Tory NHS Lies Now Too Much for Private Eye

The colossal lies put out by the Tory party about building new hospitals, recruiting new nurses, and expanding the number of GP appointments have been ripped to shreds by leftwing bloggers and news and comment sites like Mike’s, Zelo Street and many, many others. And it seems Private Eye now shares that highly critical views. On page 7 of their latest edition for 29th November to 12th December 2019 there’s this little article, ‘Tory Story’. It runs

It’s hard to rank the Conservative’s NHS pledges in order of ridiculousness.

“40 new hospitals”, but only six existing refurbs named and costed; 50,000 new nurses – when 19,000 of them are already employed by the NHS which is already 40,000 nurses short; or 50m more GP appointments when the number of GPs has fallen despite a previous failed pledge to recruit another 5,000. But dwarfing all of these is the absurd pledge that no one will have to sell their house to fund social care, with nothing in their manifesto to explain how.

In other words, the last is yet another empty Tory election promise that they’ve no intention of keeping. This seems to be a bit of a volte face on the part of Eye’s editor, Ian Hislop. I can remember him making a sarcastic comment about Labour’s opposition to people having to pay for their social care on I Have I Got News For You. Possibly something changed in the meantime, and one of Hislop’s relatives is now having to face the possibility of selling their home to pay for it.

Either way, it shows that people are realising that the Tories’ lies about improving the NHS are just that – lies. While they privatise it.

Majority of GPsTrust Labour to Support NHS

Yesterday’s I newspaper also carried some very interesting and important news in an article by Paul Gallagher. The article ‘GPs ‘shifting support to Lib Dems’ is mainly about the majority of GPs supporting the Liberal Democrats rather than Labour or the Tories. But the really important stuff is in the last paragraph, where it reports

But Labour remained the party GPs believed would look after the NHS – 30 per cent trusted Labour, 20 per cent opted for the Liberal Democrats and 14 per cent chose the Conservatives. Some 30 per cent chose “none of the above”.

This follows the Tories promising that they will increase spending on the NHS by £20bn a year by 23-4, Labour stating it would be £26 bn a year and the Fib Dems that they would increase it by £35 bn over the next five years. Apparently only 20 per cent of GPs say the will vote Tory at the next election, whereas 30 per cent said they would at the last one. Support for Labour was also down 10 per cent. 31 per cent of GPs had said they would vote Labour at the last election, but now it’s only 21 per cent. 31 per cent of GPs, however, say they will vote Lib Dem, up from 19 per cent at the last election. This is according to a survey conducted by GPonline.

A few remarks on this. Firstly, this poll only records the way those GPs, who responded to the survey said they would vote. These may unrepresentative of the great majority of GPs for various reasons. For example, the GPs, who replied are obviously those with the time and motivation to vote. Others may be too busy or otherwise not motivated.

Secondly, it shows that the Lib Dems have eaten into the Labour vote through Jo Swinson presenting herself as a progressive alternative to Labour’s extremism and anti-Semitism. But this is a mistake. Labour is neither anti-Semitic nor extreme. Corbyn’s policies are simply a return to the social democratic consensus which delivered over three decades of prosperity and economic growth after the War. And the Lib Dems are not in any way progressive. Jo Swinson consistently voted with the Conservative government, far more so than many leading members of the Tory party. She fully supported the swingeing welfare cuts, the privatisation of the NHS, the bedroom tax and other Tory attacks on the poor and vulnerable. How progressive is someone really, who wants to put up a statue to Margaret Thatcher? Clearly she isn’t, and only 2 per cent more of her party support Remain than Labour. As she seems ready to do a deal with the Tories and go into coalition with them as he predecessor Nick Clegg did, rather than support Corbyn, it seems that she personally only regards supporting Remain as a temporary electoral strategy. If there’s a hung parliament, you can bet she’ll be round Johnson like a shot pledging her support.

I also feel that belief in the Labour party as the true supporters of the NHS would be higher, if Blair’s new Labour hadn’t been so determined to privatise it through the introduction of privately run health centres, the award of contracts to private healthcare firms, including GP services, and the introduction of the Community Care Groups, who were empowered to raise funds through private enterprise and contract in private services. It’s these Blairite policies, which spring from Blair’s own Thatcherism, that Corbyn intends to remove.

The real message, for anyone who genuinely prizes our NHS, is that only Corbyn’s Labour party can be trusted with it. Not Johnson, not Swinson, just Corbyn. 

The Wretched State of Modern Ghost Hunting

I spent Saturday with friends at a conference on the paranormal by ASSAP at the University of Bath. ASSAP are one of the old school ghosthunting/ paranormal investigation societies. They were formed 30 or so years ago to investigate spontaneous cases occurring in the outside world, as opposed to the laboratory based approach of the Society for Psychical Research. The SPR itself has been going for over a century now, and was founded by serious, prominent scientists, philosophers and intellectuals in the Victorian period to investigate the-then new phenomenon of Spiritualism. This raised the question of whether there was an afterlife and there were hidden powers of the mind, like telepathy, telekinesis and so on. I realise that this is very much fringe science, and to many people it’s unscientific nonsense. But these societies really are rigorously scientific in their approach to studying the paranormal. Many of their members and active officials are qualified and practising scientists, medical professionals, engineers and IT specialists, as well as academics from other disciplines, like history, anthropology and so on. In their investigations they formulate and apply the methods of science. Phenomena are thoroughly investigated, and only after natural explanations have been ruled out is it suggested that whatever strange events have occurred may be supernatural. That can mean long nights in supposedly haunted houses sitting quietly bored waiting for something to happen. They also have a strict code of conduct to regulate dealing with scared, vulnerable people. And this means not dabbling with things that are well outside their competence, such as people’s mental or physical health. There was a fascinating panel discussion with five leading investigators. And one of the issues they discussed was this. One panel member said that he had one person from a case he was investigating phone him up worried, as the ghost had started scratching them. He promptly advised them to see their GP as he was not qualified to investigate that. There are clear ethical issues involved, and the professionals make sure that they protect and look after the welfare of the people experiencing the haunting or whatever.

All of this contrasts very strongly with the approach of many of the contemporary ghosthunting groups. One of the talks I attended was by a female Ph.D. student, discussing why she no longer considers herself a ghosthunter. She very definitely was a ghosthunter, it must be said, but her old school approach was far too different from that of most of the ghosthunting groups that were now around. She stated at the outset that she wasn’t trying to shame or embarrass anyone. She was just trying to show what it was like now. And it was grim.

If she was correct, then contemporary ghosthunting is not driven by the goals and methods of science. ASSAP, the SPR and the other, older paranormal societies contain both believers and sceptics. These new societies were composed almost solely of believers, who were determined to obtain evidence. They were also very much creatures of today’s media-driven culture. They had their websites, on which they put up the video footage they believed they had obtained, which demonstrated paranormal activity. They also had their own merchandising, such a T-shirts and caps bearing their group’s logos. Quiet, scientific investigation was out. In old school investigations, things tend to be calm and quiet, with everyone knowing where everyone else is. In these investigations, there’s much excitement with people running around here and there. They are keen to have scientific equipment, like EMF meters. These register changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. But they don’t know how to use them. They’ll also have tape recorders in order to record any voices from the spirits. However, most of the time these record simply noise, and so they spend their time messing around with them trying not just to clean them up, but effectively editing the tape so it produces what they want to hear. The speaker said that these groups were strongly influenced by programmes like Most Haunted, where there was a lot of running about, a lot of excitement, and people got possessed. She showed one tweet from a group, which said they had had a quiet night. They had only encountered two spirits and a third had chased them home. This, she said, beat all the quiet times she had on investigations in haunted locations where absolutely zip happened.

They were also completely irresponsible with the members of the public they dealt with. One family were frightened to go up in their attack after they were told by the investigators that there was a demon up there, ’cause they’d caught it laughing on tape. Yes, it did sound like someone laughing. However, the sound was eventually revealed to be due to plumbing, rather than the paranormal. Another family made £10,000 worth of alterations to their property after another medium told them that they had a portal to the underworld. Yet another family were scared to go back to their house after a medium told them they also had a portal to the underworld. She wasn’t capable of dealing with it. She could, she said, give them an address of a shaman, but he had moved away. She made the point that this was incredibly irresponsible. She’d frightened these people, and then left with them with it.

She was also pessimistic about what could be done about this problem. It’s the hope of groups like ASSAP and the SPR that someday parapsychology will be given its due respect as a genuine scientific discipline. But there seems to be little chance of this with the field dominated by this new kind of ghosthunter. They were keen to defend the reality of the paranormal, and any criticism was met with the accusation that the critic was a ‘hater’, who should be ignored. This meant that the sceptics were even more determined to disparage and ignore parapsychology. The speaker had hoped that these groups would die out, but they seemed to multiply and breed like viruses.

It was a fascinating, if dispiriting – no pun intended – talk, and I really don’t know what can be done about this situation. The speaker said she didn’t want to shame anyone, as these groups genuinely believe that what they’re doing is right. Perhaps. But if they’re making ordinary people terrified in their own homes, then clearly they’re a menace. Listening to her, it struck me that ‘ghosthunting’ in the traditional sense was very much a misnomer for these people. They’re actually legend trippers. ‘Legend tripping’ is the term folklorists use to describe the practice of people, mostly youngsters, going to a haunted or supposedly paranormal location, in order to experience something weird. Quite often they also have an ulterior motive as well, as they’ll often bring alcohol and their girlfriends. I am not saying that these groups are also there to drink and have a bit of romance, but they do seem to show the same mindset as those seeking to experience the paranormal on legend trips.

But if these groups dominate ghosthunting now, perhaps there is still some hope. Possibly that style of ghosthunting may fall out of fashion, even though it hasn’t done so far. What I think groups like ASSAP can do is carry on with their thorough, scientific investigations and make sure that these are given due prominence, in the hope that their influence will carry. Hopefully, a few, at least, of the other groups may get the message of how to investigate the paranormal properly.

Don’t Let Theresa May Privatise the NHS

This is the text of one of the self-published, table-top produced pamphlets I created a few years ago, and which are advertised on one of the other pages of this blog.

As you can see, it was written a year or so ago when David Cameron was in power. Nevertheless, it is still as valid now as it was then. Theresa May has not changed the Tory policy of privatising the NHS one whit.

So, please, read this article, and then vote for Jeremy Corbyn to preserve this most precious of British institutions.

Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS
David Sivier

Visiting our local health centre the other day, my parents, along with the other local people enrolled there, were handed a letter, explaining that due to funding cuts the health centre was having to cut back on services. It also advised its patients that if they wanted to raise their concerns about the restriction in their service they could contact:-

1. NHS England at FAO Linda Prosser, Director of Assurance and Delivery, NHS England South West (BNSSG), 4th floor Plaza, Marlborough Street, Bristol BS1 3NX
2. your local MP at the House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1A 0AA

Unfortunately, this is happening to the NHS and GPs’ services all over the country. It is no accident, and it is certainly not the fault of the many dedicated doctors, nurses and other health professionals working in the NHS.
It is the result of over 30 years of privatisation begun with Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher and her former Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, denied that they wanted to privatise the NHS. They merely stated that they wanted to include more private provision in the NHS. This is a lie. Released cabinet minutes showed that Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe wanted to privatise the NHS along with abolishing the rest of the welfare state. They were only prevented from doing so because the rest of the cabinet realised that this would be the death knell for the Tory party. And a fact-finding mission to the US to see how their private healthcare system worked by Patrick Jenkin showed that it was massively inefficient.

Nevertheless, the amount of private healthcare in the NHS was expanded, and state provision duly cut by successive governments. It was Maggie’s government in 1989 that ended the state support for care for the elderly in nursing homes. As a result, the families of those, who need this kind of care, are forced to fund it themselves, often through selling or remortgaging their homes because of the immense expense. It was also Maggie’s government that ended free eye tests, and picked a feud with the doctors that saw the majority of them leave the NHS.

This privatisation has continued under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and now David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt. Blair and Brown were deeply impressed with American private healthcare firms such as Kaiser Permanente, and wished to reform the NHS on their model. The ultimate intention was to replace the publicly owned and operated NHS with private healthcare funded by the state, but administered by private health insurance companies. As a result, NHS work has been given to private hospitals and clinics, and private healthcare companies have been given NHS hospitals to manage. Alan Milburn, Blair’s health secretary, wanted the NHS to become merely a kitemark – an advertising logo – on a system of private healthcare companies funded by the government.

This has been carried on the current Conservative government. And they have used the same tactics Margaret Thatcher did to force private healthcare on this nation. The dispute with the doctors over contracts a few years ago was part of this. It has left the majority of NHS GPs wishing to leave. Yet elements within the Conservative networks responsible for foisting these demands have seen this as an opportunity for forcing through further privatisation. Penny Dash, of the National Leadership Network, and one of those responsible for the NHS privatisation, has looked forward to the remaining GPs forming private healthcare companies. Furthermore, an report on the Care Commissioning Groups now in charge of arranging healthcare in the NHS by one of the private healthcare companies also suggested that they could form private healthcare companies, and float shares on the stockmarket.

Further privatisation has come with Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care bill of 2012. This exempts the state and the Secretary of State for Health from their statutory duty, as the ultimate leaders of the NHS, to provide state health care. It is carefully worded to disguise its true meaning, but that is what has been intended by the bill. Dr David Owen, one of the founders of the SDP, now part of the Lib Dems, has tabled amendments trying to reverse this despicable bill. He and many others have also written books on the privatisation of the NHS. One of the best of these is NHS SOS, by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis, published by Oneworld.
This process cannot be allowed to continue, and I strongly urge everyone to resist the creeping privatisation of the NHS, Britain’s greatest public institution.

In the last government, there were 92 Conservative and Lib Dem ministers, who advocated the privatisation of the Health Service, and who stood personally to gain from it. They included Iain Duncan Smith, the minister for culling the poor, the sick and the old. Andrew Lansley, the health minister, openly stated he is in favour of privatising it. So has Nigel Farage, and the Unterkippergruppenfuhrer, Paul Nuttall.

Farage in particular follows the Tory policy going all the way back to Thatcher of promising to defend it while secretly plotting how to sell it off. Thatcher ‘s review into the NHS and its funding in the 1980s. so alarmed Labour’s Robin Cook, that he wrote a Fabian pamphlet, Life Begins at 40: In Defence of the NHS, attacking possible proposals to privatise the Health Service.

Previous reviews had given the NHS a clean bill of health. The extremely high quality of the NHS and its doctors was recognised by the heads of American healthcare firms: Dr Marvin Goldberg, chief executive of the AMI health group, told a parliamentary select committee that the Health Service Provides ‘outstanding health care and British NHS hospitals are at least as good as those in America while British doctors are better.’

The then Conservative MP for Newbury, Michael McNair-Wilson, also testified to the effectiveness of the NHS. He had suffered kidney failure. He had private health insurance, but it did not cover operations such as the one he needed because of the expense. He said ‘I have cost the NHS tens of thousands of pounds – much more than I could have afforded privately … Had my treatment depended on my ability to pay, I would not be alive today.’

Pre-NHS Britain: Some Areas Completely Without Hospitals

Cook’s pamphlet also graphically described the patchwork state of healthcare in Britain before the NHS. In London, where there were plenty of paying customers, there could be hospitals in neighbouring streets. Out in the poorer British provinces, there were hardly any, and many operations were carried out not by surgeons but by GPs. He cites Julian Tudor Hart’s book, A New Kind of Doctor, to show how bad this could be. Hart described how he joined one of those practices in Kettering. One patient was left under anaesthetic as the London specialist operating on him was called away to continue a stomach operation on a London patient, which the operating GP had been unable to complete.
Cook was deeply concerned that the Tories’ review would not be at all interested in improving quality, only in opening up the NHS to the market and privatisation.

Cook on Private Health Insurance

One of the issues he tackled in the pamphlet was the possibility of the introduction of private health insurance. This covers two pages and a column and a bit in the original pamphlet. This is what he wrote, though emphases and paragraph titles are mine.

The mechanism proposed to square the incompatibility of health care with the market is insurance. All market approaches to the NHS submitted to the Review stress the case for much wider private insurance and almost as frequently propose subsidies to boost it.

Insurance-Based Systems Encourage Expensive Treatment

The first thing to be said is that private insurance does not offer
to health care the alleged benefits of the discipline of the market place. At the point when the individual requires treatment he or she has already paid the premiums and has no incentive not to consume as expensive a treatment as can be reconciled with the policy. The position of the doctor is even more prejudiced in that he or she has every incentive to obtain as much as possible from the insurance company by recommending the most expensive treatment. Both patient and the doctor are in a conspiracy to make the consultation as costly as possible, which is a perverse outcome for a proposal frequently floated by those who claim to be concerned about cost control.

Insurance-Based Systems Encourage Unnecessary Surgery

The compulsion in an insurance-based system to maximise the rate of return is the simple explanation why intervention surgery is so much more often recommended in the United States. For example, the incidence of hysterectomy there is four times the British rate. This is unlikely to reflect higher morbidity rates but much more likely to reflect the greater willingness of doctors on a piece-work basis to recommend it, despite the operative risks and in the case of this particular operation the documented psychological trauma. I can guarantee that an expansion of private insurance will certainly meet the objective on increasing expenditure on health care, but it is not equally clear that the money will be spent effectively.

Insurance-Based Systems Require Expensive bureaucracy to Check Costs

One direct diversion of resources imposed by any insurance-based scheme is the necessity for accountants and clerks and lawyers to assess costs and process claims. The NHS is routinely accused of excessive bureaucracy, frequently I regret to say by the very people who work within it and are in a position to know it is not true. Expenditure in the NHS is lower as a proportion of budget than the health system of any other nation, lower as a proportion of turnover
than the private health sector within Britain, and come to that, lower than the management costs of just about any other major enterprise inside or outside the public sector. I am not myself sure that this is a feature of which we should be proud. ON the contrary it is evidence of a persistent undermanaging of the NHS, which is largely responsible for its failure to exploit new developments in communication, cost control and personnel relations. Nevertheless, there is no more pointless expansion of administrative costs than the dead-weight of those required to police and process and insurance-based system. These costs would be considerable.

Forty per cent of personal bankruptcies in the US are attributable to debts for medical care

Part of this additional cost burden is incurred in the task of hunting down bad debts, which does not contribute in any way to the provision of health care. Forty per cent of personal bankruptcies in the US are attributable to debts for medical care, a salutary reminder of the limitations set to insurance cover. These limitations have three dimensions.

Insurance Cover Excludes Chronic and Long-Term Sick, and the Elderly

First, insurance cover generally excludes those conditions which are chronic and therefore expensive or complicated and therefore expensive. Standard exclusions in British insurance policies are arthritis, renal dialysis, multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy. Most people do not require substantial medical care until after retirement. Most insurance cover excludes the very conditions for which they are then most likely to require treatment. Short of retirement, the most expensive health care required by the majority of the population is maternity care, which is also excluded by the majority of insurance policies.

Private Healthcare Limits Amount of Care due to Cost, not Need

Secondly, insurance cover is generally restricted by upper limits which are arbitrary in every sense other than financial. I recently met a psychiatric consultant to a private clinic, who was prepared to discuss candidly the ethical dilemmas of treating patients whose financial cover is fixed at five weeks of residential care, but whose response to treatment may indicate that a longer period of hospitalisation is desirable.

Private Health Care Geared to Selling to Healthy not Sick

Thirdly, insurance cover is further limited by exclusion of those most likely to claim on it. I am often struck at the sheer healthiness of the patients who illustrate the promotional literature of BUPA and PPP who appear in such pink of good cheer and fitness that it is difficult to figure out why they are in a hospital bed. These models are though in a sense most suitable for the purpose as the objective of insurance companies is to attract the healthy. They therefore claim the right to screen for the unhealthy and reject them from cover. This discriminatory approach was defended earlier this month by the managing director of WPA, Britain’s third biggest health insurer, on the principled grounds that it meant ‘essentially healthy people are not penalised by unhealthy people.’ This statement has the advantage of originality in that it perceives healthy people as the vulnerable group and proposes a market remedy that protects them from the inconvenient costs of the unhealthy.
Given this limited character of health insurance in Britain, the private sector is patently not in a position to substitute for the NHS and to be fair most directors of BUPA or PPP would be horrified at the notion of accepting the comprehensive, open-ended liabilities of the NHS. It is therefore perplexing that so much effort in and around the Review appears to be addressed to the issue of how the private sector may be expanded rather than how the public sector may be improved. Two major devices are being canvassed to boost private cover-tax relief on private cover or opt-out from public cover, or for all I know both of them together. Both would be a major mistake.

Tax Relief on Private Healthcare

Tax relief is open to the obvious objection that it targets help most on those who need it least – the healthy who are most likely to be accepted for private cover and the wealthy whose higher tax rates make relief most vulnerable. These are curious priorities for additional health expenditure.

Tax Relief Does Not Create Higher Spending on Health Care

Moreover, even in its own terms of stimulating higher spending on health, tax relief is likely to prove an ineffective mechanism. If for example the average premium is £200 pa the cost of tax relief for 6 million insured persons will be £300 million. The numbers under insurance need to increase by a third before the increased spending on premiums matches the cost of the subsidy and provides any net increase in health spending. Up to that point it will always produce a larger rise in health spending to increase the budget of the NHS by a sum equivalent to the cost of tax relief.

It is apparently being mooted that these objections could be circumvented by limiting the tax relief to the elderly. At this point the proposal moves from the perverse to the eccentric. This restriction targets help for private insurance on the very group for whom private cover is most inappropriate as their most likely health needs are the ones most likely to be excluded from cover. Only a moment’s reflection is required on the multiple ways in which we need to expand our health provision for the elderly to expose the hopeless irrelevance of tax relief as the solution for them.

Opt-Out Penalises those who Remain in the System

Opt-out is even more objectionable. The basic problem with opt-out is that it requires the payment towards the NHS of every individual to be expressed in a manner that gives him or her something to opt-out from. The principal attraction to Leon Brittan of his proposal for an NHS insurance contribution appeared to be precisely that it paved the way for opting out (A New Deal for Health Care, Conservative Political Centre,, 1988). Nor is this inconvenience confined to the need for a whole new element in the tax system. If one in ten of the population chose to opt out, it would be remaining nine out of ten who would have to prove they were not opted-out when they went along to seek treatment. With the new contributions comes a requirement to maintain a record of payment of them, and presumably a mechanism for credits to those not in work but who do not wish to be counted has having opted out of the NHS.

Private Healthcare Undermine NHS as Universal System

The more fundamental objection both these proposals is they explicitly threaten the NHS as universal health service catering for everyone. Moreover, they threaten its universality in the worst possible way, by encouraging those with higher incomes and lower health needs to get out, leaving behind the less affluent and the less fit. In this respect such an approach to the NHS would be a piece with the Government’s strategy of erosion towards the rest of the social services-housing, pensions, and now education, where the Government has encouraged those who could afford it to opt-out of public provision, leaving behind the poor who could be expected to put6 up with a poor service.

This is the reality of the private healthcare system which Cameron, Clegg, Farage and the rest of the Right wish to introduce. It is expensive, bureaucratic, does not stimulating further spending, and excludes those with the most acute and expensive medical need, especially the elderly.
And the Tories and their counterparts in UKIP and the Lib Dems know it. Why else would the Tories spend their time trying to deny what they’re doing? Why does Farage appear to be advocating retaining the NHS, while arguing for an insurance based system, like America? It’s because they know that private medicine does not provide the solutions they claim. It is only source of further enrichment to them and their corporate donors.

And since Cook wrote that pamphlet, more than 20 per cent of all Americans can no longer afford their healthcare. It’s why the firms are trying to get their feet under the table over here. Don’t let them. Ed Miliband and now Jeremy Corbyn have promised to reverse the privatisation of the NHS. Please support them.

Healthcare in America: Republican Politico Urges People to Save Money by Not Taking Children to Hospital

Since Maggie Thatcher, the privatisers and Neoliberals in all three parties have been keen to privatise and remodel the NHS at least partly on the American private healthcare model. This clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report shows just how pernicious this model, and the politicians who defend and promote it, are. Seder here comments on a speech by a Republican member of the House of Representatives, Bill Huizinga, in which he recommended that people worried about their healthcare costs could cut down on them by not seeking medical help immediately until after they were sure it was necessary. Representative Huizinga tells the story about how he waited until the next day to take his son to the A&E department of his local hospital, after the lad broke his arm falling off a trampoline.

Seder rips into this stupid attitude by making it very plain how dangerous it is. Huizinga seems to regard patients as ‘customers’. They aren’t. They are people who require medical care, and in many cases don’t have the luxury of shopping around for the lowest price. The time taken to do this, instead of getting the patient treated, could be decisive, such as in cases of head injury and concussion.

Seder also makes the point about the racism in the way Huizinga’s story was blandly accepted. If a Black parent had said that they hadn’t taken their child to the hospital, because they didn’t know if they could afford it, it’s very likely that social services would intervene. They’d have their child taken into care and be denounced as bad parents. But Huizinga has got away with this, ’cause he’s White and middle class.

However grotesque this, it is the choice faced by millions of Americans. About 20 per cent of the US population cannot afford their healthcare. And I was told by a friend that it’s not uncommon for elderly citizens suffering terminal illness to forgo palliative care in order to save money to pass on to their families.

This is what’s coming to Britain if and when May and Hunt have their way and sell off the NHS. And it did happen here before the establishment of the National Health Service. GPs were in private practice, and although successive Liberal governments introduced some state insurance coverage, this only covered the wage earner. And so many people, particularly women, did not go to the doctor except when they were seriously ill, as they could not afford it.

This is another instance where women are going to be particularly hard hit by the government’s attacks on the welfare state. Despite all the verbiage about making politics and industry more representative, with more women and people from ethnic minorities, and opening up more jobs to women and girls, it has been traditionally female jobs that have been the hardest hit by the Tories’ austerity campaign. And there is the pay gap between women and men, so that if the Tories bring in private insurance contributions into the NHS, as they and the Blairites would like, it will be women who’ll have the least insurance coverage.

Get them and their Lib Dem enablers out. Only Jeremy Corbyn has made it clear that he will protect the NHS from further privatisation.

NHS Privatisation: Cuts to My Local Health Centre

Visiting our local health centre the other day, my parents, along with the other local people enrolled there, were handed a letter, explaining that due to funding cuts the health centre was having to cut back on services. It also advised its patients that if they wanted to raise their concerns about the restriction in their service they could contact:-

1. NHS England at FAO Linda Prosser, Director of Assurance and Delivery, NHS England South West (BNSSG), 4th floor Plaza, Marlborough Street, Bristol BS1 3NX
2. your local MP at the House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1A 0AA
3. Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health, via his website http://www.jeremyhunt.org

Unfortunately, this is happening to the NHS and GPs’ services all the country. It is no accident, and it is certainly not the fault of the many dedicated doctors, nurses and other health professionals working in the NHS.

It is the result of over 30 years of privatisation begun with Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher and her former Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, denied that they wanted to privatise the NHS. They merely stated that they wanted to include more private provision in the NHS. This is a lie. Released cabinet minutes showed that Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe wanted to privatise the NHS along with abolishing the rest of the welfare state. They were only prevented from doing so because the rest of the cabinet realised that this would be the death knell for the Tory party. And a fact-finding mission to the US to see how their private healthcare system worked by Patrick Jenkin showed that it was massively inefficient.

Nevertheless, the amount of private healthcare in the NHS was expanded, and state provision duly cut by successive governments. It was Maggie’s government in 1989 that ended the state support for care for the elderly in nursing homes. As a result, the families of those, who need this kind of care, are forced to fund it themselves, often through selling or remortgaging their homes because of the immense expense. It was also Maggie’s government that ended free eye tests, and picked a feud with the doctors that saw the majority of them leave the NHS.

This privatisation has continued under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and now David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt. Blair and Brown were deeply impressed with American private healthcare firms such as Kaiser Permanente, and wished to reform the NHS on their model. The ultimate intention was to replace the publicly owned and operated NHS with private healthcare funded by the state, but administered by private health insurance companies. As a result, NHS work has been given to private hospitals and clinics, and private healthcare companies have been given NHS hospitals to manage. Alan Milburn, Blair’s health secretary, wanted the NHS to become merely a kitemark – an advertising logo – on a system of private healthcare companies funded by the government.

This has been carried on the current Conservative government. And they have used the same tactics Margaret Thatcher did to force private healthcare on this nation. The dispute with the doctors over contracts a few years ago was part of this. It has left the majority of NHS GPs wishing to leave. Yet elements within the Conservative networks responsible for foisting these demands have seen this as an opportunity for forcing through further privatisation. Penny Dash, of the National Leadership Network, and one of those responsible for the NHS privatisation, has looked forward to the remaining GPs forming private healthcare companies. Furthermore, an report on the Care Commissioning Groups now in charge of arranging healthcare in the NHS by one of the private healthcare companies also suggested that they could form private healthcare companies, and float shares on the stockmarket.

Further privatisation has come with Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care bill of 2012. This exempts the state and the Secretary of State for Health from their statutory duty, as the ultimate leaders of the NHS, to provide state health care. It is carefully worded to disguise its true meaning, but that is what has been intended by the bill. Dr David Owen, one of the founders of the SDP, now part of the Lib Dems, has tabled amendments trying to reverse this despicable bill. He and many others have also written books on the privatisation of the NHS. One of the best of these is NHS SOS, by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis, published by Oneworld.

This process cannot be allowed to continue, and I strongly urge everyone to resist the creeping privatisation of the NHS, Britain’s greatest public institution.

The War and Socialist Demands for a National Health Service before the Beveridge Report

This is following a debate I’ve recently had with a critic, who stated that the National Health Service had its origins in the Beveridge Report of 1942, and was endorsed by Winston Churchill and the Conservatives. This is true, up to a point, though Churchill was initially very cautious about the foundation of a National Health Service. After the War he made a radio speech denouncing the Labour party’s plans for a complete reconstruction of Britain as ‘a Gestapo for England’. However, Michael Sullivan in his book, The Development of the British Welfare State (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf 1996) also points out that before the publication of the Beveridge, there had been a long process of negotiation and demand for some kind of comprehensive, free healthcare for working people, and that this had become official Labour party policy in the 1934. He writes

Discussions about the reform of British health care had, in fact, occurred between the National Government and interested parties during the 1930s (Abel-Smith, 1984, pp. 424-7). The starting point for these discussions was the extension of health insurance rather than the position adopted by the Socialist Medical Association in the early 1930s. These latter proposals, which became Labour party policy in 1934, included the provision of free services to patients, the establishment of a corps of full-time salaried doctors and the introduction of local health centres which would be the hubs of the health care system. The discussions between doctors and government had emphasised the need to cater for the British Medical Association’s preference for the retention of a large private sector in health and the extension of health insurance to cover hitherto uninsured groups. (Leathard, 1991, p. 24).

During the early war years the departmental civil service encouraged the continuation of these discussions and received deputations from the medical profession and the Trades Union Congress. Events, however, overtook these discussions. The formation of the Emergency Hospital Service had, as we have noted earlier, the effect of providing a planned health service, albeit in the conditions of war.

By 1941, civil servants in the ministry of health, perhaps influenced by the running of the EHS, suggested a comprehensive national health system in which general practitioners would be grouped in health centres associated with local hospitals. In October of the same year, the Minister of Health, the Liberal, Ernest Brown, announced that some sort of comprehensive service would be introduced after the war. The organisational and funding arrangements of the service remained unclear, though the minister did suggest that patients ‘would be called on to make a reasonable payment towards cost, whether through contributory schemes or otherwise (Hansard, 10 October 1941). At this time, a survey of hospital provision was also set under way.

At the same time, professional interests were attempting to influence the shape of any future national health system. First, the voluntary hospitals, which had been in financial difficulties before the war, started to plan to avoid the return of financial ill-health after the war. Their suggested framework for a national health system included a closer co-operation between the two existing hospital systems in which local authority hospitals might buy service from the voluntary sector, a call echoed of course in the 1980s, if in a slightly different form and from a different source!

The British Medical Association and the Royall Colleges were also active. Charles Hill, better Known to a generation earlier than that of the author’s as ‘the radio doctor’, and later to become a Conservative Minister of Health, argued that those who planned first would be more likely to influence the final form [of the health service].’ That planning initially included an acceptance of the ideas emerging about General Practitioner (GP) health centres, as well as those of central planning and of a universal and free service. (Pp. 40-1)

He then describes how the BMA later changed its opinion, and became resolutely opposed to the idea of socialised medicine.

Of the contribution of the Conservative Health Minister, Henry Willink, he says

The White Paper, introduced by the then (Conservative) health minister, Henry Willink, conceded very little to the doctors and the voluntary hospitals. Indeed it was, at first sight, almost as radical in intent as the National Health Service came to be seen. Under this plan, a national health service was to be comprehensive and free and financed out of general taxation and local rates. A closer look at the White Paper reveals acknowledgement of some of the doctors’ concerns, however. The planned service would, as far as the ministry was concerned, be free and comprehensive. There would, nonetheless, be no compulsion for doctors or patients to use the planned public service but doctors who opted into the system would be offered the opportunity to become salaried employees of the central or local state. This latter offer, of course, flew in the face of the formal position adopted by the BMA. (p. 41).

He also points out that Willink appears to have retreated from several of his initial positions due to lobbying from the BMA:

In the succeeding months, political lobbying was intense. BMA leaders engaged in secret negotiations with Willink and appeared to have achieved a large degree of success. It seems that the minister colluded with the BMA in dismembering the proposals contained in the White Paper. First the idea of Central Medical Board was dropped to be followed by the demise of plans for a salaried service organised around health centres. Local authorities, it was now decided, would build health centres, but not control them. Instead GPs would rent the buildings, would be remunerated by capitation fee and be entirely free to engage in private practice. (p. 42).

He also argues against the view that the War was ultimately responsible for the creation of the NHS, and that it was the result of an overall consensus in which there was little left for Labour to do but decide the final details. He writes

The war cannot sensibly be regarded as the midwife of the NHS. Some account must also be taken of pressure for change in health policy during the inter-war years.

As we have already seen, the SMA were successful in placing these recommendations for a national health service on the political agenda during the 1930s. These proposals for a free and comprehensive service with a salaried staff formed the basis of Labour party policy as early as 1934. The proposals put forward during this decade by the BMA were, of course, less radical but acknowledged that there were fundamental weaknesses in available medical cover. On two occasions in the 1930s, it published reports which recommended that each citizen should have access to a family doctor and to the services of appropriate specialists. These recommendation, like later proposals from the BMA, fell far short of a national, or nationalised, health service; the financing of the service was seen as best achieved through a system of health insurance. The BMA were even unwilling to accept the recommendations of its own Medical Planning Commission about the scope of a health insurance scheme (Sullivan, 1992). Nonetheless, the BMA during the 1930sa was ready to concede that co-ordination of any post-war service was most satisfactorily located at the national level. (pp. 42-3).

He also notes that even in the 1920s there were calls for some kind of national health service.

There had, of course, been an even earlier call for a national health service. In fact in 1926 the Report of the Royal Commission on National Health Insurance was published. It acknowledged that the insurance system established in 1911 by a reforming Liberal government had become an accepted part of national life. It suggested, however, that ‘… the ultimate solution will lie we think in the direction of divorcing the medical service entirely from the insurance system and recognising it, along with all other public health activities, as a service to be supplied from the general public funds (HMSO, 1926). (p. 43).

Of the supposed consensus produced by the War in favour of an NHS, he says

While it is undoubtedly the case that the experience of war played some part in promoting ideas about changes in the principles and practices of health care (ultimately represented in the 1944 White Paper), it is far from clear that this process represented a new beginning. War may simply have achieved the acceleration of an already established process of policy movement.

Nor should we fall into the trap of seeing the development of war-time health policy as consensual, leaving a Labour government only to decide on the best way to implement agreed policy frameworks. Though many doctors, even in war time, supported the idea of a health system funded from general funds and including a salaried service, there was critical resistance to some of the measures outlined in Willink’s White Paper. that resistance, from the BMA leaderships and, it must be said, from a small majority of doctors responding to the BMA survey, included resistance to the idea of doctors as public servants and, sometimes, to the idea of comprehensive health system itself.

Even among those medical and other interests favouring the establishment of a comprehensives system, there were conflicts about other issues. While the SMA and the Labour Party and Service doctors supported the idea of financing the service from the national Exchequer, most other doctors and certain elements in the Conservative Party favoured a system of health insurance, either publicly or privately administered. While the former grouping favoured control of the health service by central or local government, many doctors opposed government activity that went beyond central planning functions. While the SMA, Service doctors and local medical officers, the Labour Party and some ministers in the Coalition government favoured a salaried service, this found very little support in the wider ranks of the medical profession.

By the end of the war there was agreement of only a limited nature, which masked a wide divergence of opinion amongst interested parties in the health field and in the wider social politics of health. (P. 44).

He concludes

War-time health policy seems, then, to be of less significance than some claim in defining post-war health policy. Though limited agreement on the need for a comprehensive system had emerged, conflict remained over the nature of that system. More than this, inter-war factors seem to be not insignificant in the growth of pressure for a comprehensive health system. War undoubtedly accelerated the acceptance as orthodoxy hitherto contested arguments. Nevertheless, as Aneurin Bevan was to find out, that orthodoxy was still some way short of a national health service.

It’s therefore clear then that sections of the civil service was aware of the defects in existing health provision in the 1920s, and that the Labour Party was demanding something like an NHS from 1934 onwards. The proximate cause of the emergence of the NHS was indeed the emergency health care system set up in the war to treat victims of bombing and evacuees. I concede to my critic the fact that Churchill was, at times, cautiously in favour of an NHS, and that Henry Willink did advocate a free health care system, although his was not ultimately as radical as that set by Bevan.

Nevertheless, ultimately it was Bevan and the Labour party that set up the NHS in 1946. Furthermore, even though there were elements in the Tory party that certainly supported the creation of the NHS and welfare state, there were still many others that opposed it.

Furthermore, the origins of the National Health Service in a fragile war-time and post-war consensus does not, unfortunately, alter the situation today. The Tory party is determined to privatise the NHS by stealth. Jeremy Hunt has said that he wants the NHS broken up and replaced with private health care. Another Tory apparatchik stated that by 2020, if his party had its way, the NHS wouldn’t exist except as a clearing house for health insurance. This was later denied by the Tory spin machine, would claimed that he instead said that the Tories would succeeded in removing unnecessary health regulations and bureaucracy. In the last government, there were 95 Tory and Lib Dem MPs with interests in private health firms, hoping to profit from the NHS’ privatisation.

The only remaining clear champions of the National Health Service as national, free, universal system are the anti-Blairite wing of the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn.

And that’s my last word on this issue. At least for now.

Nye Bevan and Nostalgia for the Era Before the NHS: My Response to a Critic

Last week I received a comment from Billellson criticising me for stating that Aneurin Bevan was the architect of the NHS. He also stated that we did not have a private healthcare system before the NHS, and although some charges were made, they were in his words, not so much that people would lose their house.

Here’s what he wrote.

“Nye Bevan, the architect of the NHS, was also acutely aware of the way ordinary women suffered under the private health care system that put medicine out of the reach of the poor.”
Aneurin Bevan was not the architect of the National Health Service. The NHS was a wartime coalition policy, for the end of hostilities, agreed across parties. The concept was set out in the Beveridge Report published in December 1942, endorsed by Winston Churchill in a national broadcast in 1943 and practical proposals, including those the things the public value re the NHS today, set out in a white paper by Minister of Health Conservative Henry Willink in March 1944. It would have been established whoever was Minister of Health after the war / whichever party won the 1945 general election. The UK did not have a ‘private health care system’ before the NHS. Most hospitals in England and Wales were local government owned and run, the remainder voluntary (charitable). Those who could afford to pay for treatment were required to do so, or at least make a contribution, but nobody was expected to sell their house. The poor were treated in hospitals free of charge. c11 million workers were covered for GP consultations by the National Health Insurance Scheme which had been established in 1911. In many places, particularly mining areas, there were mutual aid societies that established health facilities including dispensaries. Scotland had a greater degree of state health provision and Northern Ireland had greater faith based provision before their NHSs were established, starting on the same day as Bevan’s English and Welsh service, but always separate established under separate legislation.

So I checked this with what Pauline Gregg says about the creation of the NHS in her The Welfare State: An Economic and Social History of Great Britain from 1945 to the Present Day (London: George G. Harrap & Co 1967).

She states

In 1942, during the War, the scope of health insurance had been considerably widened by the raising of the income limit for participation to £420 a year. But it still covered only about half the population and included neither specialist nor hospital service, neither dental, optical, nor hearing aid. Mental deficiency was isolated from other forms of illness. Medical practitioners were unevenly spread over the country – they had been before the War, but now their war-time service had too often disrupted their practices and left their surgeries to run down or suffer bomb damage.

Hospitals were at all stages of development. There were more than a thousand voluntary hospitals in England and Wales, varying from large general or specialist hospitals with first-class modern equipment and with medical schools attended by distinguished consultants, down to small local cottage hospitals. There were some 2000 more which had been founded by the local authorities or had developed from the sick ward of the old workhouse, ranging again through all types and degrees of excellence. Waiting-lists were long; most hospitals came out of the War under-equipped with staff and resources of all kinds; all needed painting, repairing, reorganising; some were cleaning up after bomb damage; most needed to reorient themselves before they turned from war casualties to peace-time commitments; all needed new equipment and new buildings. Other medical services were only too clearly the result of haphazard development. There were Medical Officers of Health employed by the local authorities, sanitary inspectors concerned with environmental health, medical inspectors of factories, nearly 2000 doctors on call to industry, as well as doctors privately appointed by firms to treat their staff. A school medical service provided for regular inspection of all children in public elementary and secondary schools; local authorities provided maternity and child care, health visiting, tuberculosis treatment, and other services for the poor, which varied widely from district to district. How many people there were of all ages and classes who were needing treatment but not getting it could only be guessed at.

Since it was clear that ad hoc improvement would no longer serve, a complete reshaping of the health and medical service marked the only line of advance. The general pattern it would take was indicated by Sir William Beveridge, who laid down his Report in 1942 the axiom that a health service must be universal, that the needs of the rich and poor are alike and should be met by the same means: ” restoration of a sick person to health is a duty of the state … prior to any other,” a “comprehensive national health service will ensure that for every citizen there is available whatever medical treatment he requires, in whatever form he requires it, domiciliary or institutional, general, specialist or consultant, and will ensure also the provision of dental, ophthalmic and surgical appliances, nursing and midwifery and rehabilitation after accidents.”

The Coalition Government accepted the Health Service Proposals of the Beveridge Report and prepared a White Paper, which it presented to Parliament in February 1944, saying the same thing as Beveridge in different words: “The government .. intend to establish a comprehensive health service for everybody in this country. They want to ensure that in future every man and woman and child can rely on getting all the advice and treatment and care which they may need in matters of personal health; that what they get shall be the best medical and other facilities available; that their getting these shall not depend on whether they can pay for them, or any other factor irrelevant to the real need – the real need being to bring the country’s full resources to bear upon reducing ill-health and promoting good health in all its citizens.” The Health Service, it said, should be a water, as the highways, available to all and all should pay through rates, taxes and social insurance.

Ernest Brown, a Liberal National, Minister of Health in the Coalition Government, was responsible for a first plan for a National Health Service which subordinated the general practitioner to the Medical Officer of Health and the local authorities, It was abandoned amid a professional storm. The scheme of Henry Willink, a later Minister of Health, was modelled on the White Paper, but was set aside with the defeat of Churchill’s Government in the 1945 Election. In the Labour Government the role of Minister of Health fell to Aneurin Bevan, who produced a scheme within a few months of Labour’s victory.

Pp. 39-51.

Churchill’s own attitude to the nascent NHS and the emergence of the later welfare state was ambivalent. In March 1943, for example, he gave a speech endorsing it. Gregg again says

He was “very much attracted to the idea” of a Four Year Plan of his own which included “national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave”, a national health service, a policy for full employment in which private and public enterprise both had a part to play, the rebuilding of towns and a housing programme, and a new Education Act. He envisaged “five or six large measures of a practical character”, but did not specify them, … (p. 25).

However, two years later after the Beveridge Report had become the official policy of the Labour party, Churchill’s tone was markedly hostile.

Coming to the microphone on June 4, 1945, he said: “My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to British ideas of freedom … Socialism is in its essence an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of an ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. A free Parliament – look at that – a free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire.” The Daily Express followed the next day with banner headlines: “Gestapo in Britain if Socialists Win”. (pp. 32-3)

So Mr Ellson is partly right, but only partly. There was some state and municipal healthcare provision, but it was a patchy and did not cover about half the population. It was a Coalition policy, which was sort of endorse by Churchill. However, its wholehearted embrace and execution was by the Labour party under Aneurin Bevan.

And its immense benefit and desirability was recognised by many traditionally staunch Tories at the time. One of my mother’s friends was herself a pillar of the local Conservative party, and the daughter of a pharmacist. She told my mother that at the 1945 elections her father gather his family together and told them that he had always voted Tory, but this time he was going to vote Labour, because the country needed the NHS. He explained that he served too many people, giving them their drugs on credit, because they couldn’t pay, not to vote for Labour and the NHS.

Now I think the Tories would like to roll state healthcare provision back to that of the pre-NHS level, where there is some minimal state provision, but much is carried out by private industry. The Daily Heil a few years ago was moaning about how the friendly societies were excluded from a role in the NHS. Like them, I think Mr Ellson has far too rosy a view of the situation before the NHS. I’ve blogged on here already accounts from doctors of that period on how badly much of the population were served before the NHS, especially those without health insurance.

Britain needed the NHS, and the party that was most passionately in favour of it was Labour. That some Tories were in favour of it, including Churchill on occasions, is true. But there were others in the party that were very firmly against, and it was ultimately Rab Butler in the Tories who reconciled them to the NHS. But that reconciliation is breaking down, and they are determined to privatise it anyway they can.

Independent: State GPs Better than Private Enterprise, Report Shows

Friday’s Independent carried news of research by Imperial College London that that the private and voluntary healthcare organisations that have bought into the NHS perform worse than the traditional GP system. New Labour in 2004 opened up the NHS to private healthcare firms like Virgin Healthcare and Care UK, and also social enterprises and voluntary organisations. At the moment, these organisations provide 347 GP surgeries out of the total 8,300 in England. The Indie noted that these firms typically served more deprived, younger and diverse populations than normal, state-run surgeries.

The study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, found that these private, voluntary and social organisations provided worse service than the state in 15 out of 17 key areas. These included patient satisfaction, diabetes control and keeping patients out of hospital.

Supporters of these private GP services criticised the study’s findings on the grounds that like was not compared with like.

This is, nevertheless, a blow to the supporters of the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS under the Tories and Lib Dems. There are 92 MPs in the coalition parties, who either own, or have senior positions in the private healthcare firms seeking to profit from the NHS, including the minister for chequebook genocide, Iain Duncan Smith. Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt have both spoken out in favour of the privatisation of the NHS. One Tory politico even stated that it wouldn’t exist if the Tories won a second term. When this was reported, Tory Central Office immediately went into emergency spin mode, and claimed he’d been misreported. They said instead that what he meant was that the NHS would be transformed by the removal of all the bureaucracy.

And the Kippers have been very outspoken in their desire to privatise the NHS. The Purple Duce, Nigel Farage, claims he doesn’t want to privatise it, but has said that he wants state funding to be replace by private insurance. Which means privatisation. His deputy, Paul Nuttall, has stated very clearly that he wants it privatised. I can’t remember if it was Nuttall, or one of the other Kippers, who went off and compared the NHS to Nazi Germany. This says much about the extreme Right-wing hysteria running through UKIP. They really believe that any kind of state intervention = Nazism. Because the Nazis put ‘Socialist’ in their name.

As for the Tories’ claim that their people don’t advocate the privatisation of the NHS: they’re lying. The bureaucracy has actually increased in the NHS due to the introduction of privatisation, PFI and the internal market, the basis of which was introduced by Peter ‘I’ve got a little list’ Lilley’ in the 1990s under John Major.

As for not keeping people out of hospital, from the point of view of private medicine this is just good, profit-making sense. Private hospitals make their money from treating people. Therefore, they have a vested interest in making sure as many people are sent to them as possible. It’s why the private healthcare system of the US is riddled with cases where people have undergone unnecessary surgery.

Earlier today I reblogged a video that has been sent out by 38 Degrees, asking people to use their vote to defend and protect the NHS. I notice that a number of my readers here have already reblogged in their turn. Thanks! We’ve got to do all we can to stop the privatisation of the NHS.

And that means definitely not voting for the Tories, the Lib Dems and very definitely not the Kippers.

Vox Political Defends Piece Attacking Labour for Allowing WCA Deaths

Earlier this week I reblogged a piece by Mike, in which he attacked the Labour party for continuing to allow disabled people to die due to the Work Capability Test. He was incensed at what Liza van Zyl, a fellow campaigner against the WCA, had been told by the Labour MP Owen Smith. Smith stated that Labour would not consider scrapping the WCA before the election, because of the fear that the right-wing press would torpedo their chances of getting elected with the charge that Labour were ‘soft on welfare’. They might, however, review the situation after the election.

Mike criticised this policy on the grounds that it was absolutely immoral and unjust for disabled people to continue to die because of the test just so that Labour could get elected. He pointed out that the party would get far more support by openly appealing to disabled people, their relatives, friends and supporters, by openly opposing the test. He also makes the point that if Labour did scrap or modify the test after the election, without any previous announcement that they would do so, they would be guilty of the same deception and mendacity as the Tories and Lib Dems, a cynical attitude that has done so much to put people off politics and politicians.

In order to encourage the party to do the right thing and scrap the test, Mike offered to write a letter to one of the right wing papers making the above arguments.

The piece was immensely controversial, garnering 92 comments. Mike says that most were supportive, but he also received some criticism. Amongst other accusations, he was told that he was working for the Tories in order to destroy Labour’s chances at the election. Mike here defends his comments, stating clearly that the purpose of the WCA is to give money to the private firms that administer it while throwing the disabled themselves off benefit. Many of these have consequently died of starvation and despair. As he says, ‘death surrounds the process’.

Mike also attacks the way Liza van Zyl has been hounded off Facebook and Twitter because of her piece reporting what she had been told by Owen Smith. Mike states that Smith’s comments could be a fudge, or he might be serious about Labour reviewing the situation after the election. Either way, it’s the kind of deception practised by the Tories and their Lib Dem lackeys, of which the public are well and truly sick.

He provides further proof just how mendacious and duplicitous this government is by repeating, once again, how the DWP is refusing to release the figures showing how many people have died due to the WCA. He then argues that there is a desperate need for Labour to scrap the wretched test, because Labour is the only party that stands any chance of getting the Tories out.

Mike’s article’s entitled Work Capability Assessment fuss shows Labour must change its ways. It begins

Yesterday’s article on Labour’s attitude to the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), used on people applying for incapacity or disability benefits, was probably the most controversial to be published by this site.

Look at the article‘s comment column and you will see the strength of support for this writer’s planned open letter. It calls for Labour to accept that the public opposes the continued use of a system that is responsible for as much death as the WCA undoubtedly is.

You will also see a few critical comments, and it is fair to say that there have been quite vicious attacks on the other social media, including Facebook and Twitter. Let’s try to address some of those.

Some claimed this writer was some kind of agent provocateur who had timed an attack on Labour to ruin its chances – a curious suggestion, considering the report was about someone else’s response to the ill-considered comments of a Labour shadow cabinet member, over which Yr Obdt Srvt could not have had any control.

Some claimed that Labour’s attitude to the WCA has already been addressed by Rachel Reeves’ promise to reform it – even though it cannot be reformed. It is beyond rehabilitation. The Work Capability Assessment serves a twofold purpose: It shovels taxpayers’ money into the hands of private, profit-making firms, and in return those firms do their best to disqualify claimants from receiving payments. If there was no intention to pervert the benefit system, governments would rely on the word of claimants’ GPs and the specialists working on their case. The responsible course of action is to get rid of it – before it kills anyone else.

It’s at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/03/11/work-capability-assessment-fuss-shows-labour-must-change-its-ways/. Go and read it. It makes sense, which is more than the WCA ever has.