From 7am on Monday 15 June until just before 7am on Friday 19 June, resident doctors across England are staging a full four-day walkout. Another week, another strike, another round of cancelled operations and postponed appointments. And another reminder that Labour's central promise on the NHS — that they alone could end the disputes and get the health service moving — has not survived contact with reality.
This was supposed to be the party with the special relationship with the NHS. The party that would sit the doctors down and sort it out. Instead, the strikes keep coming, and patients keep paying the price for a government that overpromised and underdelivered.
The Waiting List Tells the Story
There is a sliver of good news, and it deserves to be acknowledged: the waiting list for routine hospital treatment fell for a second month running, to an estimated 7.36 million treatments at the end of May — the lowest since 2023. NHS staff have worked extraordinarily hard, maintaining around 94 percent of planned activity even during previous strikes, and delivering a record 18.6 million treatments over the past year. That credit belongs to the doctors, nurses and porters on the front line, not to ministers.
But hold that 7.36 million figure in your mind. Even after the improvement, that is more than seven million treatments outstanding. That is not a health service that has been fixed. It is one that is still buckling under demand — and now faces a four-day strike that experts warn could reverse the very progress being celebrated.
You Cannot Fix the NHS by Accident
The pattern is the same across this government's record: a modest improvement is seized on as proof the strategy is working, while the underlying crisis grinds on. Falling waiting lists are welcome. But a list of seven million, propped up by the goodwill of an exhausted workforce and threatened by repeated walkouts, is not a system in good health. It is a system surviving on the heroism of its staff.
And every strike day undoes part of the progress. Operations are cancelled. Clinics are shut. People in pain wait longer. The human cost is borne by patients who did nothing wrong except fall ill in a country whose government cannot keep its own promise to keep the wards running.
Throwing Money Is Not the Same as Reform
Labour's answer to the NHS is the same as every government before it: more money, more targets, more announcements. But the British people have been paying more and more for the NHS for years, and the waiting lists remain enormous. The problem is not simply how much we spend. It is how the money is used, how the workforce is valued and how the service is run. Pouring cash into a broken structure does not fix the structure.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK believes the NHS must remain free at the point of use — that principle is not up for debate. But free at the point of use does not mean immune from reform. We would cut the bloated layers of management that swallow money before it reaches a single patient, and put resources into front-line care.
We would value and retain the doctors and nurses we already have, rather than training them at great expense only to watch them leave. And we would be honest with the public: a health service that lurches from strike to strike and carries a seven-million backlog needs genuine reform, not another minister claiming the corner has been turned. Patients deserve a plan, not a slogan.