This week Labour proposed scrapping NHS prescription charges in England. It’s a move that OurNHS has been demanding for years. Indeed, it was a truly historic moment – the implementation of these kind of charges (including optical and dental charges) that prompted the service’s founder, Nye Bevan, to resign on principle.
It’s a historic move - but hardly Venezuelan-style socialism, rather a policy that the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments implemented successfully years ago.
Predictably enough, where the right have paid attention to the new policy, they’ve downplayed it as merely another expensive item on Labour’s ‘shopping list’ of policies. In contrast, both Tories and indeed Lib Dems like Shirley Williams have been flirting instead with the idea of scrapping even these exemptions, for example for better off pensioners. Currently, pensioners, children and pregnant women are exempt from prescription charges, which now stand at £9 per item. Some extremely low-paid workers – typically those earning under £13,000 a year – can also claim exemptions, though that process is cumbersome, poorly understood and riddled with errors.
