Press briefing from the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on: North Korea, Opposition Proposals for the NHS, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell
North Korea
Asked whether the government had accepted North Korea’s claim of testing nuclear weapons, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said that the Foreign Secretary would be making a statement shortly. However, everything we have seen so far led us to believe that we should take this with due seriousness.
Asked on what basis were we making that assessment on, the PMOS said there was a variety of means by which to assess this. There had been a process where North Korea had been warned on a repeated basis. Therefore, why did it bring the opprobrium of the international community on its head.
Asked what sort of measures or sanctions seemed appropriate, the PMOS said our Ambassador at the UN had talked about his interpretation, which was that this merited Chapter VII action, which equalled sanctions. What we had to do was work with the other members of the Security Council.
Asked whether we would work in concert with the US as President Bush had said in his statement, the PMOS said we would work in concert with the international community as a whole. We worked in the knowledge that Japan and China had issued a joint statement yesterday, which made their position very clear. South Korea had made it’s position very clear. The US had also made it’s position very clear and we had made our position clear. What made this case more clear cut was that North Korea should have be in no doubt of what the response of the International community would been never mind that of the UK. Therefore, North Korea could not have been unclear in anyway as to the reaction it was likely to provoke.
Opposition Proposals for the NHS
Asked what the government’s position was on David Cameron’s comments on introducing legislation to enshrine the independence of the NHS, the PMOS said this was a party political matter and he would not respond officially to the leader of the opposition. The factual position was that the government had transferred eighty percent of the health budget to the front line. In terms of practitioners in the health service we had given primary care trusts greater operational independence. We had reduced the number of centrally imposed targets. But there was a balance to be struck between on the one hand giving people the operational independence that they needed to carry out a service and on the other maintaining the accountability of those who spent money on that service. The other key issue that people needed to recognise that was going on was not a process of financial cuts, but a process of trying to align the changes in the pattern of diseases and in the pattern of clinical treatments with the level and structure of provision. You could not freeze frame the NHS anymore than you could freeze frame the progress of medical treatment or indeed the demands of the public that treatment where possible be more locally accessible and the impact that had on where you put resources into the NHS. You could not say that the NHS as it was ten years ago was how it should be today because the nature of illness had changed. The nature of public demand for the service had changed. The nature of medical technology had also changed. Therefore you had to reconfigure the NHS to fit modern day medical reality.
Asked whether he was saying that the NHS had had more independence under this government, the PMOS said if you gave eighty percent of the budget to local managers and clinicians then that was independence. What we could not do, however, was take away the need for either the sometimes hard choices about how to configure services so that they best reflected modern day medical reality or the need to be accountable for those choices. The medical reality now was different from how it was ten or twenty years ago.
David Blunkett
Asked what would the Prime Minister say to those MPs who claimed that one reason that the prisons were in the current state of crisis was the mess left by David Blunkett who by his own admission was not concentrating fully on the job when he was Home Secretary, the PMOS said that was a clever way to try and get him to do something that he never did, which was called a book review. Therefore we would concentrate on what we were doing about the prisons now rather than given giving a commentary on a past Home Secretary.
Put that David Blunkett had said the Prime Minister knew about his problems whilst he was Home Secretary, yet he had left him in one of the top jobs in Government, the PMOS referred journalists to the lobby notes at the time of David Blunkett’s resignation where he had said at the time that the Prime Minister knew about the particular relationship.
Alastair Campbell
Asked if the PMOS was aware Alastair Campbell had periods of depression whilst at Downing Street, the PMOS said that issue came under the heading of personnel matters. Therefore he would not comment.
Asked if the PMOS got depressed, the PMOS said it was his job not to get depressed even when confronted twice daily with the parliamentary lobby.
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