LABOUR’S Shadow Business Secretary said Rishi Sunak’s plans to give the police more powers to shut down protests are insubstantive.
He was reacting to reports that the Government is to table an amendment to the public order bill to ban so-called “slow marching” and give the police new powers to take action to prevent disruption by protesters.
Jonathan Reynolds told GB News: “We’ve had an announcement of this overnight, we’ll obviously have to see exactly what the government are proposing but my first reaction is to say of course, people need to be able to get on and live their lives and do what they need to do alongside protests that are taking place.
“But the police do already have quite extensive powers around that.
“So I would like to hear a little bit from government about how they’re going to do this, alongside the big reductions in police numbers we’ve seen over the last 13 years.
“In terms of what we’ve heard about preventing protests, that doesn’t sound particularly British to me.
“Of course people have the right to protest, alongside striking the right balance in not disrupting other people’s lives too much.”
Asked about Labour’s plan to reform the NHS, in an interview during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, he said: “We are consulting on a ten-year plan to reform the NHS but the truth is, after 13 years of the other side being in power, things are very, very tough in the NHS, and there isn’t a huge amount of money around.
“To simply say just spend more money on things won’t be enough. The economy we’ve got isn’t the kind of economy that’s going to produce the revenues to do that, so we’ve got to at least think about doing things differently.
“And when we talk about the specific issue of going straight for specialist care, this wouldn’t be for everything.
“This wouldn’t be completely removing GPs from the system. It already does exist in a number of areas for a few treatments and looking at greater ways to do that.”
Mr Reynolds said: “Being willing to think about doing things in a different way within a publicly-funded, publicly-provided National Health Service, I do think is necessary because at the minute the kind of experience people are having when they’re trying to access care, it is simply not good enough.
“I often think when politicians or anyone proposes thinking of new ways of doing things it does get sometimes at a negative reaction, even the creation of the NHS in 1948 got a similar reaction initially, but I think we’re right to think about not just how we can try and get more capacity, more resources into the NHS, but how can it work better for everybody?
“We’ve got to be willing to have those conversations.”
Asked if he was on a collision course with the medical profession over Labour’s reform proposals, he said: “It’s not about trying to pick a fight with anybody.
“It’s simply the case that we have to look at how we can have a national health service that really works for the kind of health conditions the kind of society we have today.
“And we’ve got to be willing and able to put forward new ideas around that and sometimes even I think the proposal we put forward where obviously we would double the number of doctors being trained in the NHS – that actually negative reaction at first when we put it forward.”
