Saj but true

SAJID Javid is in danger of raining on the NHS’s parade today — but his criticisms are sadly spot-on.

The Sun remains proud of the 75-year-old health service.

Its “free” access to care, its pioneering innovations and overwhelmingly admirable staff, honoured by our Who Cares Wins awards.

But the ex-Health Secretary is right that it needs ground-up reinvention. That it is “frozen” in 1948. That it is buckling, with waiting lists at a shameful 7.4million.

It is not under-funded, whatever Tory-haters claim.

We are sixth among developed countries for health spending as a percentage of GDP.

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And our system is neither envied nor replicated elsewhere. Indeed, we should copy others with far superior patient outcomes.

The Tories and Labour privately admit the NHS is unsustainable, Sajid says. So who will challenge voters’ rose-tinted devotion to it and design a new model?

The Tories, miles behind in the polls?

Or Labour, with just one MP — Wes Streeting — apparently gutsy enough to question the “national religion”?

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Both, we fear, will meekly inject billions more at the expense of all other needs.

But with a soaring and ageing population the NHS will grow less and less able to cope.

Khant see that

WE’VE railed against the nanny state before. You may have noticed. But the story on Page 11 opposite truly takes the cake:

A ban on supposedly harmful posters for a West End show.

They weren’t glamourising drugs, guns or knives — the real instruments of hellish misery afflicting London.

They were illustrating a wedding with a Victoria sponge.

Absolutely nothing riles Labour mayor Sadiq Khan like excess sugar.

So the pipsqueak puritan purges Transport for London of all temptation. He’s tough on cake, tough on the causes of cake.

This, not rampant crime nor the housing crisis he has perpetuated, is what this woeful lightweight fixates on . . . like his “comrades” in the wider party.

And we say “party” while we still can.

The fun sponges of a meddling Labour Government would ban even that.

Nato no-no

ONE is a distinguished ex-Scots Guards Captain and Defence Secretary who has superbly led the UK’s campaign to help defend Ukraine from tyranny.

The other’s a hapless former doctor who once sent German troops on exercise with sticks for guns.

Naturally, the latter — EU chief Ursula von der Leyen — is hot favourite for new Nato chief despite our Ben Wallace’s vastly greater nous and experience.

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Von der Leyen’s long career of “failing upwards” will thus achieve its crowning moment as she is entrusted to mastermind the defence of the free world.

May God help us all.

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