The Tories have been planning the privatisation of the NHS for a very long time. Thatcher commissioned a report looking into it, but then suppressed it, realizing it constituted political suicide. And I can remember Davids Steel and Owen when the Liberals and Social Democrats were merely an alliance, rather than the same party, stating that it didn’t matter whether the health service was private or public, so long as it was free. Well, it works much better when it’s state owned, and as a private industry it most definitely won’t be free. Tories like Peter Lilley, Jeremy Hunt and IDS despise it because it is free, and so excludes the private sector from making a tidy profit.
Unite’s secretary general Len McCluskey would be naive indeed to think David Cameron is ever likely to heed his call for the National Health Service to be kept out of the EU/US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
McCluskey has warned that the NHS could be sued by American healthcare multinationals if a UK government tried to return services to state control; they would argue that such renationalisations interfered with their potential profits, in breach of the trade agreement, as has been discussed on this blog in the past.
His appeal misses the point. The entire thrust of Coalition government policy is to ensure that the NHS becomes vulnerable to just such pressure, in order to ‘lock in’ the privatisations inflicted on us by Andrew Lansley’s horrifying Health and Social Care Act 2012.
One has to look no further than Vince Cable for confirmation of this. The Whig business…
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