Health Minister Stephen Barclay went full Nero by putting on a display of distraction politics at the Tory conference. In an embarrassingly obvious use of imported ‘culture war’ anger he decided to focus on trans patients and ward allocations rather than the NHS crises.
On the scale of major problems facing the NHS at the moment, the arrangements regarding where trans people are treated is pretty low on the crisis leader board. In a health service which is haemorrhaging staff, where trans people are treated is pretty academic if there aren’t enough staff to treat people irrespective of their gender identity.
Stephen Barclay could have spent time addressing the failure of the government to settle the doctors and nurses disputes, the increasing loss of demoralised staff, soaring waiting lists, progress on the 40 new hospitals promised or how to improve the UK’s poor performance regarding cancer outcomes. Plenty of important issues that people want answers to. Absolutely nobody apart from a handful of anti-LGBTQ+ obsessives have been talking about ward allocations for trans patients. Even the Daily Mail has no news or opinion articles about this non-issue.
He did manage a few seconds of childish name calling when he portrayed the doctors and nurses as militants. The same doctors and nurses belonging to the BMA and Royal College of Nursing which have both never called a strike in about one hundred years until a couple of years ago.
How ward space is used and whether single rooms are used should remain a matter for individual hospitals and managers to determine. Each hospital has different needs, layouts and availabilities which local personnel are familiar with. For a government minister to get involved in micromanaging ward allocations is a waste of time and the lamest of distractions.
Andrew Boff protests against homophobia and transphobia
The only Tory who demonstrated any integrity at the conference was Andrew Boff, member of the London Assembly. He was removed from Suella Braverman’s conference speech after heckling her homophobic and transphobic speech.
Boff told PA Media that Braverman “was basically vilifying gay people and trans people by this attack on LGBT ideology, or gender ideology”. He added: “It is fictitious. It is ridiculous. It is a signal to people who don’t like people who are LGBT+ people. Words like that in the forum of the party that I love need to be challenged.”
The majority of conference delegates happily lapped up this diet of gratuitous homophobic and transphobic speeches.
And the scale of the problem?
Zero. In December 2022 Translucent, a trans advocacy group, published an investigation which involved sending FoI requests to 102 NHS trusts asking: “How many natal female inpatients complained that a transgender woman inpatient was being cared for in the same ward?”. No NHS trusts reported any complaints or issues.
So a lot of time was wasted on a non-issue.