LONDON - Campaigning for Britain`s expected general election in May has kicked off in a round of bare-knuckle politicking over the National Health Service, with opposition Conservatives showcasing one pensioner`s plight and Labour defending its record.
The mammoth NHS, which consumes roughly 67 billion pounds (some 130 billion dollars, 97 billion euros) a year and rising, provides free-care-for-all treatment for millions of Britons but its inefficiencies and notoriously long waiting list leave it open to attack.
Tory leader Michael Howard made a first strike on it in parliament on Wednesday, when he introduced the nation to the plight of pensioner Margaret Dixon, 69, from Penketh, Cheshire in the north of England.
Dixon, he said, lived in pain since she had had a shoulder operation put off at her local NHS hospital no less than seven times due to a lack of intensive-care post-operative beds.
Dixon had been "let down" by a system which devotes too much money to bureaucracy and allows central government health-care targets to override local priorities, he said, holding up her case as proof of Prime Minister Tony Blair`s failure to improve health care during eight years of Labour rule.
But Blair and his health secretary, John Reid, have parried the blows, first by finding out from the hospital in Warrington that Dixon`s operation had been cancelled only three times.
Then they accused Howard of using Dixon as a prop in a political stunt.
Howard has been "ruthlessly exploiting" Dixon`s tale for gain at the polls, Blair charged on Friday, adding that listening to the Tory leader denounce the NHS "should make any decent... person turn away in disgust".
Reid, a member of Blair`s inner circle, intends to take back the high ground in the health debate next week with a raft of Labour promises for reform in a third term.
According to reports, he will repeat one of the party`s main campaign promises -- that no patient will have to wait more than 18 weeks between seeing their main NHS doctor and undergoing a necessary operation.
And, to deflect any future cases like Dixon`s, he will promise that any hospital that postpones an operation will have to guarantee a replacement date for wihin 28 days.
Hospitals could lose thousands of pounds in fines for failing to achieve those targets, according to The Sunday Telegraph.
Reid will also announce that about one million operations could be "contracted out" to private clinics and hospitals, the newspaper said.
That last reform could knock the wind out of the Conservatives` main health proposal -- to fund half of operation costs for NHS patients who seek treatment in the private sector.
Labour strategists claim Howard has led the Tories down a wayward path with the issue, saying it will backfire against the party.
"The Tories are totally out of step with public perception on this," one Labour election strategist told the Telegraph.
Another Labour media advisor, Alistair Campbell, reportedly told his aides that the Tories had been "tactically clever but strategically weak" by grandstanding with the Dixon case.
It gave an enraged Blair an opportunity to rail against Howard for sitting in a cabinet that "cut (the NHS), starved it of resources, sneered at its values".
The tactic, though potentially harmful to the Conservatives, seems to have helped Dixon.
After the political brawl, her shoulder still hurts, and her arm is still in a sling, but she has a new appointment for surgery, on March 21.
03/06/2005 03:16 GMT