Streeting calls Farage ‘snake-oil salesman’ and says Reform UK would be ‘disaster’ for NHS – UK politics live | Politics

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is one of the best platform speakers in the cabinet, and his speech was enthusiastically received. Most speeches from cabinet ministers at this conference have included lavish amounts of Farage-bashing, and this one was no exception. But it also included an argument about modernisation.

Here are the key lines.

My ambition isn’t just to recover the NHS, but to rebuild it to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Modernisation is not a betrayal of [Aneurin] Bevan’s legacy, it is fulfilment. Because as the great man himself said, the NHS must always be changing and improving.

The truth is this, the next 10 years won’t just bring a decade’s worth of change in healthcare, it will bring centuries worth.

Medicine is being transformed before our eyes. We now have genetic tests that can predict a child’s risk of illness before they ever fall sick.

We’re on the brink of vaccines that could one day cure cancer. Weight loss jabs could help us finally defeat obesity.

And this isn’t just a medical revolution, it’s an industrial revolution, a technological revolution, one that will shape the next century of jobs, industry and public health.

• He said he relished a debate about the future of the NHS with Nigel Farage and Reform UK. After restating his attack on Farage for his interest in replacing the NHS with an insurance system (see 9.13am), Streeting said:

Be in no doubt. It’s not reform he’s offering. It’s retreat. He says we can’t afford in this century the National Health Service we could afford in the last. Well, if that’s the fight Farage wants, I say, bring it on.

If you earn less than £60,000 a year and came from abroad, Farage, wants you gone – the doctors, the porters, the nurses, the people who care for us in our hour of need and kept this country going when everything else stopped – tearing families apart, our friends, our neighbours.

Last week, I received a letter from a consultant at Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, he spent the last three decades here caring for children, but now tells me that Reform’s health policy is making him consider leaving our country.

He wrote, ‘please use your office to ensure that those who have made their lives here in good faith can continue to care for patients without fear’.

So as our country’s health and social care secretary. Let me address him and his colleagues directly. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Farage says, ‘go home’. We say ‘you are home’.

I’ve got your back. We’ve got your back, and at the next election, we’ll send Farage packing.

Tomorrow, we’re reforming general practice so patients can request appointments online at any point during the day.

Many GPs already offer this service because they’ve changed with the times.

Why shouldn’t be booking a GP appointment be as easy as booking a delivery, a taxi or a takeaway? And our policy comes alongside a billion pounds of extra funding for general practice and 2,000 extra GPs.

Yet the BMA threatens to oppose it in 2025. Well, I’ll give you this warning; if we give in to the forces of conservatism, they will turn the NHS into a museum of 20th-century healthcare.

• He said it was the mission of Labour “to build a national care service worthy of the name”. Referring to the announcement about the move towards a fair pay agreement for adult care workers (see 10.32am), he also praised the unions GMB and Unison for standing up for care workers “when no one else would”, saying they could “go back to your members and tell them with pride, this is a difference that Labour unions in government make”.

• He said that he wanted to see Angela Rayner back in government. He said that Rayner, a former care worker, deserved credit for the fair pay agreement, and he went on:

Angela Rayner, this achievement is yours. Thank you. And we want her back as well.

As delegates applauded, he added: “We’ll definitely make sure she sees that. We need her back.”