I got this message from the internet petitioning organisation yesterday. As you can see, they’re hoping to organise a massive petition against Sajid Javid’s noxious proposal to start charging patients for NHS care. I think they organised a similar petition a little while ago, but they seem particularly alarmed after Gordon Brown denounced it. I’ve signed it, and I’ve put it up here in the hope that others may wish to sign it too. The NHS really is under threat from the Tory goons.
‘David, this is shocking.
Former Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has suggested patients should be charged a £20 fee if they ask for NHS treatment without seeing a GP first. [1]
David – there’s no sugar coating it. Charging sick people for being sick would end the NHS as we know it. And only this week, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the alarm – now we’re doing the same. [2]
This isn’t the first time something so dangerous has been floated. Rishi Sunak said patients should be charged £10 for missing appointments, and some Conservative grandees have suggested the same. [3] But, every time, public pressure forced them to back down. [4]
David, this is a dangerous moment – our NHS needs us. We are in a fight to defend its very existence. And it’s going to take our biggest NHS campaign ever. Today, we take the first step of the Great British backlash with a huge petition. Together, we could get ONE MILLION PEOPLE to add their name, to show those in power that the British public will NEVER stand for the sick being charged for being sick.
David, this fight starts with you. Will you add your name to the petition and tell the Government: charging the sick for being sick? Don’t you dare. And then share it with 5 friends? If each of us reading this email added their name, and passed it on, we’d make it to a million. And fast. Clicking the button below will add your name automatically with one click:
Make no mistake, this is an attempt by the same people who have spent a decade underfunding and understaffing the NHS, bringing it to its knees, to make paying for healthcare seem a normal way out of this crisis.
We’re planning this huge campaign right now, but it starts – today – with you.
David Lammy was on LBC Radio yesterday, and gave an answer to an interview question that left many listeners stunned. Kernow Damo has put up a piece about it on his vlog, as has Maximilien Robespierre, the smooth-voiced Irish vlogger. The Met’s heavy-handed policing of the Coronation and its arrest of 62 anti-monarchy protesters, simply for protesting, has raised questions about both the Met’s conduct and the Tory legislation allowing them to clamp down so hard on peaceful protesters. People are concerned about the draconian laws curbing protests and strikes. Lammy was asked if Labour intended to repeal this legislation. ‘No,’ he said, ‘because otherwise we’d spend all our time just repealing Tory legislation.’ This left Robespierre thoroughly gobsmacked. Because people are voting Labour in the hope that they’ll revrerse the Tory legislation allowing the water companies to dump raw sewage into our waterways and seas, stop the running down of the NHS, the impoverishment our great, hard–pressed and underappreciated working people. Now Lammy says that Labour doesn’t intend to do any of that. Robespierre raises the obvious point that this is a strange attitude for a party whose electoral line is that people should vote for them because they aren’t the Conservatives.
But I think this attitude is part and parcel of Starmer’s return to Blairism. Blair was a Thatcherite, who went further in the privatisation of the NHS and reforming – read: cutting back even further – the welfare state than the Tories themselves. One of the criticisms of Blair’s and Brown’s governments was that New Labour really didn’t differ at all from the Conservatives. They just promoted themselves on being able to implement the same wretched policies better and more efficiently. And in the case of the ‘welfare to work’ legislation, in which benefit claimants only got their welfare cheque if they did mandatory voluntary work for grasping, exploitative charities like Tomorrow’s People or the big supermarkets, Blair spun a profoundly reactionary policy introduced by Reagan’s Republicans in America and mooted by Thatcher over here as somehow left-wing and radical. It was all part of Blair’s New Deal, a modern version of Roosevelt’s make-work schemes during the Depression. The result of New Labour’s shameless emulation of the Tories was that an increasingly large part of the electorate stopped voting. They felt that it didn’t matter who you voted for, because they were all the same. Corbyn offered some escape from this electoral trap by promoting socialist policies. Hence the screams from the establishment both inside and outside the party that he was a Commie, Trotskyite anti-Semite. Because you can’t have someone offering the proles something that will actually benefit them.
And now it seems it’s back to business as usual under Starmer.
And the return to Blairism is already having the effect it previously had on the electorate. The Tories took a hammering at the local elections, and has naturally been held as an historic win by Stalin. Except that it was more a comment on how the electorate was fed up with the Tories than an overwhelming victory for Labour. According to some experts, by this measure Labour will be 28 seats short of a majority at the next general election. I seem also to recall polls that indicated that while people liked Labour, they didn’t like Starmer and didn’t think he was anywhere near as good a leader as whoever was the Tory prime minister at the time. And it’s obvious to see why. Starmer is deeply treacherous and untrustworthy, ditching nearly every pledge and promise he declared he believed in. He has done everything he could to purge the left with the usual smears of anti-Semitism. But his personal performance against the Tories has been dismal. For a long time he offered no alternative policies. His tactics seemed to be to wait for the Tories’ own failures and duplicity to catch up with them and then hope that the proles would vote Labour as the only alternative. This seems to have worked to a certain extent, but it also shows that the same tactics is failing to energise any enthusiasm for a Labour government. In fact, it’s put many people off.
Not that this necessarily bothers Starmer. As we’ve seen from the various coups and plots against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour right would prefer to destroy Labour than accept any return to socialism.
I got an invitation the other day from the Labour party to buy tickets so that I could meet Peter Mandelson at a special dinner in Swindon. It was a repeat of a similar dinner a little while ago, in which they Labour faithful were asked to buy tickets to a similar event to meet certain members of the party’s front bench. I didn’t want to go then. Not just because I couldn’t afford it, and am too sick to travel to Swindon anyway, but also because I objected to it in principle. The Labour party was set up by the trade unions and socialist parties to fight for working people. It should be funded from their subscriptions, not from corporate donations and dinners set up in emulation of the Tories.
And principle says I don’t want to meet Mandelson anyway. He was very clever as the party’s spin doctor and electoral strategist, but he and Blair prolonged Thatcherism well past its proper lifetime. It was Blair’s government that cut of benefits for asylum seekers and pushed them into detention centres, pushed NHS privatisation into high gear, and went about cheerfully outsourcing more state business, introduced the work capability tests, carried on with benefit sanctions, and was very enthusiastic about private management of prisons. Blair also took money from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen, thus ensuring his silence over that country’s flagrant human rights abuses. And then there was a little matter like the illegal war in Iraq. It was under Blair that the party turned away from its working class roots to appeal to middle class swing voters. They condescendingly expected Labour voters to go with it, as they had nowhere else to go. Hence the shock and outrage when Jeremy Corbyn started packing them out at halls, parks and sports grounds up and down Britain. Hence also the rise of UKIP, as White working class voters who felt they’d been abandoned by the both parties turned to Farage’s xenophobia and populism.
If I want to go and see someone from the Labour party, it’d be Richard Burgon, Jeremy Corbyn or that other dissident, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone. I’d go and see Rosina Allin-Khan, a woman of mixed Polish and Asian heritage, who’s a doctor working in the NHS and concerned, as so many are, about the state the Conservatives have reduced it to. I’d want to hear Black Activists Rising Against Cuts. I dare say they have takes on racism and White privilege that might annoy me, but austerity is hitting the Black community hardest, as is clear from a paper in the collection The Violence of Austerity. I’d go to see the head of Young Labour as she defies the leadership on issues like socialism and Israel.
I want proper, working people back leading the Labour party. I want to see a working mother tell her story about struggling to keep her family fed and their home heated on her and her partner’s wages. I want to hear former students tell how, despite their degree, their now mired in £40,000 worth of debt and are flipping burgers at McDonald’s for a living. I want to hear the people who volunteer at food banks about the starvation and privation they see. I want to see someone from Disabled People Against Cuts talk about how austerity, low wages and welfare cuts is affecting ordinary disabled folk. I want to see Jews like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker talk about Israeli atrocities and the sectarian anti-Semitic persecution to which they’ve been subjected. I want to see Alexei Sayle, shouty, foul-mouthed Sayle, make jokes about Communism and the Conservatives, celebrating and supporting real anti-racist activists like Marc Wadsworth.
I want to hear the voices of ordinary men and women stuck in dead-end jobs and zero hours contracts talking about their lives and how they can be improved. People on supermarket checkouts, cleaners, white-collar office workers, now being depressed into the rest of the proletariat. As for business, I only want to hear from the small business people, the Arkwrights, who run local stores and corner shops, who are being driven into the ground as the Tories and corporatist New Labour support big business and the supermarkets.
I want to hear from the elderly as they worry about pensions and issues like mobility, as well as the problems they experience as everything goes on line. Many of them don’t have a computer and don’t understand them. They have to rely on their children to sort some of this out for them. What if they haven’t had any, and don’t have younger friends and neighbours to help them?
I want the victims of the benefit agencies humiliations and sanctions regime to tear into that and the cruelty and self-interest of the clerks administering it.
These are the people, I’d pay to see. Not someone like Mandelson, Blair or Starmer, who seem to have only a nodding acquaintance with working people, and see them through the prism of voting and demographic documents with the cool, detached eye of the ad man. Not someone who patronises them with management-speak, who expects Labour grassroots activists and supporters to act as drones reading from specially prepared scripts.
I want that to end. I want it to have ended long ago, when Brown lost the election.
I want to see local MPs for local people, not right-wingers parachuted in against the wishes of ordinary voters.
Those are the real Labour party. Not Mandelson, Blair and Starmer. I want to see proper Labour activists at protests, picket lines and church halls. I don’t want to see corporate closet Tories across a dinner table.
According to the right, the left can’t meme. I beg to differ. Kernow Damo is a left-winger, who, as his name suggests, comes from Cornwall – Kernow in Cornish. Over the past couple of days he’s posted some excellent memes from himself and Agitate4Change. tearing apart Starmer’s lack of any principles and the vacuity of his five ‘missions’, as well as the biological level the Tory party is currently at.
Here’s his meme,taken from Agitate4Change, on Starmer threatening to give his five missions the same treatment he gave the principles he claimed to support when he fought the Labour leadership election:
And here’s his real principles.
This is true. According to some Labour insiders, Murdoch was an invisible presence at every cabinet meeting Blair held. And Gordon Brown, you’ll remember, flew to American to visit the Dirty Digger. Murdoch had supporter the Tories, but threw them overboard and switched to Labour, thus incurring the wrath of the doomed John Major. But it was too late by the time Major finally woke up and realised that giving Murdoch a near monopoly on the press gave him too much power. And Blair was all too willing to cave in to his demands in return for the support of his media empire.
Coarse, but accurate. Over the past forty years there’s been a massive transfer of wealth upwards – the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer, and the Tories and Thatcherism are solidly responsible for all of it.
I’ve also sent this email to my local MP asking her if she wants copies of my book and pamphlet. Smyth has said that she joined the Labour party because she was so concerned about what the Tories were doing to the NHS. I think she already worked for it. But she is a Starmerite, and so it will be interesting to see if she does want them.
Dear Karin,
Thank you for sending me your latest report ahead of this month’s CLP meeting on Thursday. I was also very impressed with your article defending the health service in last month’s South Bristol Voice. A few years ago I wrote a book and a pamphlet, which I was forced to publish myself, against the privatisation of the NHS. I’m writing to you to inquire if you would like copies of either one of them. Here’s a description of them.
Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.
If you want a copy of either of them, please let me know and I will send them to you.
I’m still trying to get people interested in my books attacking the privatisation of the NHS. A few days ago I sent this email to my local Labour party, Bristol South, asking if they would be interested in receiving copies of them.
‘Dear ,
Thank you for the email notifying me of February’s meeting next week. I am contacting you because, like so many other people, I am greatly concerned about the state of the health service and the threat of privatisation. This process has been going on for forty years since Margaret Thatcher, and in my opinion is responsible for the much of the dreadful state it’s now in. A few years ago I wrote a couple of self-published pieces of literature against it. One is a ten-page pamphlet and the other is a small book. I would very much like to know if the party would like to receive copies, which they could use for reference and for helping others to understand this threat.
Here is a description of the books.
‘Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.’
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.’
Yours with best wishes,
David Sivier’
I haven’t received a reply so far. I’ll let you all know if I get one.
I spent some time Saturday evening watching a couple of videos posted by the far right YouTube outfit, Correct, Not Political. One was of their man Jim walking around the demonstrators and supporters at Drag Queen Story Time in Colchester asking them awkward, ‘Socratic’ questions. The other was an interview between Jim and another fixture of the British far right, Godfrey Bloom. Both were weirdly interesting, but only for the light they cast on these two men’s conspiracist views. I’ve already written about how Correct, Not Political has the classic paranoid idea that the Masons are behind a massive conspiracy. His interview with Bloom, and the comments he made talking to some of the people in Colchester confirmed it. It also revealed him to be a mad anti-vaxxer who thinks they’re putting something in it to kill people as part of the WEF’s goal to reduce the human population on the planet.
The drag queen reading to the kids in Colchester was Edward Wilcox, who performs under the name ‘Ann Nemic’ or something similar. Talking to various members of the crowd, Jim said that ‘Nemic’ had been vaccinated twice, and given blood 92 times. He didn’t want to say too much, as he didn’t want his channel to be banned, but didn’t this tell you something. Er, yes. It demonstrates that he was like everyone else and did as the government and medical authorities advised. He got vaccinated to protect himself. As for giving blood 92 times, one of the women at the demonstration pointed out that it made him a good person and that surely you want people to give blood? His stage name also shows that he has a sense of humour: Ann Nemic/ anaemic. It doesn’t say anything more than that, unless you’re so paranoid you think he was actively trying to spread whatever it is in the vaccine which you think is a poison by donating his contaminated blood. Sadly, I think Jim really is that bonkers.
Looking at the crowd, he declared, ‘There isn’t half a lot of sodomy going on here!’ This was probably because they were quite a few gay people and people waving pride flags, not because gay men were having sex in the street. He then went round warning people that drag queen story hour was a plot to indoctrinate kids with gender ideology and abuse from paedophiles. Here he has a point. James Lindsay has read out a paper co-written by a drag queen and queer activist, which states that the purpose of these shows is to queer the children’s minds and upset gender norms. And yes, the founder of Queer Theory, Judith Butler, did support paedophilia and the breaking down of barriers between adult and child. But this doesn’t mean that every drag queen, library or school which stages these sessions holds such views or is even aware of their existence. They may just be doing it because they genuinely feel it is spreading tolerance towards gay and trans people whilst encouraging children to read. No more than that.
Walking around the demonstration was a bald bloke, who looked a bit like the Matt Lucas character George Daws, selling copies of the Socialist Worker. So Jim immediately called him a Communist, asked whether he was trying to get people to sign up for Communism, and then asked people to tell him if there was a country in which Communism had ever succeeded. Well, technically the man was a Trotskyite, which is a slightly different form of Marxism. And I actually agree with him in that there hasn’t been a country where Communism has been successful. China has been doing very well of late, but that’s also thanks to a capitalist component in its economy. But from where Britain stands at the moment, capitalism isn’t working very well either. Far from improving people’s living standards, they’re being lowered. However, the right haven’t given up the refrain that this generation has it far better than anyone else at any time in history, and capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than socialism has. The first part of that statement is utterly wrong, and the second needs serious qualifications.
The drag show, Jim said, was all about promoting equality. But this was equality under communism, where everyone didn’t have life equally good, but equally bad, except for those at the top. Again, this seems to come from critiques of the woke ideology from James Lindsay and the EDIJester. It’s certainly present in those ideologies, though its equity – equality of outcome – rather than equality of opportunity. There were a couple of examples of this in the American education system a month or so ago. One teacher, in the interest of equality, gave all her students an ‘A’. Another one just gave the average award to a series of excellent students, who actually deserved much higher marks to take them into one of the prestigious American universities to study science. This was eventually revealed after an inquiry and possibly legal action. I have yet to hear of a case like this in this country, however.
Jim also got shirty with the Trotskyite because the man called him a Fascist and a Nazi. Jim told him that was libel, to which the fellow rightly pointed out that it was slander, as he’d know if he’d actually had any knowledge of the law. As Jim has prefaced several of his livestreams with old footage of Oswald Mosley and the BUF, and that Mosley changed his benighted organisation’s name to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’, it could be said that what the man said was fair comment.
When someone asked who was behind this plot to corrupt Britain’s kids, Jim replied that, again he didn’t want to say too much, but it was the Freemasons, citing a couple of 19th century authors, who, he said, were themselves 33rd degree members of the brotherhood. I’ve forgotten just who they were, but their names rang a bell among the sources cited by those convinced of such a conspiracy. Finally, after bothering the good burghers of Colchester for about an hour, and nearly being assaulted by some particularly angry LGBTQ+ rights demonstrators, he went off in search of something to drink. Going through the town’s back streets, he complained about the number of ‘weirdos’ there were and that it was all coffee houses. Quite what he has against coffee houses I don’t know. Perhaps he was afraid that if he went inside, left-wing intellectuals would all jump on him like the characters in Fraser all those years ago.
His conspiracist views became much clearer in his conversation with Godfrey Bloom. Bloom announced himself has having been an investment banker for 40 years and at one time a member of the defence council or something like that. He was thus well-placed to know that capitalism was about to collapse. Actually, there’s a Marxist economics professor on YouTube, Richard Wolf, who has being saying exactly the same thing. And if it hadn’t been for Brown in 2008, I’m sure it would have collapsed. The two then shared their views on the World Economic Forum wishing to depopulate the planet, set up Green Communism and make us all eat bugs. The WEF has captured all our institutions, including the monarchy. Prince Philip also believed there were too many people on the planet. Well, the late Duke of Edinburgh was the head of the World Wide Fund for Nature, so his views are hardly a surprise. The WEF are Malthusians, which means that they believe that population always outstrips the supply of available food, as suggested by the 19th century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus and his followers believed that when this happened, starvation and war would inevitably result. In order to prevent this, they recommended birth control and were active promoting contraception. As did the Duke, who on one of his official visits to some tribe showed the men how to put on a condom using a spear. However, the WEF were going much further and planning to wipe out a sizable chunk of humanity using a manufactured disease or its vaccine. Those who survived would be under the WEF’s new communist order.
This made me wonder if Jim knew about the wretched views of the late zookeeper John Aspinall, best known for his big cats killing and mauling people. Aspinall also believed that there were too many people around. He said the British population should be only eight million. However, he definitely wasn’t a communist of any description. He declared that what the country needed was a ‘counterrevolution, Francoist in spirit.’ So his green views were closer to Hitler’s than the WEF. And almost certainly pretty close to Jim’s and Bloom’s.
Correct, Not Political’s Jim therefore seems to have read or watched much material about the woke ideology, especially Queer Theory, and mixed this up with old conspiracy theories about the masons. I also think there might be a touch of anti-Catholicism in their as well. When he was voicing his objections to drag queens reading to children as getting them used to nonces, one woman asked him about Roman Catholic priests abusing children. He didn’t agree with that, either, but said he didn’t agree with established religions as ‘they’re from Satan’. But some of the other things he has said, and they’re nothing I can put a precise finger on, suggests that he might have the same conspiracist views about the Catholic church, which is supposed to be doing the work of the antichrist, as some as the bigoted Protestant writers of the 19th century.
Correct, Not Political aren’t physically violent, and while Jim’s sneers about socialism are irritating, he personally has an affable manner. I can’t say that they present a physical danger, unlike National Action or the BNP, for example. What is dangerous is the mad anti-vaxxer views and the deranged paranoia about the WEF, which he also shares with the Lotus Eaters, Alex Jones and any number of others on the right. And these views are a danger to democratic politics, if only because the undermine proper democratic views in favour of suspicion and paranoia.
With the NHS crisis the Tories the Tories have created, the sharks really are circling in the water. Nana Akua of GB News seems to be one of those plugging its privatisation, along with broadcaster, stalker and jailbird Alex Belfield. And now they’ve been joined by Our Favourite Internet (non)Historian, Simon Webb. He put up a post this morning with the title ‘What’s So Bad About Privatising the NHS?’ It’s short, but I haven’t watched it on the grounds that I’d find it too infuriating. Webb is, of course, far right, and seems to get most of his views from the Torygraph, which has also been pushing this nonsense. As someone who takes history seriously, Webb should know what an immense difference the NHS and the welfare state made to the lives of ordinary Brits. I’ve blogged about it, citing my sources. But some of those I’ve used were by social worker types, the kind of people the Tory party has been trying to discredit for donkey’s years, and so someone like Webb would simply ignore them out of hand. But I’ve also used books from the time looking forward to the foundation of the NHS, as well as Jackie Davis’ and Ray Tallis’ excellent NHS – SOS. In contrast to what the privatisers will tell you, private healthcare is not more efficient. It’s less. Private hospitals are smaller, and in order to make a profit private healthcare largely ignores the long-term sick in order to concentrate on people who are mostly well. When private healthcare companies have taken over doctors’ surgeries in this country, they’ve closed down those they consider unprofitable, leaving thousands without a doctor. Also, private healthcare spends a large proportion of their running costs on administration, so as a consequence these costs have risen in the NHS as a consequence of its privatisation.
At the moment there seems to be a trend among the political class to be looking at the continental healthcare systems, where medical costs are paid by a mixture of state and private health insurance. But this also neglects the simple fact that these countries also spend much more on their healthcare generally than we do. The privatisation of the NHS won’t improve healthcare, but it will give private healthcare firms the support of the state sector, which is what they want.
And it seems to me that what the Tories really want is a completely private healthcare system, funded by private health insurance, like America. And that really would be disastrous. Except for their corporate friends, of course, who would get all those great profits.
A few years ago I wrote a book and a pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. Here’s their description. The pamphlets are available from me, if you want one, while the book’s available from Lulu.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.
Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.
Here’s the video I made years ago for my book against the privatisation of the health service.
I also put up this video, which only four people have watched, asking people to vote Labour to defend the NHS. I hope people will, as some Labour MPs will defend it. But I’m not at all sure about Starmer.
Okay, a few years ago – I was when Cameron was in power – I was so worried about NHS privatisation that I wrote a couple of pieces of literature about it. One was just a pamphlet consisting of a few pieces of A4 folded together giving the main points about NHS privatisation and how it was killing the health service. Another was a short book, Privatisation: Killing the NHS, which I self-published through Lulu, the print on demand service. Since doing so, I’ve had next to zero interest in them. I have a page about them on this blog. Simply go to the relevant bar, and look at ‘pages’ and you’ll find them there, along with other books I’ve self-published. Here’s the pieces about them from that page.
Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.
If you would like one of the pamphlets, please get in touch using the contact form below. All details will of course be kept strictly confidential, and will not be passed on to third parties. If you only want single copies of the above, let me know and I’ll post them free to you.’
Now with the NHS facing a truly devastating crisis and the Tory and hard-right sharks circling and demanding its privatisation, I want to get these out to as many people as possible. And I’d be grateful for any ideas.
Of course, one way would simply be to have multiple copies of these pamphlets printed off and to set up a stall in town, and especially right when there’s a strike. But I only have a very small number of copies of the books around at the moment. Also, the myeloma means that I am not as mobile as I once was, and the council and bus companies in their infinite wisdom have cut the direct route from where I live into the centre of Bristol. But I’m hoping this might still be an option.
For the self-published book, one solution might be to go to see the buyer for my local branch of Waterstone’s and see if they would be interested in stocking it.
I’m also considering writing to my local Labour party and asking if they would be interested in stocking them, as well as contacting my local Labour MP to see if she would also like copies. I’m hesitant to do this, however, as I put the blame firmly where it lies – not just with Thatcher and the Tories, but also with Blair and New Labour. Kier Starmer is a true-blue Thatcherite and devoted follower of Blairism. He has said some ominous things about using the private sector to aid the NHS, even though it’s due to privatisation, as well as underfunding, that is responsible for this crisis. The local MP for south Bristol, Karen Smyth, is very firmly on the side of the health service, but she’s also an admirer of Starmer. Reading her messages about the health service, while she says much about how it’s been run down, she doesn’t condemn outsourcing. I can therefore see the pamphlets being extremely unwelcome in certain right-wing Labour circles.
Beyond this, any suggestions?
I’d be interested to know if there are any left-wing organisations that would be willing to accept copies of the book and pamphlet and/or publicise them. I’ve tried looking on Google for small press associations and organisations that might be suitable, but none have so far turned up. One possibility could be contacting some of the left-wing news and comment sites on YouTube and the Internet, but I’m not sure how willing they’d be to say anything about them. I haven’t had much luck in the past when I sent some of my literature to the Canary and a few others.
If you therefore have any ideas, please let me know in the comments section below.
The very right wing That Preston Journalist has taken time off from sniping and criticising Nicola Sturgeon, and instead fixed his sights on Keir Starmer. Earlier this evening he posted a video stating very clearly that Starmer was a Tory. The thumbnail for this is a meme which shows a rubber plant on one side, and a Tory plant, Starmer, on the other. It’s very short, just 1 minute 44 seconds. The Journalist’s reason for calling Starmer a Tory was the Labour leader’s statement that the NHS needed reform. Although met with a chorus of criticism, Preston Man believes this is glaringly obvious. I agree. It is obvious, and the real solution would be to renationalise it and clear out the private medical companies and advisors who are a waste of money. But unfortunately I suspect this is not Starmer’s view, and that he really wants to follow his wretched, squalid hero Tony Blair and push the health service’s privatisation even further. But Preston Hack also believes that Starmer’s a Tory because of what he said about being fiscally prudent. Starmer stated that he was against austerity, had always been against austerity, but in government they would be careful about expenditure. They would be prudent. This, you will remember, was Gordon Brown’s mantra when he was chancellor: ‘We will be prudent’. He said this so often that according to Private Eye the assembled gentlemen and women of the press started calling him Dear Prudence after the Beatles song. Personally, I preferred ‘Help’ and ‘Helter Skelter’. As a Chancellor, who kept tight control of expenditure in order to avoid the boom and bust cycle, Brown was successful. That is until the bankers went berserk and almost destroyed capitalism. Brown prevented it by injecting our own reserves, for which he’s been blamed for wrecking our economy. But I really believe there would have been global financial collapse if he hadn’t.
And it remains the case that the bankers’ disastrous antics were exploited by the Tories, keen to push through austerity and punish ordinary people in the name of further enriching the superrich. But we were all in it together, as Cameron lied.
The trouble is, Blair and Brown were both neoliberal pushing through Tory policies of privatisation and welfare cuts. Moreover, by the time Brown got his feet into No. 10, New Labour had outlived any popularity with the British public. They were fed up with its managerialism, the spin, the condescension towards working class voters, Blair’s warmongering, the cuts to welfare services and hospital closures. I think Brown also put people off with his surly demeanour, although how much of that was real and how much an false image manufactured by the right-wing press is open to debate. He did not himself no favours by referring to an elderly lady, objecting to eastern European immigrants, as ‘some bigot’ when he thought the camera and microphone were off. But I think this may have been the last nail in his electoral coffin.
But back to Starmer, it really does look to me that once he’s in power, it’s going to be Blairite Tory politics as normal. Some of the great commenters here have suggested that the best policy would be to get him into power then bash him. At the moment, I think that is the best policy, considering that there are no alternatives and another round of Tory government would destroy this country. But I am not optimistic about Starmer’s government.
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