Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025
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00:00Please welcome up here our next speaker.
00:02This is Andrew Mayerson who is a doctor at the A&E at the Royal London Hospital.
00:06Please welcome him up here with a round of applause and love in your heart.
00:18Hello everybody.
00:19I'm just coming off of night so I had to keep to the script.
00:23I will try to look up.
00:26Just a note, I'm speaking for myself entirely, not representing anybody.
00:30I work for, but I suspect that a lot of NHS employees throughout the country will agree
00:37with what I have a lot to say.
00:41Hi, I am Dr. Andrew Mayerson.
00:44I'm an emergency medicine doctor proudly working in your NHS, right across the river in Whitechapel
00:50at the Royal London Hospital.
00:52I am also a proud, proud immigrant to your country.
00:56Yes.
01:00This year, it will be 10 years since we moved to London.
01:05Is 10 years enough for me to be able to call myself a Londoner?
01:07Yes!
01:08That's okay?
01:09Okay, good.
01:09But where are you really from?
01:14Baltimore, Maryland.
01:15Yes.
01:20As a bloody foreigner, one here not to take your job, but to take care of you and your children
01:27if they ever become ill, I see your country through the lens of an outsider.
01:33I see your country through eyes that have seen the wonders and the horrors of the American
01:39health care system.
01:41Wonders for those who can afford it and horrors for those who can't.
01:45I see your country through the eyes of someone who has family members and friends who have
01:50had their financial lives destroyed by terrible American health care bills.
01:53And I'm grateful to be in your country where health care still is a human right.
02:04I am grateful for the NHS in a way that only an immigrant or those who grew up without the
02:09NHS can truly understand and appreciate.
02:11But my love for the NHS is not a blind love of an institution that I'm just told to love.
02:20It's a deep respect for an extraordinary health care system, one dreamed of by beverage, that
02:27by 2010 was ranked the number one health care system in the world.
02:31You guys were the best globally.
02:33And when I found that out, when I started medical school in 2015, I was just absolutely
02:37floored that I get to go to medical school in the country with the best health care system
02:39in the world.
02:40I thought that was just remarkable.
02:44And because it was so good, that's why I loved it.
02:47And then the conservatives took over and conserved nothing of the society we had spent
02:54generations building.
02:55They gave us Austerity 1.0, a no-deal Brexit, a Tory civil war.
03:00They stole 400 billion pounds from NHS budgets and then delivered a criminal-grade pandemic response.
03:06Life expectancy dropped for the first time in 100 years.
03:11We became poorer, sicker, shorter even, and far less productive.
03:16From 2010 to now, it is absolutely shocking, it's shocking to see how far the NHS has fallen.
03:24GP waiting times used to be 24 to 48 hours, it can now be up to a month.
03:31A&E waits, it used to be four hours.
03:33Now 24 hours in A&E is no longer just a television show.
03:36It's the reality for far too many people around this country.
03:39And many of my colleagues, myself included, have been assaulted multiple times by patients.
03:46It's happening in record numbers as patients are just absolutely furious with the terrible
03:50waiting times and they're taking it out on us.
03:53Shine.
03:53Yeah, elective care waiting list, which used to be only a few million, peaked at nearly 8 million,
04:01the longest in NHS history, before dropping now to a still shocking 7.5 million.
04:07Cancer waiting times used to be a two-week wait.
04:10It's now months before you see a specialist to get treated.
04:14Right here in the sixth wealthiest country on the planet,
04:17we have patients that are dying from treatable cancers in record numbers.
04:22Shame.
04:22Shame.
04:26Our hospitals are crumbling because maintenance budgets have been gutted.
04:29Increasing privatization means far fewer staff to help you through your journey in hospital,
04:33which kills productivity.
04:35And it's been so bad over the last couple of years
04:37that up to 500 patients are dying every single week in this country
04:42from delays accessing NHS emergency care.
04:44Those are people dying at home waiting for an ambulance,
04:47dying in the backs of ambulances that are queuing outside of our hospitals,
04:50dying in our A&E waiting rooms because we don't have enough staff to be able to see them,
04:54triage them, and see and understand just how sick they are.
04:57That's over 25,000 avoidable deaths every single year.
05:04It's been happening for probably the last five years.
05:06Easy.
05:06And so it's therefore not surprising at all that we are losing 20,000 doctors every single year.
05:18We're losing 40,000 nurses every year.
05:21And all of our colleagues are going to the private sector and they're going to health systems abroad
05:25where they are appreciated because we just can't take it here anymore.
05:29As an A&E doctor in one of the four major trauma centres in London,
05:32I'm at the coalface of this societal breakdown.
05:36If you just spend some time in one of our A&E waiting rooms,
05:39you'll see chronic conditions that have been made far worse by long waits to see your GP.
05:48People having mental health crises, people in desperate need of housing, addiction support,
05:52a social care package, a safe place to sleep, or just a sandwich and a cuppa.
05:57This is what it looks like when governments fail their people.
06:01Our last government launched the greatest assault on our population's health since World War II.
06:08They intentionally undermined your own health care system
06:11to drive more patients into the arms of private health care.
06:14It was not a foreign enemy.
06:16It was our very own government.
06:20Intentional.
06:25And what they have created, it's fair to say,
06:27is the greatest crisis we've faced as a nation
06:29and as a society since the time of the Beverage Report.
06:33Sir William understood the magnitude of the crisis.
06:35He understood that a revolutionary moment in the world's history
06:38is a time for revolutions, he said, not for patching.
06:43We desperately need a revolution in government right now,
06:45not one of pitchforks and torches that burn our beloved institutions to the ground
06:50like they're doing back in the United States,
06:53but one that builds a new social contract with the people.
06:57Yeah!
06:59The time for a patriotic wealth tax
07:08that asks the super-rich to just be a bit less greedy is now.
07:16The time for tax justice is now.
07:20The time to rebuild our NHS, to fix social care, to rebuild our schools,
07:26to clean up our rivers, to restore our railways,
07:28to fix local transportation, and to deal with the climate emergency is now.
07:32The time for patches is over.
07:41Because if we do not immediately support working families with tangible results
07:46that start improving their lives this year, not in a few years, this year,
07:50then trust me, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Nigel Farage will turn this country into a giant free port.
08:00And everything we fought for for the last 100 years will go down the drain.
08:05Take it from me, at this moment in our history, in my country's history,
08:09your institutions are far more fragile than you think.
08:13So please join me in sending a wake-up call to the Labour government.
08:19Wake up and read the room, stop pretending it's 1997 outside,
08:24and start understanding that for the rest of us, it feels very much like 1942.
08:38Austerity 2.0 is not the answer.
08:42That's right.
08:44But what is the answer?
08:45It's beverage 2.0.
08:49Thank you, guys.