Cummings Creates Civil Service to Take Over from Private Consultants, Who Took Over from Civil Service

Yesterday Mike put up a piece about Dominic Cummings’ reinvention of the wheel. Presumably he did so after he received an important report from the Department of the Bleedin’ Obvious. Boris Johnson’s pet polecat, or the distinguished advisor from Epsilon 6, as Spitting Image portrays him, has finally woken up to the fact that the legions of private consultants they brought in to do the work of the civil service, is too expensive and simply isn’t as good as civil servants. So he has created a new official department, called the Crown Consultancy. As an example of the exorbitant cost involved, Mike quotes the figures for the amount the Tories spent between 2016 and this year on just eight private consultancies – which include the usual rip-off merchants like KPMG, Deloitte and McKinsey. It’s £2.6 billion. The work obviously should have been left to the civil service, who, like other state departments, should have been properly funded with an appropriate level of staffing. Instead of being cut to pieces because the Tories don’t trust experts.

The fact that civil servants are far more efficient than private sector consultants should hardly be a revelation, no matter how new it may seem to Tories and other fans of outsourcing. It’s been known for over a decade and a half. William Blum, a long-time opponent of American imperialism and capitalism, has this little snippet in his 2014 book America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (London: Zed Books).

A study of 17,595 federal government jobs by the Office of Management and Budget in 2004 concluded that civil servants could do their work better and more cheaply than private contractors nearly 90 per cent of the time in job competitions. (p. 257).

Privatisation and outsourcing doesn’t work, and the evidence has been staring everyone in the face for decades. But the decrepit, rotting facade of Thatcherism is propped up because it enriches big business, who in turn line the pockets of the Tories and Blairite Labour with corporate donations, as well as giving them seats on their boards.

While giving poor service, poverty and starvation to everyone else.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/11/07/reinventing-the-wheel-after-replacing-civil-servants-with-expensive-private-consultants-cummings-wants-to-replace-them-with-a-civil-service/

19 Years Ago Private Eye Revealed New Labour Plans to Privatise NHS and Education

One of the good aspects of Private Eye that has kept me reading it – just about – is the way it has covered the deep and pernicious connections between the political parties and big business. And in their issue for 15th-28 June 2001, right at the beginning of Blair’s second term in government, the Eye revealed his plans to privatise the NHS and the education system in the article ‘How the New Government Will Work’. This ran

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are in two minds: should they privatise the entire delivery of public services or just some of it? To help them decide they are consulting the best minds money can buy.

For a start, Downing Street has a report from the Blairite Institute for Public Policy Research. It recommends that private firms deliver health and education on the widest possible scale. The report, a final paper from IPPR’s “Commission on Public Private Partnerships”, claims that “the crucial ingredient that the private sector possesses and the public sector needs is management.”

The report was paid for by the Serco “institute”, a front for the firm which privately runs a slew of Britain’s prisons and immigration detention centres, including the grim “Doncatraz” Doncaster gaol. Serco failed to win the air traffic control privatisation precisely because of worries about its management.

The report was also supported by Nomura, Japanese bank with a big interest in private finance initiative-style (PFI) deals: Nomura’s management of army housing under PFI has been lamentable. KPMG chipped in to support the report as well. It is not a disinterested party either. KPMG advised on 29 hospital PFI schemes, and many other deals outside health.

The giant accountant’s role in these hospital sell-offs has only come under indepdent scrutiny once: at Dartford and Gravesham hospital. The national audit office (NAO) found that, despite KPMG’s “healthcare” advice, the new hospital probably made no financial saving but did cut beds drastically. KPMG’s own fees were originally tendered at £152,000. It finally billed the NHS for £960,000. For good measure, the Norwich Union, which also put millions in PFI, invested in the IPPR report too.

Martin Taylor, chancellor Brown’s friend who used to run Barclays Bank, acted as “commissioner” in drawing up the IPPR’s advice. He is perfectly suited to the job: as an adviser to Goldman Sachs he is in the pay of a multinational bank which wants to make a profit out of Britain’s poor. Goldman Sachs is involved in PFI: it originally funded the PFI buy-out of all Britain’s dole offices.

As the “honorary secretary” of the Bilderberg group, Taylor is also involved in the secretive corporate schmoozing of big name politicians (he signed up for Bilderberg originally alongside Peter Mandelson). And when he ran Barclays, he showed his “secret ingredient” was disastrous management. Under his stewardship the bank lost £250m gambling in Russian financial markets, and had to stump up £300m to bail out the absurd American “hedge fund”, Long Term Capital Markets.

Eventually Taylor was ousted by a boardroom battle in November 1998 before he could cause more damage. Now he’s decided to help the public sector.

The treasury meanwhile wants to take a second look at IPPR’s prediction about the efficiency of privatisation. In particular chancellor Brown wants to test the idea that the private sector gets greater productivity out of employers through “reskilling”, “efficient shift systems and better motivation” – rather than low pay, poor conditions, long hours and casualisation.

To test the theory he will commission a study by the Office of Government Commerce. This office in turn also has a private manager: Peter Gershon, Britain’s highest paid civil servant on £180,000 a year, plus performance benefits and a three-year contract.

He was formerly chief operating officer at British Aerospace. But far from being expert in efficiency, BAe is best at massive cost overruns, project failures and non-competitive tendering. The managers in charge of the Tornado, Bowman Radio and Type 45 destroyer programmes – all plagued with late delivery and technical problems – reported directly to Gershon.

Since then, Serco have become notorious for their massive inefficiency and the inhuman conditions at the prisons and detention centres they run. One of the most notorious of the latter was Yarl’s Wood, which was so atrocious the asylum seekers rioted. And I don’t think that was only one either. I also remember the outrage that the government’s sale of the army barracks to Nomura caused.

Goldman Sachs and Lehmann’s Bank caused the 2008 world banking crash, ushering over two decades of cuts and austerity, which has made conditions for the poor even more worse. For those who are managing to survive the low pay, monstrous levels of debt, and the almost non-existent welfare state. This has forced millions of people onto food banks to keep body and soul together, and hundreds of thousands are suffering from starvation, or ‘food poverty’ as the media now delicately put it. And I forget what the death toll from this is, it’s so high.

As for low pay, poor conditions and job insecurity – that all increased under Gordon Brown, and has increased even more so under the Tories, as it all keeps the working woman and man down, cowed and fearful, in her and his place.

And the Bilderbergers will be familiar to anyone interested in conspiracy theories. They were some of the ‘Secret Rulers of the World’ covered by Jon Ronson in his documentary series on Channel 4 of the same name.

I dare say some of the names involved in the privatisation agenda has changed, but you can bet it’s all going to come in with Starmer, despite his retention of Corbyn’s election manifesto. ‘Cause that was popular. Now it looks like he’ll undermine it by starting to ignore it.

And we’re back to Blairite misery, despair, poverty and starvation again. Except for the multinationals and their utterly talentless managers. It all looks pretty good for them.

Outrageous! Government Uses Pandemic to Privatise Even More of the NHS

So much for the real respect the Tories have for the NHS! Yesterday Mike put up a piece based on a report in the Guardian about the government pushing through the privatisation of even more NHS services through emergency powers designed to deal with the pandemic.

These powers have allowed the Tories to circumvent the usual tendering processes and award contracts to private healthcare companies and management consultants without the usual competition. The Groan reported that doctors, academics, MPs and campaign groups raised their concerns about this after it emerged on Monday that the outsourcing company, Serco, was in the lead to get the contract to supply 15,000 call handlers for the government’s track and trace operation.

And where Serco goes, the other outsourcing companies aren’t far behind. Deloitte, KPMG, Sodexo, Boots, Mitie, as well as Serco and the American data-mining group Palantir have also been given government contracts to run the Coronavirus drive-in testing centres, purchase PPE equipment and build nightingale hospitals.

They’ve also decided to centralise part of the purchasing process and hand it to yet another private company. The Groan stated that it had seen a letter from the Department of Health instructing local hospitals not to buy their own PPE and ventilators. Instead, purchasing of a list of 16 items, including were to be handled centrally. The items include PPE, but also general, high-value equipment such as CT and ultrasound scanners and mobile X-ray machines.

The Groan considered that this would hand more power to Deloitte, as not only was the accountancy and management consultants responsible for coordinating Covid-19 test centres and logistics at three new ‘lighthouse’ laboratories, they were also given a contract three weeks ago to advise the government on PPE purchases. As the provision of PPE has been absolutely deplorable, with equipment needed her exported abroad, insufficient supplies coming late from Turkey and other faults, so that doctors and nurses have been forced to use masks and gowns made by the public, and even bin-bags, Deloitte should be sacked and fined for their massive incompetence.

Mike makes the point that at the time PPE should be available to as many people as possible, the government is actually making it more expensive. He states that if Jeremy Corbyn had won the election, these items would be free. He also makes the point that it is alleged that Corbyn was prevented from doing so because of sabotage from the right-wingers in his own party. A genuinely free, publicly funded and nationalised NHS was one of the things the intriguers didn’t want. Presented with the evidence of this plotting and sabotage, one Labour MP remarked that it explained why he experienced so much resistance to his attempts to have it accepted as Labour policy that NHS services should be taken back in house. Alan Milburn, Tony Blair’s health secretary, wanted the NHS fully privatised so that it would become simply a logo for services provided by private healthcare companies for the state.

This shabby policy also shows how desperate the Tories are to give rewards to their own donors. a few weeks ago Zelo Street posted up a piece about how one company, which was set to supply ventilators for the government were told that this was off. Instead, the order went out to Dyson, who’s donated something like £10 million to the Tory coffers. This does not seem to be a coincidence.

I also came across a report somewhere that said that the big accountancy firms, Deloitte, KPMG, whatever Anderson Consulting is now, were in trouble. Most of their money comes from consultancy work, but this has dried up since the lockdown. Good! I’m still angry with these parasites for the way they trashed the inland revenue and DHSS for the Tories in the 1980s and ’90s. I don’t think any of them should be given any kind of government contract whatsoever.

It is thanks to the NHS and not a private healthcare system like America’s that the death toll from Boris’ idleness and incompetence isn’t massively higher. It’s a savage indictment of ten years of Tory privatisation and underfunding as it is. This is another example of how much the Tories ‘treasure’ the NHS. They will treasure it right up to the time they sell the last piece of it off.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/05/06/tories-are-accelerating-destruction-of-the-nhs-just-when-we-really-need-it/

The Beeb’s Biased Reporting of NHS Privatisation

The Corporation’s General Right-wing Bias

The BBC is infamous for its flagrant right-wing bias. Writers and experts like Barry and Savile Kushner in their Who Needs the Cuts, academics at the media research centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff Universities, and ordinary left-wing bloggers like Mike and Zelo Street have pointed out time and again that the corporation massively prefers to have as commenters and guests on its show Conservative MPs and spokespeople for the financial sector on its news and political comment programmes, rather than Labour MPs and activists and trade unionists. The Corporation relentless pushed the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. But it has also promoted the privatisation of the NHS too through its biased reporting.

Biased Towards NHS Privatisation

Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis’ book on the privatisation of the NHS, NHS – SOS, has a chapter by Oliver Huitson, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’, discussing the biased reporting of the NHS’s privatisation by the media in general. Here, however, I will just confine myself to describing the Corporation’s role. The Beeb was frequently silent and did not report vital pieces of information about successive privatisations, such as the involvement of private healthcare companies in demanding them and conflicts of interest. On occasion, this bias was actually worse than right-wing rags like the Daily Mail. Although these ardently supported the NHS’ privatisation, they frequently reported these cases while the Beeb did not. When the moves towards privatisation were reported, they were often given a positive spin. For example, the establishment of the Community Care Groups, groups of doctors who are supposed to commission medical services from the private sector as well as from within the NHS, and which are legally allowed to raise money from the private sector, were positively described by the Corporation as ‘giving doctors more control’.

Lack of Coverage of Private Healthcare Companies Role in Privatisation

David Cameron and Andrew Lansley did not include Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill in the Tories’ 2010 manifesto, because they didn’t believe they’d win the election if they did. But in all the two years of debate about the bill, the Beeb only twice reported doubts about the bill’s democratic mandate. (p.152). In October 2010, Mark Britnell was invited to join Cameron’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. Britnell had worked with the Labour government and was a former head of commissioning for the NHS. But he was also former head of health for the accountancy firm, KPMG, which profits greatly from government privatisation and outsourcing. He declared that the NHS would be shown ‘no mercy’ and would become a ‘state insurance provider, not a state deliverer’. But the BBC decided not to report all this until four days after others had broken the story. And when they did, it was only to explain a comment by Nick Clegg about how people are confused when they hear politicians stating how much they love the NHS while at the same time demanding its privatisation. (pp.153-4).

On 21 November 2011 Channel 4 News reported that they had obtained a document which showed clearly that GP commissioning was intended to create a market for private corporations to come in and take over NHS services. But This was only reported by the Groaniad and the Torygraph. The rest of the media, including the Beeb, ignored it. (pp. 156-7).

Lansley was also revealed to have received donations from Andrew Nash, chairman of Care UK, another private healthcare firm hoping to profit from NHS privatisation. But this also was not reported by the Corporation. (pp. 157-8).

In January 2011 the Mirror reported that the Tories had been given over £750,000 from donors with major connections to private healthcare  interests since David Cameron had become their chief in 2005. But this was also not mentioned by the Beeb. (pp. 158).

The Mirror also found that 40 members of the House of Lords had interests in NHS privatisation, while the Social Investigations blog suggested that it might be as high as 142. The BBC, along with several papers, did not mention this. (pp. 158-9).

Sonia Poulton, a writer for the Heil, stated on her blog that 31 Lords and 18 MPs have very lucrative interests in the health industry. But this was also ignored by the Beeb, along with the rest of the media with the exception of the Guardian. (p. 159).

The Tory MP, Nick de Bois, was a fervent support of the Tories’ NHS privatisation. He is a majority shareholder in Rapier Design Group, which purchased Hampton Medical Conferences, a number of whose clients were ‘partners’ in the National Association of Primary Care, another group lobbying the Tories for NHS privatisation. This was also not reported by the Beeb. (pp. 159-60).

The Beeb also chose not to report how Lord Carter of Coles, the chair of the Co-operation and Competition Panel charged with ensuring fair access to the NHS for private healthcare companies, was also receiving £799,000 per year as chairman of McKesson Information Solutions, part of the massive American McKesson healthcare company. (p. 160).

There were other links between politicos, think tanks, lobby groups and private healthcare companies. The health regulator, Monitor, is dominated by staff from McKinsey and KPMG. But this also isn’t mentioned by the press. (pp. 160-1).

Beeb Falsely Presents Pro-Privatisation Think Tanks as ‘Independent‘

The BBC, along with much of the rest of the media, have also been responsible for misrepresenting spokespeople for pro-privatisation lobby groups as disinterested experts, and the organisations for which they speak as just independent think tanks. This was how the Beeb described 2020health.org, whose chief executive, Julia Manning, was twice invited onto the air to discuss the NHS, and an entire article was given over to one of her wretched organisation’s reports. However, SpinWatch reported that its chairman, former Tory minister Tom Sackville, was also CEO of the International Federation of Health Plans, representing of 100 private health insurance companies. Its advisory council includes representatives of AstraZeneca, NM Rothschild, the National Pharmaceutical Association, Nuffield private hospital group, and the Independent Healthcare Advisory Services. (p. 162).

Another lobby group whose deputy director, Nick Seddon, and other employees were invited onto the Beeb to discuss the proposals was Reform. Seddon was head of communications at Circle, the first private healthcare company to take over an NHS hospital. Seddon’s replacement at Circle was Christina Lineen, a former aide to Andrew Lansley. None of this was reported by the Beeb. Their corporate partners included companies like Citigroup, KPMG, GlaxoSmithKline and Serco. Huitson states ‘Through Seddon’s and other Reform Staffs’ appearances, the BBC may have facilitated private sector lobbying on a publicly funded platform without making relevant interests known’. (163).

Beeb Did Not Cover Protests and Opposition to Bill

Pages 164-5 also discusses the Beeb’s refusal, with few exceptions, to interview critics of Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill, the rightwing bias of panels discussing it and how the Beeb did not cover protests against it or its discussion in parliament. Huitson writes

At the BBC opportunities were frequently missed to provide expert opposition to the bill on a consistent basis. the RCGP’s Clare Gerada was largely the exception to this rule. Many of the most well-known and authoritative critics of the bill – the likes of professors Allyson Pollock or Colin Leys, doctors Jacky Davis and Wendy Savage from Keep Our NHS Public – never appeared on the BBC to discuss the plans. Davis recalls being invited to appear on the BBC a number of times but the item was cancelled on every occasion. ‘Balance’ is supposedly one of the BBC’s primary objectives yet appearing on the Today programme of 1 February 2012 to discuss the bill, for instance, were Shirley Williams (who voted in favour of the bill, however reluctantly), Nick Seddon of ‘independent’ Reform (pro-Bill), Steve Field (pro-Bill) and Chris Ham (pro-Bill). It’s difficult to see how that is not a breach of BBC guidelines and a disservice to the public. One of the fundamental duties of an open media is to ensure that coverage is not skewed towards those with the deepest pockets. And on that issue the media often performed poorly.

Further criticism of the BBC stems from its curious lack of NHS coverage during the climactic final month before the bill was passed in the House of Lords on 19 March. One such complaint came from blogger and Oxford Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology Dorothy Bishop, who wrote to the BBC to ask why it had failed to cover a number of NHS stories in March, including an anti-bill petition that had been brought to the House by Lord Owen, carrying 486,000 signatures of support. In reply, the BBC confirmed that the bill had been mentioned on the Today programme in March prior to the bill’s passing, though just once. Bishop replied:’So, if I have understood this right, during March, the Today programme covered the story once, in an early two-minute slot, before the bill was passed. Other items that morning included four minutes on a French theme park based on Napoleon, six minutes on international bagpipe day and eight minutes on Jubilee celebrations.’

Other BBC omissions include Andrew Lansley being heckled by angry medical staff at a hospital in Hampstead, as reported by both the Mail and Sky News. On 17 March a peaceful anti-bill march took place in central London. Those out protesting for their national health service found themselves kettled by riot police despite being one of the most harmless-looking crowds you’re ever likely to see. The protest and the shameful police response were completely ignored by the media, except for a brief mention on a Guardian blog. On social media numerous examples have been reported of protests and actions opposing the bill that were entirely absent from national coverage.

Then, on 19 March, the day of the final vote on the bill, the BBC ran not a single article on the event, despite this being one of the most bitterly opposed pieces of legislation in recent history – it was as if the vote was not taking place. The next day, with the bill passed, they ran a full seven articles on the story. Three days after the bill passed, Radio 4 broadcast The Report: ‘Simon Cox asks: why is NHS reform mired in controversy?’ Why this was not broadcast before the Lords’ vote is a mystery. 

When the Bill was passed, the bill scrolling across the BBC News’ screen ran ‘Bill which gives power to GPs passes’. (166). Huitson remarks that when the Beeb and the other news networks reported that the Bill gave power to GPs and allowed a greater role for the private sector, it was little more than regurgitating government press releases. (p. 168).

Beeb Bias Problem Due to Corporation’s Importance and Domination of Broadcast News

Huitson also comments on the specific failure of the Beeb to provide adequate coverage of NHS privatisation in its role as one of the great British public institutions, the dominant role it has in British news reporting. On pages 169-70 he writes

Campaigners may not expect more from the Sun but they certainly do from the BBC, given its status as an impartial public service broadcaster whose news gathering is supported directly by licence fee payers. The BBC accounts for 70 per cent of news consumption on television. Further, the BBC accounts for 40 per cent of online news read by the public, three times that of its closes competitor, the Mail. Quite simply, the BBC dominates UK news. The weight given to the BBC here is not purely down to its dominance, however, but also because, along with the NHS, the BBC remains one of our great public institutions, an entity that is supposedly above commercial pressures. Many of the stories ignored by the BBC were covered by the for-profit, right-wing press, as well as the Guardian and Channel 4, so the concern is not that the organisation failed to ‘campaign’ for the NHS, but that it failed to report facts that other outlets found newsworthy.

The BBC’#s archive of TV and radio coverage is neither available for the public to research nor technically practical to research, but there are a number of reasons for confidence that their online content is highly indicative of their broader output. First, BBC online is a fully integrated part of the main newsroom rather than a separate operation. Consequently, TV and radio coverage that can be examined is largely indistinguishable from the related online content, as demonstrated in the examples given above. During the debate of Lansley’s bill, the BBC TV and radio were both subject to multiple complaints, the figures for which the BBC has declined to release.

Beeb’s Reporting of NHS Privatisation as Biased as Coverage of Miners’ Strike

He also compares the Beeb’s coverage of the bill, along with that of the rest of the media, to its similarly biased reporting of the miners’ strike.

The overall media coverage of the health bill brings to mind a quote from BBC radio correspondent Nicholas Jones, on the BBC’s coverage of the miners’ strike: ‘stories that gave prominence to the position of the National Union of Miners could simply be omitted, shortened or submerged into another report.’ (pp. 172-3).

Conclusion

The Beeb does produce some excellent programmes. I really enjoyed last night’s Dr. Who, for example. But the right-wing bias of its news reporting is now so extreme that in many cases it is fair to say that it is now a propaganda outlet for the Tory party and big business. It’s utterly indefensible, and in my view it will only be reformed if and when the newsroom and its managers are sacked in its entirety. In the meantime, Boris and the rest of the Tories are clamouring for its privatisation. Godfrey Bloom, one of the more prominent Kippers, has also put up a post or two in the past couple of days demanding precisely that.

If the Beeb was genuinely impartial, it would have defenders on the Left. But it is rapidly losing them thanks to its bias. And to the Tories, that’s also going to be a plus.

Thanks to the Beeb’s own Tory bias, it’s going to find it very hard to combat their privatisation.

And in the meantime they will have helped destroy the most valued of British institutions, the NHS, and free, universal healthcare to Britain’s citizens.

Private Eye on ChangeUK MP Stephen Dorrell’s Role in Disastrous and Exploitative Tory Policies

This fortnight’s Private Eye, for 3rd – 16th May 2019 has an article about the major role the former Tory MP Stephen Dorrell played in creating and promoting the disastrous Tory policies of rail privatisation, the Private Finance Initiative and the privatisation of the NHS. These are policies which the magazine speculates will make him unpalatable to those centrist Labour voters that ChangeUK hopes to appeal to. The article runs

The adoption of former Tory health secretary Stephen Dorrell as a Change UK candidate in the European elections may be a Tory too far for ex-Labour voters wanting to switch to the centrist cause.

Dorrell’s Tory CV harks all the way back to the dying days of the Thatcher era when he was a whip – a supposedly “wet” Tory helping push through her ultra “dry” policies.

Under John Major, he became a Treasury minister, active in the Rail Privatisation Group behind the sale of the railways. Against expert advice, Dorrell was one who pushed for separation of responsibility between trains and track – with dire results. Railtrack, the privatised track operator, eventually collapsed after lethal crashes caused by poor maintenance.

As health secretary it was Dorrell who began the 20-year disaster of the private finance initiative (PFI) in the NHS. “I am a strong supporter of the PFI,” he told the Commons, calling PFI “the best opportunity that we have had in the history of the NHS” to “deliver the best healthcare.” It wasn’t. And it didn’t.

Dorrell launched a failed bid for the party leadership in 1997 and never held a ministerial job again. Later, under the coalition, he was seen as a critic of Andrew lansley’s NHS reforms – but not too loud a critic.

Having left parliament in 2015, he has kept up his interest in giving corporations access to the NHS, chairing Public Policy Projects, a subscription-based outfit “focused on the big issues in health and social care”. His group arranges breakfasts and receptions for businesses to meet political and NHS insiders. Recent events have included meals iwth health secretary Matt Hancock, housing and communities secretary James Brokenshire, Treasury committee chair Nicky Morgan and top NHS officials.

Dorrell has also worked as a healthcare and public services adviser to KPMG since 2014; and last year became an “associate” of Cratus Communications, a lobbyist for developers. If Change UK really wants to fix the UK’s “broken politics”, it may have to cast its net a little wider. (P. 7).

These are all very good reasons why genuine Labour voters shouldn’t vote for him. But they’re also reasons why traditional Labour voters shouldn’t vote for any of the former Labour MPs in Change UK. All of the so-called Labour ‘centrists’ are really nothing of the sort. They’re red Tories, as fanatically keen on privatisation and the dismantlement of the NHS for the profit of private healthcare firms as the Conservatives. Blair was responsible for the introduction of much of the legislation allowing the NHS to purchase services from private healthcare providers, including the operation of the health centres and polyclinics, which he hoped would be run by private firms. His health secretary, Alan Milburn, wished the NHS to become simply a kitemark for services provided by private healthcare firms.

The real centrists and moderates are Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, who wish to renationalise the NHS, the rail companies, water and part of the national grid. These are policies both the Tories, Change UK and the Labour ‘centrists’ loathe and detest. Just as they loathe and detest his plans to renew and strengthen the welfare state and give workers back proper employment rights and powerful trade unions able to defend them.

As Mike, Zelo Street and the various other left-wing bloggers have described on their sites, Change UK and its mixture of former Tory and Blairite Labour MPs shows that there really isn’t any difference between the two.

Private Eye’s article is thus a very good reason not to vote for Dorrell personally nor his wretched party in general. And the solid support for Blair’s own privatisation and destruction of the welfare state by Change UK’s former Labour MPs and their fellows still in the Labour party also demonstrates why working people need to see a genuine socialist Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn once again in power and winning elections, from the European all the way to Westminster.

Private Eye on the Tax Avoiders in Cameron’s ‘Business Council’

I mentioned in the last post on the Daily Mail’s hypocrisy in demanding that Kraft foods stop avoiding paying British taxes, while its owner, Lord Rothermere, is another tax dodger using the non-dom status inherited from his father. The right-wing press was outraged this week by Ed Miliband’s statement on Wednesday that he was going to end the non-dom tax loophole that allows Rothermere, and others like him, to avoid paying tax. They claimed that it would drive senior businessmen out of the country.

Way back in their issue for the 15th – 29th October 2010 Private Eye published a brief article on the numbers of businessmen avoiding taxes through offshore companies and the like. They were a refutation of Cameron’s continued refrain that ‘we are all in it together’, and that everyone was suffering equally during the recession. They had also benefitted personally from Cameron by being selected for his business council.

David “We’re all in this together” Cameron has chosen a patriotic bunch to sit on his “business council”.

One of them, Martin Sorrell, has already moved his company, advertising group WPP, offshore to avoid tax; while Paul Walsh, of drinks company Diageo, has threatened to do the same.

His company already diverts most of its profits out of the taxman’s grasp, having “offshored” ownership of British drinks brands such as Johnnie Walker. A similar ruse helps drugs giants GlaxoSmithKline avoid millions of pounds of tax, but that hasn’t stopped its chief executive, Andrew Witty, from joining Cameron’s council as well.

Also among the business sages is the man behind a great deal of such dodging over a decade at the top of one of Britain’s biggest beancounters, KPMG, Sir Mike Rake.

The captains of industry will no doubt have been pleased to note the shift in rhetoric on tax dodging from chancellor George Osborne in his party conference speech. Gone was the “immorality” of (legal) tax avoidance that his Lib Dem deputy Danny Alexander had condemned the week before. In a carefully worded speech, Osborne’s ire was conspicuously directed only at illegal “tax evasion”. This gives Britain’s top businessmen – not to mentioned the hedge fund managers and beancounters who have funded the Tories so generously over the last year – plenty of room to squirrel a few billion away while remaining on the right side of Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street.

The attack on the tax evaders is pretty much an attack on Tory donors. It shows that Ed Miliband himself is independent of at least some of the corporate interest that New Labour also competed with the Tories for. and it also shows the deep, self-interest of the Tory party and their mouthpieces in the British press in moaning about the potential loss of income for these extremely rich men.

As Mike has shown again and again on his articles on some of the prize specimens of Tory MPs, many of them, from Jacob Rees-Mogg to education minister Nicky Morgan and the Wicked Witch of the Wirral, Esther McLie, vigorously demand tax cuts for the rich, and the transferal of the tax burden to the poor through VAT.

It’s not enough that the rich should get richer. They want the poor to get poorer. It’s one of the reasons why they should be voted out next May.

Private Eye 2011 on Circle Health

Last week the Circle Health group finally pulled out of its contract to run NHS hospitals. The standards of care were appalling, and the company had not been able to make the massive profit it expected. Four years ago in their 24th June – 7th July 2011 issue, Private Eye printed this story about Circle Health, and what their acquisition of government contracts augured for the rest of the NHS under the Tories’ privatisation plans.

NHS Competition
Circle Health Merry-Go-Round

As the debate rages over greater private sector involvement in a reformed NHS, the aggressive behaviour of one private health firm, Circle Health, is a sign of things to come.

Using the ‘”Any Willing Provider” rules that are designed to increase competition in the NHS (and which will continue even after the Conservatives’ current health reforms are watered down), Circle is trying to force two NHS trusts to give it more surgical work and on better terms regarding price and timing.

Circle Health is 49 percent-owned by employees and often described as a “social enterprise”. But 51 percent of it is owned by private investors, including around 40 percent by hedge funds Odey Asset Management and Landsdowne Holdings. Since 2003 Crispin Odey and Lansdowne’s Paul Ruddock and David Craigen have between them donated more than £560,000 to the Conservative party.

In January this year, Circle Health applied to the NHS Cooperation and Competition Panel to demand that NHS Wiltshire and NHS Bath and North East Somerset give it more work and on better terms. The panel, a New Labour quango, is meant to determine when the NHS should give operations to private firms, in keeping with the edict that “any willing provider” should be considered for NHS work in competition with NHS hospitals.

Under the government’s current “climbdown” on NHS reform, the panel will be moved into the NHS regulator Monitor and become the main enforcer pushing NHS privatisation. This is supposedly less aggressive than health secretary Andrew Lansley’s original plan because the panel will now consider “cooperation” as well as “competition”, whereas before Monitor only had a duty to promote “competition”.

Circle Health is pressing its demands on Wiltshire and Bath, who jointly commission NHS services, because it built its flagship hospital in Bath and needs the NHS work to pay for its fancy. Norman Foster-designed building with “chauffeur drive service”, “five-star hospitality” and a bistro serving “locally-sourced, mainly organis food” prepared by a “Michelin-starred chef”.

Local NHS suits must be hoping the panel, headed by former private healthcare investor Lord Carter, looks fairly at the case. Worryingly, he and health secretary Andrew Lansley appear to be fans of Circle Health: in January they were guest speakers at its annual conference at the firm’s Bath hospital.

According to papers lodged with the panel, Circle Health is angry that out of a £160m local budget, its own potential revenues “have been capped at 6m”. It claims the health authorities won’t offer it more contracts because they want to keep work in-house to “protect NHS providers from further potential capacity reduction”. Circle also claims that the health authorities are favouring the NHS by only offering private sector providers four types of surgery. Circle wants more, including the chance to carry out liver surgery.

The panel is due to give its verdict at the end of the month.

In the same piece, the Eye also had this to say about Ruth Carnall, the NHS head, who was also on the payroll of the private health care industry. Unsurprisingly, she also favoured cuts and privatisation, for which she was suitable awarded.

Congratulations to Ruth Carnall, who grabbed a CBE for services to the NHS.

Carnall flitted between running the “Change Programme” at the Department of Health … and jobs with private health firm Care UK and consultants KPMG. She is currently head of NHS London, where her hospital cuts plan for the capital was so aggressive even slash-happy health secretary Andrew Lansley had to call for a pause.

At both the national and local level then, the privatisation of the NHS has been carried out by politicians and NHS heads with links to private health care companies and the firms involved in the privatisation – a clear conflict of interest. As for Circle Health, the events of the past week shows how right NHS BANES and Wiltshire were not to want to give NHS contracts to this outfit of incompetent profiteers.

Health Regulator Schmoozed by Lobbying Companies

David Bennett of the Government Healthcare Regulator Monitor – now enjoying company largesse with private healthcare firms.

This fortnight’s issue of Private Eye for the 21 March – 3rd April also contains a story about the way the health regulator, Monitor, is being approached and its chief executive, David Bennett, taken out to a variety of cultural events, by a series of lobbying companies.

Monitor is the government body in charge of supervising the closures, mergers and take-overs that will now occur after the passage of Clause 119. The Eye states that these will become more common as health budgets are further cut and more NHS Trusts are forced into deficit. The health regulator has the duty of ‘promoting provision of healthcare services which is economic, efficient and effective, and maintains or improves the quality of services’. It is therefore required to consider improving competition and the integration of services. The Eye states that judging ‘by the pro-marketization companies schmoozing its senior officials (most of whom are themselves former management consultants), however, competition is likely to win over cooperation every time’.

Monitors chief executive, David Bennett, who was formerly a partner in McKinsey Ross, has been treated to a variety of artistic and cultural events.

Boston Consulting, a US consultancy with a large and expanding health care business over here, took him to the Royal Academy, as did BUPA and FTI Economics. KPMG, who now employ Mark Britnell, who was previously the NHS’ commercial director, took him to a Radiohead concert at the O2 arena. They also took him to a number of receptions and dinners. One of these was for the chief medical officer of the US hospital group, Virginia Mason. BUPA took him to their ‘stakeholder dinner’, as well as a series of receptions for former employees of McKinsey.

Adrian Masters, Monitor’s Strategy Director, was also taken to lunch by Public Projects policy. This organisation describes their ‘central theme’ as “shifting responsibility for the provision of services and systems to independent sector partners’ – in other words, privatisation. Masters is also a former consultant with McKinsey.

Lastly, the Eye mentions that staff from PwC, who advise struggling NHS trusts, also took Monitor’s ‘managing director, provider regulation’ to Lords for the cricket match between England and New Zealand.

The report can be read on page. 20.

In other words, it’s an example of the soft corruption all too common in British politics, in which the heads of government bodies are taken to agreeable lunches and other events by the very people they are supposed to regulate. This case is especially offensive given the fact that all the companies involved are hoping for a piece of the rapidly privatised NHS. As was revealed this week, even the Tories recognise that the public do not want the NHS to be privatised. But nevertheless, as it looks like it’s going to be immensely profitable, they’re pushing ahead for it anyway.

Pride’s Purge on the Stealth Privatisation of the NHS to Atos

In an entirely serious piece, Pride’s Purge tells you what you can expect to be done to the British health service from the way it was privatised just across the North Sea in the Netherlands. it begins

‘The NHS is not being privatised with a bang – more with a sly, underhand whimper.

We only have to look to Holland – which privatised its health care system in 2006 – to see how it’s possible for the NHS to be privatised by stealth.

Following the Dutch example, privatisation is happening in three stages.

1) First of all provision of health services is handed over to private companies.

This is already well under way in the UK

2) Then control of the health budget is handed over to private commissioning consortiums made up of doctors and consultants.

This has already happened in the UK

3) Finally, the private commissioning consortiums themselves are taken over by private companies.

In the UK, already over a quarter of NHS Commissioning Consortiums are being run by consultancy firm KPMG.’

The Political Purgative then points out that KPMG was the global accountancy firm, whose French and Dutch branches were taken over by Atos.

The article’s here:
http://tompride.co.uk/how-atos-is-taking-over-the-nhs-by-stealth-under-a-different-name.

The article also shows us that, in this increasingly globalised world, we need to be increasingly aware of what the multinationals are doing in other countries. What is being done to their citizens, will be done to ours. In the slogan of the Communist Manifesto: Workingmen of all countries, unite!