Lies, damned lies and semantics

Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, was the first guest on this morning's Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show on BBC1. If Kuenssberg is looking for an alternative career (though why would she when her current BBC contract brings her in a cool £250k pa?) she might try dentistry, as extracting the truth from Barclay was like drawing teeth.

But the indomitable Ms K is nothing if not persistent and was clearly in no mood to stop until she had convinced Barclay that the Tories' oft-repeated claim of planning to build "forty new hospitals" was, if not mendacious then at best weasely. It wasn't the number she was querying but the use of the word "new". A new wing was not a new hospital she insisted, any more than a new conservatory constituted a new house. At which point, without actually conceding defeat, the ever-suave Barclay decided simply to let her have her way.

Of course, this was just the sort of tergiversation beloved of that arch-weasel, Boris Johnson, who shamelessly plucked slogans out of the air on the campaign trail in 2019 to get the job done (the job being to get him the coveted premiership rather than to improve the lot of his electorate). And why not, from his point of view, when "£350m a week for the NHS" and "take back control" had served him so well during the earlier Brexit campaign? 

When this utterly bogus 'pledge' was first made, "new" was widely understood to refer to brand new hospitals (as in not existing before) adding to overall UK hospital capacity. However, by August 2021, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) was moved to issue guidance to NHS trusts on "key media lines" to use when responding to questions about its veracity. (Note to editors: for "key media lines" read spin.)

It defined a "new" hospital in three ways: A whole new hospital on a new site or current NHS land; a major new clinical building on an existing site or a new wing of an existing hospital; a major refurbishment and alteration of all but the building frame or main structure. There was a variety of schemes which, it added sternly, "must always be referred to as a new hospital".

In an attempt to clarify the situation, The Nuffield Trust, an independent health think-tank, carried out its own research, defining a "new" hospital as "a new building on an entirely new site". Using this definition 22 of the 40 are rebuilding projects, 12 are new wings within existing hospitals, 3 involve rebuilding non-urgent care hospitals and 3 are brand new hospitals, consisting of two general hospitals and one non-urgent care hospital. 

Okay, so we know figures can be made to prove anything and words are open to interpretation but, by any calculation, three is a very long way from forty and new is not synonymous with renewed. However, as this corrupt government has amply proved, under the Tories the truth is no longer an absolute concept but an infinitely fluid commodity. Basically it can mean anything they want it to mean.

As George Orwell showed in his dystopian novel,1984, Newspeak is the currency of a totalitarian regime.


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