Jammed 999 lines and not enough ambulances to go round: come see the sharp end of this NHS crisis | Polly Toynbee

This is a fine new dispatch centre with an air of camaraderie, but 24% of the posts are vacant, as it’s hard to recruit for this invaluable but sometimes distressing job at £24,228 starting pay, especially in the expensive south of England.

As the latest NHS figures were published, the national medical director, Sir Stephen Powis, talked of “enormous demand on services, with more people than ever before attending A&E in the last year, over a million more than before the pandemic”.

But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, with a massive cull in disability benefits in his fantasy 2025 budget, said recently: “Do I think our country is three times sicker than it was a decade ago?

The DWP’s own projections expect disability and sickness claims to have risen by almost 2 million in five years’ time – and their work capability tests are ferocious.

Time was – it seems aeons ago now – when Labour lagged a mile behind in the polls and any bad news for the government, economic or social, was a cause to celebrate (secretly) and hope for worse to come.

The social destruction of austerity has created a health deficit that may prove more onerous to shift than the national debt.Labour people admit it may take more than one term to restore the NHS to its peak state of 2010, when it recorded its shortest waiting times and highest satisfaction.