Lizzie, you have a rare gift for inflaming a situation with your intemperate and grossly ill-informed views. The question posed was 'do nurses need degrees?'. The answer is at the moment that you can be a qualified nurse with either a diploma or a degree, although the trend for the last ten years at least has been towards nurses with degrees. (How do I know? I teach nurses as part of their degree courses.)
Nursing as a profession has changed radically in the last twenty years or so. Much of the physical care carried out on the wards is now done by what used to be called 'unqualified' staff, with titles like 'Nursing Auxiliary' etc. In practice these staff are also required to have qualifications, usually NVQ to level two or three. (These qualifications allow staff to bridge the gap into formal graduate nurse training too, unlike the 'good old days' when you had to stay as a Nursing Auxiliary unless you had 5 GCE O levels and usually a couple of A levels too). How do I know this? 20 years in the NHS, plus my younger daughter is currently working her gap year as a Nursing Auxiliary. As a consequence of this change, qualified nurses now carry out much more technical work, including assessment of patients, planning of treatment, minor surgery, prescribing of simple drugs, pain management using high-tech approaches and so on. The amount of knowledge required to perform effectively in the role has increased exponentially, and the purpose of the 'all-degree' approach is to ensure that those entering the profession have a sufficient level of knowledge and intellectual ability to cope with the increased demands of the job as it is now, not as it used to be.
You should also bear in mind that the pressure to make this change came not from the supposed faceless bureaucrats and politicians that you plainly despise; it came almost exclusively from the nursing profession themselves. It has been discussed endlessly at Royal College of Nursing conferences over the years, and nurses at all levels have shown themselves to be overwhelmingly in favour. The degree courses, furthermore, are not exclusively academic; they are much more akin to the old 'sandwich' courses, where periods of study are interspersed with placements where the student can acquire practical experience.
One last thing; nurses who currently practice with a Diploma rather than a degree will not be disadvantaged in any way by this; they will carry on as before, and if they wish to increase their level of qualification they will be given time and funding to do so.

I hope these facts will inform this discussion. Lizzie, it really would be nice if occasionally you would engage your brain before ranting on about subjects you plainly know little or nothing about. Leave that to journalists at the Daily Mail, they've had more practice.