Which of these New Labour failings is the most damaging (Bristol East Liberal Democrats)

Bristol East Liberal Democrats <info@bristoleastlibdems.org.uk>

Prescott, Hewitt and Clarke - but of these three, the greatest failure's Hewitt

The media has been full recently of the affairs of John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister; the silent incompetence of Charle Clarke, Home Secretary; and the self-deluded claims of Patricia "The NHS has had its best year ever" Hewitt. In our view, the most damaging of these is the damage now being done to our National Health Service.

Setting aside the corrosive impact of their behaviour on people's views of politicians in general, which failing is doing the most damage to the security and wellbeing of the general public?

New Labour is all about the triumph of image over substance. Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt are demonstrating just how incompetent New Labour ministers can be when they direct how our taxes are spent on maintaining our safety, security, health and wellbeing. John Prescott is displaying the sheer arrogance typical of a ruling clique that thinks it can pull the wool over the eyes of all the electors all of the time.

Mr Prescott's affair may be a private matter between himself, Ms Temple and Mrs Prescott but his alleged behaviour would normally be a sackable offence at most workplaces.

Mr Clarke is so busy introducing ID Cards and taking away our other civil liberties that he failed to pay attention to warnings that his department is not shouldering the responsibilities it already has.

This matter is not a storm in a Westminster tea-room tea cup. The consequences of Mr Clarke's failure, at the time of writing still largely unknown, could well mean death or serious injury for some unfortunate individuals. Where a foreign national remains intent on committing serious crimes on release from prison, failing to deport them as recommended by their trial judge means that Mr Clarke has failed in his duty to protect us as both individuals and society in general.

And New Labour accuses others of being "soft on crime"!

But, the most serious of all these failings is what New Labour is doing to our National Health Service.

Liberal Democrats applaud New Labour for spending money on the National Health Service. Even though they lambasted us back in 1997 for saying we would raise taxes because that was necessary to deliver decent public services.

Like us they knew you don't get something for nothing. So New Labour has raised taxes. But Ms Hewitt has not spent our money wisely.

More and more well-paid managers have been employed to try to meet the hundreds of targets imposed from Whitehall. New Labour is re-badging the same, failed, Tory 'reforms' of the NHS and pushing them through at breakneck speed. They don't even know whether their changes are working because they don't allow time for their initiatives to bed down before they change them again.

How can they expect the NHS to cope? But what else can we expect from a Government that lives from one gimmicky policy announcement press release to the next?

The tragedy is that the NHS is remarkably efficient at spending money on healthcare, even more so than private healthcare providers, which have to take a slice of the pie as profit to be returned to their shareholders. What the NHS lacked was sufficient resources, applied wisely to provide timely healthcare to all, free at the point of delivery, whether your disease or illness is profitable or not.

Instead, New Labour is closing hospitals, frittering resources away, fragmenting our national health service. The service is in grave danger of bursting asunder under these pressures.