbling, productivity has dropped by 7% since pre-Covid levels, and staff morale is at rock bottom. Yet, Labour’s solution is to strap a smartwatch on it and hope for the best.

And here’s the catch: ten years is Labour’s timeline to fix all of this. Ten years is a political eternity—by the time we get to 2034, Streeting and Starmer will be long gone, and Labour won’t be held accountable for whatever goes wrong. Promising change a decade down the line is a classic move to avoid responsibility. Who’s going to remember the 10-year plan when the NHS is still gasping for air five years from now? Anything beyond five years is the ultimate political "Get Out of Jail Free" card—promise big, deliver nothing, and let someone else clean up the mess.

And what about Rachel Reeves? She’s busy figuring out how to raise more money to throw at the NHS, but we’ve seen this before. Blair’s government pumped money into the NHS too, and where did it go? Into GPs’ pockets and Foundation Trusts’ balance sheets, with no real improvement to show for it. It’s like watching the same film on repeat—only this time with smartwatches and injections as the big distractions.

Meanwhile, the actual problems remain untouched. Staffing shortages, overstretched hospitals, and an exhausted workforce struggling to cope. These are the issues that require immediate attention, not fat jabs or gadgets that monitor your sleep patterns. Labour is trying to look modern and tech-savvy, but there’s no substance behind the sparkle. It’s all talk, all glitz, with no real plan to dig the NHS out of the deep hole it’s in.

The truth is, Labour doesn’t have a plan to fix the NHS—they have shiny distractions. Streeting’s obsession with "precious shiny things" is a way to gloss over the fact that there’s no coherent strategy in place. Promising a fix in a decade is as good as promising nothing at all. And by then, the only thing left of the NHS might be the memories of all the smartwatches that beeped as patients waited, and waited, for real change.

Let’s be clear: the NHS doesn’t need more gimmicks. It needs real reform, real investment, and real leadership. But instead, we’re being fed tech buzzwords and a 10-year pipe dream. Streeting may be dazzled by gadgets, but where’s the vision? Where’s the plan that goes beyond gimmicks and actually tackles the roots of the problem? Right now, it’s all sparkle, no substance—and the NHS deserves better.