Speaking at an event hosted by Macmillan Cancer Support for World Cancer Day, Wes Streeting said there was a need for DEI policies, after they were criticised by public figures such as the US president, Donald Trump.
Streeting, in conversation with the journalist Nick Robinson, said: “We’ve got to deal with these challenges against the backdrop at the moment, let’s be honest, where equality, diversity and inclusion is under a lot of spotlight and discussion.
“Now, I could get quite a lot of plaudits from quite a lot of people across the country … [If I said:] ‘You know what? NHS, tough times, I’m going to scrap all of those equality, diversity and inclusion people. We’ll save loads of money doing that, and we’ll divert the money into actual patient care’.”
He added: “Except, ask black nurses about their experiences of being bullied in the workplace in an organisation that has had black people in it since it was founded pretty much … Empire Windrush, NHS foundation, same year – that generation built the NHS.
“You look at outcomes: prostate cancer, black men twice as likely to die of prostate cancer than white men, black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. We’ve got some real racial inequalities here.”
Streeting went on to say he believed addressing those challenges was a political fight he was willing to take on, but added that he would “also need the profession to help”.
But he added: “Sometimes there are some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion, which [have] undermined the cause. For example, there was one member of NHS staff who was merrily tweeting a job ad online and saying part of her practice was anti-whiteness.”
Streeting added: “I just thought: what the hell does that say to the bloke up in Wigan who’s more likely to die earlier than his more affluent white counterparts down in London? We’ve got real issues of inequality that affect white working-class people.”
His comments come after it was announced that NHS England had scrapped a number of pledges, including plans to expand maternal mental health support to at least 66,000 women.
UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(