Now that Sunak and the Tories are feeling the heat from the Labour party they’ve gone back to reviving one of their old lies from a few years ago. This was Bozo Johnson’s pledge that the Tories would build 40 new hospitals. Of course, the pledge was empty. Most of those 40 new hospitals were existing institutions scheduled for some refurbishment or rebuilding work. And in any case, none of the new hospitals have actually been built. But they’ve revived this lie, and Steve Barclay was on yesterday morning’s news and politics show on BBC 1 to spread it. Laura Kuenssberg isn’t my favourite Beeb journalist and in the past has shown herself to be as biased towards the Tories as the rest of them. But to give her credit, she kept on about this issue to Barclay, pointing it out to him again and again. But, Barclay attempted to defend himself, some of the existing hospitals would have to be completely gutted, so they were practically being rebuilt. This cut no ice with Kuenssberg, who carried on making the point, as well as the fact that some of these hospitals needed this work because of the poor condition they’d been allowed to get in. Some of them had their roofs falling in. And besides, no matter what the Tories did now, the new hospitals wouldn’t be completed until 2030. This didn’t impress Barclay, who said that this often happened, that governments started a project that would only be completed years later. But Kuenssberg did seem to have won some kind of victory over him, as she thanked at the end for coming on the programme and admitting that the 40 new hospitals included existing ones.
I don’t believe the Tories have any intention of building these hospitals. They’ve had three years or so to do so, and haven’t done anything about them. Yes, I know there have been problems with the economy and the Tories throwing out one Prime Minister after another, but Johnson lied through his teeth. The pledge about building hospitals was just one of them. Building NHS hospitals contravenes the Tory policy of running down the NHS and contracting out NHS services to the private sector. And if these hospitals were built, it would be using the Public-Private Finance Initiative, which has resulted in smaller hospitals being built and at greater cost than if the government just used straightforward contracting methods. Besides which, when New Labour started building new hospitals, in some cases existing hospitals were closed and demolished to make way for them.
This is just more Tory propaganda, designed to fool the public into thinking that the NHS is safe with them and to fend off the threat from Labour. Get the liars out!
How stupid and arrogant is Rees-Mogg? I’ve put up several messages I’ve received from Open Britain and other internet campaigning organisations giving their assessment of the Voter ID laws. Not surprisingly, they’ve been wholly negative because of the way severely normal Brits were turned away from polling stations because they either didn’t have ID, or didn’t have the right ID. In Somerset 400 people were so denied their right to vote. Open Britain has argued very strongly that this is part of the Tories’ attack on British democracy. They’ve also given sharp criticism of Keir Starmer’s plans for constitutional reform, expressing their concerns over what he leaves out, such as proportional representation and repealing the highly authoritarian legislation stifling the right to protest. There always was a very strong whiff of gerrymandering about the Voter ID legislation. The amount of electoral fraud is low. I think there have been only seven or so recent cases, and so there’s no need for it. The Tories introduced it following the example of the Republicans in America. Left-wing commenters over there pointed out that many of the people affected by the new legislation – Blacks, the young, the poor and students, the sections of society least likely to have such identification – were also the parts most like to vote Democrat. One Republican politician even admitted it was done to the nobble them.
And now Jacob Rees-Mogg has also admitted it on this side of the Atlantic.
The man one of the great commenters on this blog dubbed ‘Jacob Reet Snob’ let the cat out of the bag at the National Conservative conference. National Conservatism is the trend in transatlantic politics towards nationalism as a reaction to the collapse of globalism. Andrew Marr did a very good analysis of it for the New Statesman YouTube channel a week or so ago. Although it’s becoming influential in the Tory party, its roots are in America with the right-wing Edmund Burke Society, and its leadership seems to be American. Mogg was speaking at the conference about the threat to British sovereignty and Brexit posed by Keir Starmer’s statement that he would give the vote to the 6 million EU citizens in Britain. This has naturally panicked the nationalistic, Brexiteer right. Mogg sought to calm them by telling them that such gerrymandering never works, and rebounds on the party that did it.
Which he illustrated using the example of the Tories’ Voter ID laws.
They had, he said, been put in to stop people voting Labour. But they harmed the Tories instead, because most of the people turned away were Tory-voting senior citizens.
I found this short video commenting on Snob’s speech on the News Agents’ YouTube channel. The man in the video is absolutely amazed at Snob’s admission. He states that when he spoke to people in America about the Voter ID laws over there, they all defended it by telling him it was about protecting democracy. Presumably he didn’t meet the Republican politico who was open about it being a ruse to stop Democrat supporters voting. But there Mogg was, telling his audience that it was a piece of deliberate gerrymandering.
So why was Mogg being so open about it?
Maximilien Robespierre did an interesting video the other day talking about how bonkers Snob and the other headbangers demanding the return of Boris Johnson were. He’s part of a group which includes Nadine ‘Mad Nad’ Dorries and Priti Patel, the woman who makes up her own foreign policy. They had declared that the Tory party had been stupid to get rid of such an electorally successful Prime Minister as the huffing classicist. Well, the Tory party had done the same to Thatcher. She was massively successful, but when it seemed she was becoming an electoral liability, they got rid of her. She was replaced by her chancellor, John Major, just as Johnson had been replaced by Sunak. But Robespierre also wondered if the three weren’t also trying to scupper the Tory party’s chances at the next election by reminding everyone just how terrible Johnson was. Bozo had promised to build 44 new hospitals, of which only one has been built, if that. And that’s only one of his failures and broken promises.
Now comes this admission by Mogg, which tells anyone seriously worried about the state of British democracy that they shouldn’t vote Conservative. Is this part of the same plan to destroy the Tories’ chances from within? Cosplay priest Calvin Robinson has appeared on one video at some kind of right-wing political gathering saying that the Conservatives are no longer conservative, and the party needs to die to save Conservatism. Does Mogg share that view?
I doubt it. I think it’s just arrogance.
I think he came out with it because he either doesn’t believe it will do the Tories any harm and/or he thinks that the media won’t pick up on it and it won’t become a major issue. He probably has a point about that, as I have seen many people in the lamestream media commenting on it. The big news about the National Conservatives yesterday was about the Extinction Rebellion protester being thrown out for comparing them to fascism. I’m sure he was right and the parallels are there. But so far I haven’t seen anyone, outside of left-wing YouTubers, comment on this.
But worryingly, the Tory gerrymandering isn’t going to stop with the Voter ID laws.
Snob says in this snippet that the real problem was the postal votes.
So how long do you think it will be before they devise a plan to gerrymander those as well?
A week or so ago I wrote to Karin Smyth, the local MP for south Bristol, at the behest of one of the internet petitioning organisation. Rishi Sunak had stated that he intends to privatise more of the health service, as privatisation has worked so well. Which shows how ideologically deluded and completely removed from anything resembling reality he and the other Thatcherite privatisation maniacs are. The petitioning organisation asked its supporters to write to their MPs requesting them to block this. If your MP was Labour, then you were urged to ask them to write to them asking them to write to Starmer and request him to oppose the privatisation. Or say if he would oppose it. I got this response yesterday from Karin Smyth:
‘Dear David -,
Thank you for contacting me to raise concerns about NHS privatisation.
I know that many people are rightly concerned at the very serious pressures facing our NHS. Our health service is struggling and performance against many waiting time measures is at a record low: patients are waiting hours for ambulances to arrive, A&E departments are overstretched, and more than seven million people are waiting for treatment.
Ministers point to the impact of COVID-19. But we entered the pandemic with record NHS waiting lists and 100,000 staff vacancies. We must build capacity in the NHS so that all patients who need it can be treated on time again. But I believe we have a responsibility in the short term to utilise spare capacity in the private sector to get through the current crisis and bring down NHS waiting lists. Nobody should be left languishing in serious pain, while those who can afford to, pay to go private. That is the two-tier healthcare system that I and my colleagues want to end.
In the long term, I want the NHS to be so good that people never have to go private.
Building an NHS fit for the future is one of Labour’s five key missions for government, reforming health and care services to speed up treatment, shift the focus of healthcare out of the hospital and into the community, and reduce health inequalities.
Paid for by ending the non-dom tax status regime, the plan will double the number of medical school places, create 10,000 extra nursing and midwifery clinical placements a year, train double the number of district nurses each year, and deliver 5,000 more health visitors.
Thank you once again for contacting me about this issue.
Yours sincerely,
Karin Smyth MP Labour MP for Bristol South’
I thank her for her response and am convinced that she is sincere in her belief in the NHS and defence of it. But I don’t trust Starmer. Not after he’s broken every promise he’s ever made. I also remember how Blair constantly accused the Tories of priatising the NHS – rightly – but then went much further than them when he came to power. So much so that the Tories under Cameron pretended to be further left and opposed the hospital closures of Blair’s regime. Of course, that lasted right up until Cameron got his public school arse through the door of No. 10.
As a member of the Labour party, I hope Labour supporters will continue to vote Labour in the local elections today and we can get the Tories out, because they will make things worse if they’re returned to power. But I remain unconvinced that Starmer will be significantly better.
We’re at a pivotal moment for the NHS, with workers continuing to take strike action, including this Sunday and Monday. This strike has been cut short by a day after the Tories put their full power behind getting a court to ban nurses from continuing to strike on Monday. But we will not be silenced – and your solidarity with NHS workers couldn’t be more important. Please help by:
Visiting an RCN picket line Monday. A list of strike locations can be found here. And if you are in London, join the protest assembling at 12 noon at St. Thomas Hospital on Westminster Bridge Road.
Joining me to hear the latest on the health workers’ struggle and those of the PCS. NEU and others at the Workers of the World Unite online rally at 2pm this Sunday, April 30 (register here.)
I got this from the pro-nationalisation, pro-NHS organisation yesterday.
‘Dear David,
The government wants to use the huge NHS waiting list as an excuse to bring in more NHS privatisation.
You can make sure they know that we won’t let them normalise NHS privatisation. They need to know that there’ll be a public uproar if they push for more NHS privatisation.
We can create a big uproar if thousands of us write to our MPs now. Can you push back against Rishi Sunak’s lie about NHS privatisation?
*We have not prepared a template email for you to send to your MP. Writing a short email to your MP in your own words, straight from your heart, based on your own experiences or those of your family and friends will be incredibly powerful and make your MP sit up and listen.
Speaking to Tory press outlet, Conservative Home, Rishi Sunak said NHS privatisation has “worked in the past and we are going to do more of that going forward”.
It will come as no surprise to you that Rishi Sunak is absolutely wrong. NHS privatisation has never worked.
Not unless “working” means stuffing public money into the pockets of private healthcare shareholders.
Open Democracy reported last week that despite private hospitals being paid over half a billion pounds to help with NHS waiting lists, fewer patients are being seen overall.
We know that NHS privatisation is causing deaths. A recent Oxford study linked NHS privatisation to the preventable deaths of 557 people.
We also know that private cleaning companies contracted to clean our hospitals are leaving our hospitals full of germs, leading the NHS to spend an extra £1 billion to deal with the health fallout of privatisation.
Private companies with NHS contracts made £831 million in profits between 2011 and 2017 from just one form of NHS outsourcing. What a waste! We could have used that money to treat more people.
NHS privatisation might be working for greedy private companies like Centene and Virgin. It’s just not working for our communities.
Rishi Sunak wants to normalise NHS privatisation, using the crisis as his excuse because he knows that NHS privatisation is massively unpopular – even among those who voted for the Conservatives in the last election.
Over 68% of Conservative voters in our polling want private companies out of our NHS, with just 18% wanting more privatisation in the NHS.
Labour (77%), LibDem (75%) and other voters (73%) also massively support an NHS run for people, not profit.
Millions of us are waiting for healthcare and can’t see our GP, so it might seem like common sense to use the private sector so that people can get help immediately.
But we already know it doesn’t work. The government has already been doing that. It’s just not working.
Politicians need to face the facts. The real and popular solution is to invest directly into NHS capacity and pay our NHS staff.
Can you make sure your MPs know that you saw what Sunak said and that you are absolutely against it?
Regardless of your MP’s party, it is really important that you make your voice heard.
If your MP is Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Independent, email them and tell them to write to Rishi Sunak and let him know you oppose his plans to invest public money in private companies instead of directly into the NHS.
If your MP is Labour, email them and tell them to write to Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting asking them to confirm that Labour does not agree with Rishi Sunak that NHS privatisation has worked well.
If you live in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, email your MP and ask them to contact the Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish government to make sure that they are NOT following Rishi Sunak’s lead.
You can have a big impact in showing that it’s a choice between investing in the NHS and investing in the private sector.
Making this choice clear is really important as we approach the next election. Your MP needs to know this is an issue people in your constituency really care about.
We can create a public outcry against Rishi Sunak’s lie about NHS privatisation. Please write to your MP now and share this action with friends and family too.
Thank you so much for all you do to protect our NHS from privatisation and for being a part of this key fight as we approach the next general election.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team
PS: We would usually provide you with a ready-made letter to send to your MP, but your MP hearing from you, in your own words, will really make them sit up and listen. Your letter can be very short. What matters most are your experiences with the NHS and those of your family and/or friends. Speak from the heart. Make sure they know you want Labour to commit to investing directly in our NHS and not in private companies.‘
I have indeed written to my MP about this, and requested her to write to Streeting and Starmer to confirm that they won’t support Sunak’s privatisation plans. I’ll let you know if I get a reply. If you feel as I do about this issue, please also write to your MPs as well.
A few weeks ago I wrote to my local MP for Bristol South, Karin Smyth, offering her copies of my self-published book and pamphlets against NHS Privatisation. I received this reply from her yesterday.
‘Dear David Sivier
Thank you for contacting me to raise concerns about NHS privatisation.
We must build capacity in the NHS so that all patients who need it can be treated on time again. But I believe we have a responsibility in the short term to utilise spare capacity in the private sector to get through the current crisis and bring down NHS waiting lists. Nobody should be left languishing in serious pain, while those who can afford to, pay to go private. That is the two-tier healthcare system that we need to end.
In the long term, I want the NHS to be so good that people never have to go private. There is, in my view, an incompatibility between the aims of private companies and the aims of the NHS. A company’s primary concern is its shareholders, not the patients.
Building an NHS fit for the future is one of Labour’s five key missions for government, reforming health and care services to speed up treatment, shifting the focus of healthcare out of the hospital and into the community, and reduce health inequalities.
Paid for by ending the non-dom tax status regime, the plan will double the number of medical school places, create 10,000 extra nursing and midwifery clinical placements a year, train double the number of district nurses each year, and deliver 5,000 more health visitors.
Thank you once again for contacting me about this issue.
Yours sincerely,
Karin Smyth MP Labour MP for Bristol South’
I very much support her comments about making the NHS so good that no-one would want to go private and the incompatibility between private enterprise and the aims of the NHS. I also fully support Labour’s proposal to increase the training of NHS nurses and midwives, paid for by ending the non-dom tax status. If that goes through, that will really hurt the proprietor of the Heil, who has inherited it from his wretched father but unlike him shows no sign of living in France.
However, I do not trust Keir Starmer and MPs like Wes Streeting to honour it. I hope I will be proved wrong. In the meantime, there is no chance of reversing privatisation with the Tories in power.
Brexit, we were told, was all about regaining Britain’s “sovereignty” and being in control of our own destiny. But big money in British politics is a more significant threat to our future than unelected EU bureaucrats ever were.
Even though the Brussels bureaucrats have been removed from the equation, people still don’t feel they have a proper say in how this country operates. One big reason for that is the amount of money, often from opaque sources, sloshing around our political system.
Have you ever thought that the national picture painted by the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Rishi Sunak differs significantly from the one you see when you look around your own family and friends? You’re not alone.
Britain ranks among the most socially liberal countries in the world on key issues, and a substantial majority now reject many of the established economic assumptions of recent decades. But you won’t see any of that reflected in the current government’s agenda. Westminster is becoming an island of irrelevance, increasingly detached from the concerns of ordinary people.
There’s a reason for that. The government cannot hear the concerns of ordinary people over the hubbub of wealthy donors and other lobbyists with shady financial backers.
As part of our Parliamentary work, we’ve been researching just how broken the system is. In this longer-than-usual email, we’d like to share some of that with you.
Dark Money and Foreign Influence
The UK has particularly lax campaign finance laws. As a result, many donations get through that probably shouldn’t. Yes, there are permissibility requirements in place, but there are plenty of ways to evade them if you want to.
The term “Dark money” refers to donations whose origins are untraceable. Because the ultimate source cannot be confirmed, there is no way of knowing whether that money comes from the kind of person or organisation that shouldn’t have influence over our lawmakers.
One example of dark money is the “Proxy Donation”. These are donations made by one person, who would not be a permitted donor, in the name of another who is. Some examples include:
Ehud Sheleg, art dealer and former Conservative party treasurer, gave over £600k to the Tory party. Documents later showed that the money originated in a Russian account of Sheleg’s father-in-law – a former official in the old pro-Putin regime in Ukraine. Proxy donations are a complete blindspot in the law, so there was no legal mechanism to hold him accountable for it.
Lubov Cherdukhin – back at it again – gave money to the Conservative party while her husband was receiving funds from business deals with sanctioned Russian oligarchs. She gave £50k to the Tories 8 days after Putin invaded Ukraine.
Mohamad Amersi has given over £200k to the Conservatives and worked closely with Boris Johnson on key policy decisions. Prior to the donation, he was given a large deposit from a Kremlin-linked company secretly owned by Putin’s telecoms minister Leonid Reiman.
“Shell Companies” are another way for dubious donors to evade the rules. According to Transparency International, 14% of LLPs established in the UK between 2001-2021 (21,000 companies) show signs of being shell companies. Here are some examples:
Conservative mega-donor Lubov Cherdukhin, who once paid £160k to play tennis with Boris Johnson, was being paid out by a shell company secretly owned by Russian senator and Putin ally Suleiman Kerimov, according to the BBC.
The offshore company Aquind is owned by a former Russian oil magnate and a Russian arms manufacturer. The company has donated heavily to the Conservative party.
Top Labour MPs Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and Dan Jarvis received a combined £345,000 from a company called MPM Connect Ltd, which has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary had never heard of the company.
“Unincorporated Associations” are nebulous groups with little oversight or legal classification. It’s essentially like ticking the “miscellaneous” box on a donation form when asked what kind of organisation you are.
Tory minister Steve Baker’s “Covid Recovery Group” organisation (a parliamentary coalition of anti-lockdown Conservative MPs) received tens of thousands from a UA called the Recovery Alliance. It has no digital footprint, no registered members, and its finances are completely opaque. Opendemocracy has linked it to a number of other covid conspiracy campaigns and anti-lockdown groups.
Richard Cook’s “Constitutional Research Group” – of which he is the only listed member and chair – gave £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign. No one knows for sure where the money came from, but investigative journalists discovered his involvement in a number of illicit trades, including underground trash-dumping and fire-arms sales.
According to Byline Times, 29 different opaque UAs donated £14 million to the Conservative party between 2010-2022.
Big Money
Between 2001 and 2021, one-fifth of all political donations in the UK came from just ten men with an average age of 70. If that doesn’t indicate that we have a big problem, we’re really not sure what would.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with political donations, huge amounts of money coming from multinational corporations and the mega-rich does raise questions about who really calls the shots. Especially when they seem to get things in return.
Here are some situations where extremely wealthy individuals and corporations used their financial heft to influence things:
In 2021, the Conservatives received £400k in donations from oil and gas companies while the government was deciding on new oil and gas licences.
More generally, the Tories took over a million from oil companies between 2019 and 2021.
From 2020-2022, the Conservatives took £15 million from the financial services industry, which they were certainly kind to when it came to dealing with banker’s bonuses.
Labour MP Wes Streeting received £15k from John Armitage, former Tory party donor and manager of a hedge fund that owns half a billion dollars in US health insurance and private healthcare. Streeting recently came out in support of private hospitals.
The “Leader’s Group” is a dining club of Tory super-donors that has given over £130 million to the party since 2010. The club’s billionaires and business moguls have been known to dine with Boris Johnson.
In 2022-2023, controversial groups, including gambling giants, climate sceptic organisations, and evangelical Christian groups, made over £1 million in donations for staffing the Labour front bench. Recipients include MPs Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and Yvette Cooper. Reeves alone received nearly £250k.
Recently, Crossbench peer Caroline Cox received large donations from American evangelical Christian activists against gay marriage that used hateful language about Muslims.
While the Conservatives often top the list when it comes to money in politics, remember that this is a cross-party systemic problem. The real issue is that the rules that are supposed to prevent the wealthy from buying influence just aren’t strong enough. We’ve allowed a situation to emerge where money can buy outcomes almost directly, and the mechanisms to detect the sources of that money are ineffective. Our system just isn’t fit for the 21st century.
The first step to fixing any problem is admitting that there is a problem. Our political system is addicted to money, to the extent that we’re now shutting real people’s voices out on a regular basis.
As you know, Open Britain’s mission these days is to deliver a democracy that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. That means a political system primarily driven by people, not primarily driven by money. That’s what democracy was always meant to be about.
As you might expect from what you’ve read above, we don’t take donations from shady think tanks or Russian oligarchs. All our work is funded directly by you, our supporters. We believe that having our work funded through small donations from a large number of people is the healthiest model of all, one that allows us to say what needs to be said to whoever needs to hear it. We hope you agree.
I know very, very little about Black American art. I’ve heard of Grandma Moses and the Harlem Renaissance, and that’s about it. I’ve been watching a number of art history documentaries on YouTube, and this piece about Jacob Lawrence from Paul Priestley’s Art History School channel came as something of a revelation. Lawrence was one of those great figures you’ve never heard of, a true pioneer. He was, for example, the first Black American artist to be taken up by a major gallery. This short video tells his story.
Lawrence came from dirt-poor working class parents, and at various times throughout his career he worked menial jobs simply to pay the rent. He was inspired to become an artist by looking at the Renaissance masters like Giotto on display in New York museums. He was exhibited in a gallery when he was only 18, but still had to keep that day job. His parents would have preferred him to have been a mailman. He carried on like this, painting while working day jobs and occasionally taking art courses for some years until he made his breakthrough and the big galleries began picking him up. During the War he did his national service in a segregated regiment, but was later moved to a desegregated one and served as a war artist. He also met various avant-garde artists, who had fled to America from the Nazis. After the War he was taken up by a number of increasingly prestigious galleries and foundations. The stress of the sudden fame and recognition was sadly too much for him. His mental health deteriorated and he was forced to spend time in a mental hospital. He recovered, and journeyed to Nigeria to explore Africa’s artistic heritage, while lecturing on the influence of African art on western modernism, like the Cubists. He also gained a post as university art teacher.
Much of his work is naturally about Black American history. He was also fascinated by Haiti’s history, and painted a series of pictures about this subject. He also painted a series on the migration of Black Americans from the south to the north after the Civil War, as well as at least one painting of the anti-slavery fanatic, John Brown. He was concerned to paint from every day life, and so much of his paintings show people at work, building, doing carpentry and so on. He also painted scenes based on his incarceration in the mental hospital.
His style is simplistic, and the figures do remind me a little of some of Picasso’s works, like The Bathers. But somebody also said that if you looked at them, there was too much craftsmanship for them to be naive. He also uses bright, vivid colours. It’s a great introduction to one of the unknown masters of modern American art.
A few days ago I got another email from the internet democracy organisation 38 Degrees calling on their members and supporters to make and post to them their videos telling how terrible the bus services are in the area. 38 Degrees are pushing for the introduction of franchising to stop the endless cuts to bus services. I posted the video below to them, which I’ve also uploaded on my YouTube channel.
In the video I explain how the cuts to the bus services in my part of Bristol has meant that local people are no longer able to travel to the centre of town, nor to the city’s hospitals. We also cannot easily travel to the neighbouring towns of Keynsham and Bath, where many people from Bristol go to work. The changes have also had an impact on local businesses. Since the services were changed a few years ago, the buses have gone past local shops and shopping centres but do not stop at them. This has very obviously hit them, especially at a time when many small businesses have been struggling due to the lockdown and the increase in people shopping on line.
Not everybody has a car, and taxis are expensive. This is why we really need a bus franchising system and proper funding to support it.
Robert Reich is an American left-wing political commenter and blogger. I think he was an official in one of the Democrat administrations, either Clinton or Obama. But today he posted a message stating that America’s healthcare system was so broken that it’s only a matter of time before Medicare for All is introduced. But, he asks, how many people are going to suffer before this happens?
‘Our healthcare system is a catastrophe. Eventually, we will implement Medicare for All. The question is how much corporate greed and unnecessary suffering we will be forced to endure until that happens.’
‘
I’m sure this is absolutely true. One of my friends trained as a doctor, and he told me that some American hospitals are keeping afloat purely because of government subsidies. But you obviously aren’t going to be told this by the Tories and Blairite Labour, who are determined to promote the lie that private healthcare is more efficient and affordable. A few years ago the American healthcare system almost broke down completely because of demand.
This may be part of the reason why American private healthcare giants like Unum and the rest have been trying to get into Britain’s NHS since they started lobbying Blair in the late 90s.
Bernie was right to demand Medicare for All. The head of the American Green party was a gynaecologist, and she wanted Medicare for All as part of her concern for women’s health. Jeremy Corbyn was right to demand the renationalisation of the health service.
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