We all have an NHS story – from being born in the NHS to seeing it save our friends and family.
We are massively thankful to our wonderful NHS and its brilliant staff for being there for us through the years.
But due to outsourcing and cuts, our NHS is on its knees. And if politicians think that we are going to just clap for the NHS on July 5th, they are sorely mistaken.
We will demand they reinstate our NHS as the fully public service it was created to be and fund it properly.
On a day when the public will be paying lots of attention to the NHS, you can help make sure they are hearing this demand and adding their voices to it.
After a decade of outsourcing and massive cuts, our NHS can longer be there for us when we need it.
7.3 million of us are now on NHS waiting lists. And as a result, 272,000 people in Britain paid out-of-pocket to get healthcare from the private sector in 2022.
You shouldn’t have to wait for months, sometimes over a year, for care because you don’t have money. That is American-style two-tier healthcare happening right here in the UK.
And it’s happening in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
We have a massive opportunity on Wednesday 5th July. Everyone will be talking about the birthday of our NHS on that day and we can make it impossible for our MPs to avoid your demand – on social media and your local high street – that they reinstate our NHS.
There are three ways that you can take action on Wednesday 5th of July to demand that your MP reinstate our NHS as a fully public service:
Organise or attend a local action on your local high street and get messages from the public, which you will deliver to your MP and put pressure on them directly
Make a selfie video or picture with your personal message and share it with the hashtag #NHS75 so that people on social media can help boost your message to your MP
Join KONP’s online rally at 6:30 pm on Wednesday 5th July
You can find out more about how to take action HERE.
There is an action for everyone to take regardless of your situation – you can be part of making sure your MP gets the message. The more of us take action, the bigger the impact we can have together.
Nye Bevan, the founder of our National Health Service, said that our NHS will survive so long as there are people willing to fight for it. And thanks to you and others fighting for our NHS, it is still here 75 years later.
Thank you so much for all you do to protect our NHS.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team’
I’ve had some of this blog’s great commenters wondering what the Labour left is doing to challenge Starmer’s stranglehold on the party and his determination to turn it into another version of the Tories. And not necessarily one further to the left. The Labour left is still around and organising events. I’ve had some emails about them, but didn’t put them up as they were in-person meetings in London, and so difficult to get to for people like me in the provinces, or they were about foreign politics, like Latin America, which I didn’t think many people would be interested in. Yesterday I had another email from Matt Willgress through the Arise festival of left ideas and the Labour Assembly against Austerity, giving details about events coming up in what remains of this month and February.
Let’s make 2023 the year of growing waves of resistance.
Read my article here // Retweet it here to spread the word // Register for Feb.1 here
Hello David
Last week, Tory ministers met numerous unions to discuss public-sector pay, but no movement was made, meaning that strike action is set to escalate, including with the PCS announcing 100,000 will be on strike on what is shaping up to be a major day of industrial and other forms of action on February 1st, the day of our #BuildingtheFightback rally.
The Tory refusal to budge on pay is the logical follow-on from locking-in austerity for years. On the Left we need to understand the scale of what we are up against politically, the extent of the crisis Britain is facing, and the nature of what is to come if the Tories aren’t forced out, including that this is an increasingly authoritarian Government.
We need to be organising resistance right now – and we need to be backing those movements taking direct action and backing those workers taking industrial action. Let’s make 2023 the year of growing waves of resistance to the Tories – join us at Building the Fightback on February 1 (details below) in solidarity with workers in struggle and to map out our next steps.
Yours in solidarity, Matt Willgress, on behalf of the Arise volunteers.
RALLY: Building the fightback in 2023.
Online rally, 6.30pm, Wednesday February 1. Join us on to hear about & build on a day of action across the country! Register here // Invite & share here // Retweet here.
Mark Serwotka, PCS General Secretary // Diane Abbott MP // Dave Ward, CWU GS // Richard Burgon MP // Helen O’Connor, GMB Southern Region & Peoples Assembly // Liz Cabeza, Acorn (Haringey) // Nabeela Mowlana, Young Labour // Holly Turner, NHS Workers Say No // Matt Wrack, FBU GS & more.
Join leaders of key industrial disputes – and who are at the forefront of fighting proposed anti-union laws – at this vital event! Now is the time to build the growing fightback, co-ordinate the resistance & popularise policies that put people before profit.
Hosted by Arise – a Festival of Left Ideas. All other pages listed on social media are kindly helping to promote the event.
OTHER 2023 DIARY DATES:
1) FORUM: The economic crisis – was Marx right?
Online. Monday January 23, 2023. Register here // share & invite here // retweet here to spread the word
Here in Britain and around the world the economic crisis is deepening. Join economist Michael Roberts for debate and discussion – was Nye Bevan right, wrong, or both when he said “Marxism put into the hands of the working class movement… the most complete blueprints for political action the world has ever seen?”
Labour Outlook forum as part of the Socialist Ideas series – kindly streamed by Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas.
2) CONFERENCE: The World At War – A Trade Union Issue
Register here. Saturday 21 January 2023, 10.30am, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London WC1H 9BD (Nearest tube: Euston/Kings Cross).
Jeremy Corbyn MP // Mick Whelan, ASLEF // Salma Yaqoob // Fran Heathcote, PCS // Alex Gordon, RMT // Ricardo La Torre, FBU & more.
Organised by the Stop the War Coalition.
3) DIARY DATE: A Society in Crisis – Building a Progressive Policy Platform.
Sat 11 Feb, 2023, 10:00am, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, WC1B 5DQ. Register here – Retweet here.
“The economic, social and environmental crises we face mean the need for a transformative policy agenda is more urgent than ever. For this reason, on February 11, I will be bringing together academics, think tanks, policy researchers and experts, campaigners and others to develop a progressive policy platform – and hope you can join us there.” – John McDonnell MP.
Organised by Claim the Future & Influencing the Corridors of Power’
It’s a pity the last meeting is in London, as this is what the left really need to challenge neoliberalism, in the Labour party as much as anywhere else. Perhaps they’ll release a video of it later on YouTube.
The pro-nationalisation, pro-NHS movement ‘We Own It’ held a Zoom meeting yesterday about the need to defend the health service from the Tory’s pernicious ongoing privatisation and discuss the demonstrations and protests they were organisations. It was hosted by the very well-informed and genial John Bosco and had a range of excellent speakers. It was to last from 6 pm to 7. 30, but I left after 50 minutes. This review thus necessarily does not cover the full event and all its speakers. Those I heard were Kate Osborne MP, Ben Goodair, the scientist behind the research showing that privatisation and outsourcing is actively killing people, Ron Mendel, an activist from my home city of Bristol and Zack Palansky, the deputy leader of the Green Party and member of the London assembly. And what they had to say was chilling.
Kate Osborne reminded us that a few years ago, Jeremy Hunt sold off the blood department of the NHS to the investment company, Bane, which then sold it on for a tidy sum. As a result, there’s a crisis in the blood section of the NHS, which has been forced to issue an ember alert. As for present health secretary, Therese Coffey, she is actively campaigning for the cash-starved NHS to get less money. She urged people to expose the false narrative that private industry is aiding the NHS. It isn’t. And to show how desperate conditions are for workers in the health service, one quarter of NHS trusts are running food banks for their own staff.
Ben Goodair’s work showing that outsourcing has actively produced excess deaths was published in the Lancet. Much of his talk was about the methodology they used to research this. He stated that one in ten patients in the health service is now being treated by a private healthcare company. He and his colleagues looked at the impact of privatisation by examining the use of private companies hired by the CCGs, the collections of doctors that Blair set up to control doctors’ spending. Not all CCGs used private healthcare companies. Many don’t, or only use to them to a small extent. But the study found that where they were used extensively by the CCGs, deaths rose significantly the next year.
Ron Mendel is an American, now living in my fair, home city. He has personal experience of the immense cost to the patient of private healthcare. He was speaking from Israel and Palestine, where he has been trying to work for peace between the two communities. He revealed that in Bristol, the Integrated Care Trust is currently running at a £36 million deficit. According to research by the University of Glasgow, between 2012 and 2019 there were 344,000 excess deaths.
Zack Palansky made it very clear that he and his party were fully behind the principles of the NHS: that it should be universal, publicly funded and free at the point of use. He stated that dental care needed to be defended as well as health – an important point now that, thanks to Thatcher’s privatisation and its consequences, millions of people don’t have an NHS dentist. He also pointed out that in 2015 Catherine Lucas, their leader, had launched an NHS reinstatement bill in the Commons to reverse the privatisation of the NHS. The Green Party, he declared, would reverse the 2012 Health and Social Care Bill. This is the pernicious bit of legislation that exempts the government from providing healthcare, the fundamental duty of the health secretary when it was founded by Nye Bevan. And he also stated that party leaders and MPs should join workers on picket lines.
We Own It as a whole stressed, they were not party-political and stated that many Tory voters wanted the privatisation stopped and the health service properly funded. But they recognised that most of the people campaigning were on the left. As well as urging their supporters to sign their petition against privatisation, they are also planning to set up a mass demonstration against it in Parliament Square on 25th February next year. They want at least 557 people there, to represent the 557 people who have needlessly died due to NHS privatisation.
The meeting was extremely well attended. There were 315 people there, from all over the country, and part of the organisers’ message was that these should be active in small groups in their local areas. If people are able to do this, it means that the organisation’s impact may be greater than those numbers suggest.
We Own It are doing great, important work as the NHS comes under attack from the Tories. We need the lie that outsourcing and privatisation is helping the health service to be absolutely refuted and political leaders who are willing to stop and reverse it.
I’ve said several times that as the failure of Thatcherite free market capitalism increases, the Tories will try to divert attention away from it by concentrating instead on issues of race and immigration. And this is has happened in the shape of the right-wing YouTubers Alex Belfield and Sargon of Gasbag and the Lotus Eaters. For example, the privatisation of the utilities ain’t working. This is why Jeremy Corbyn in his brilliant 2019 manifesto argued for their renationalisation. Just over 50 per cent of the British public agree with the renationalisation of the electricity companies with only 14 per cent opposing. Keir Starmer is one of those, as he tied himself up in knots on the Andrew Marr show this Sunday denying that he had ever said he was in favour of nationalisation while he very much had talked in favour of common ownership in his campaign to become party leader. Mike in his piece about it asked what common ownership meant if not nationalisation. Well, there are other forms of social ownership, such as municipalisation. When Blair dropped the commitment to nationalisation – Clause IV – from the Labour constitution back in the 1990s, his apologists stated that it didn’t mean that other forms of common ownership would be ruled out and specifically pointed to municipalisation. On the other hand, people have said that despite these arguments, it was very clear what the removal of Clause IV meant: the end of Labour as a socialist party and a commitment to private enterprise. Conference challenged that as well when they voted overwhelmingly for return of the electricity companies to state ownership.
This is clearly an embarrassment to Starmer, especially as the motion was passed not just by the traditional Labour left, Corbyn’s supporters, but also by members of the party’s right. Which means that people across the party have woken up and realised that the private ownership of the electricity sector isn’t working.
So, how are popular right-wing YouTubers like Belfield, who makes much of having 300,000 supporters, and the Lotus Eaters responding to this decision? Well, from what I can see, they ain’t. Instead Belfield and the Lotus Eaters are making much of the statement by one of the hosts at the Conference yesterday that too many white men were putting their hand up, and that this didn’t represent the diversity of the people in the hall. Belfield and the Lotus Eaters both extensively discuss and criticise diversity and racial issues. Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, is an avowed anti-feminist. You’ll remember that he gained notoriety a year or so ago over a tweet he sent to Jess Philips telling her that he ‘wouldn’t even rape her.’ I think this is quite deliberate. They seem to be trying to appeal to the same constituency as UKIP, of which Sargon was briefly a member and which he helped to destroy. When he joined, everyone who didn’t have such strong views about race or migration immediately denounced his recruitment and left. Academic studies of UKIP, such as for example the book, Revolt on the Right, have found that the party’s core supporters were socially conservative older White men of 50 +, who felt left behind by Blair’s multicultural Britain. At the same time, the core supporters of the Republicans and especially Trump in America were supposed to be angry White men. Which explains why Belfield and the Lotus Eaters have seized on the statement by a conference host which sought to minimise them.
When not exploiting the call for fewer questions from White men, Belfield has been playing up personalities. Keith Vaz has returned, and this has been criticised by Belfield after reports of bullying by him. Belfield also attacked him for supposedly looking the other way when Asian workers in Leeds were being paid starvation wages by their Asian employers, a situation also ignore by Black Lives Matter. It’s a fair point, although the local Labour MP has pointed out that she repeatedly tried to get something done about it but was ignored by the local council. He also repeated the criticisms of Angela Rayner for calling the Tories ‘scum’. Well, it is unparliamentary language, but Nye Bevan, the Labour politico who set up the NHS and welfare state, famously called the Tories ‘vermin’. He was angry about the real poverty and suffering their policies had caused, and to which we’re returning thanks to Cameron’s, Tweezer’s and Johnson’s determination to drag us all back to the Victorian age. And then there’s Claudia Webbe, who stands accused of using misogynistic language against someone and threatening to attack them with acid. This is serious stuff, but it’s a distraction from the serious point that a majority of the party at Conference has decided that electricity privatisation is a failure. This is a direct assault on Maggie, and so can’t be tolerated.
The fact that Belfield and the Lotus Eaters aren’t arguing against electricity nationalisation, which they would have done at one time, shows that part of the Tory media realises very well that it isn’t working. They still support it, but have no arguments for keeping it in private hands.
So all they can do is make personal attacks and hope people will ignore the rest.
I went to an amazingly great pro-NHS zoom meeting last night organised, I think, by the anti-NHS privatisation organisations We Own It and/or Keep Our NHS Public. The speakers included Dr. Louise Irvine and Antonio Perez-Iranzo, a Spanish doctor working in the NHS, who described how Centene, the private health care company that’s being given positions on NHS boards and allowed to take over doctors’ surgeries, has managed to wreck healthcare in his home country. They were so terrible that eventually the Valencian government was forced to take the service back inhouse and kick them out. Rabina Khan, a Lib Dem councillor in Tower Hamlets, talked about her experience of the poor service they delivered when they took over the traditional GP’s surgery at which she was a patient. She was particularly concerned about the effect of privatisation on the elderly, and on Black and Bangladeshi women. Another speaker told of the vastly poorer service they gave when they were given NHS contracts and acquired GPs’ surgeries in Nottingham. The final speaker was Jeremy Corbyn, introduced as the ‘best Prime Minister this country never had’. Absolutely. He provided more details on the continuing NHS privatisation, showing his absolutely and unfailing commitment to the great institution created by Nye Bevan. He reminded everyone that one he waved the documents showing this was going to happen in parliament and asked Johnson about it, prime ministerial liar called him a liar. But he was right, and if, anything, understated the case. There was also time given for ordinary folks to ask their questions and give their experiences of the destruction of the NHS by these parasites.
In every case, the story was the same. Centene are given the contracts without warning, over the heads of local people, patients and even other doctors. Notification of the change comes from a bland, corporate letter and people are urged to get on Zoom for further information. This is a problem for older people, those not on the internet or who have problems using it, and people for whom English is not their primary language. Centene is a for-profit American health insurance company. Already big, it became massive in America with the introduction of Obamacare. It states in its corporate literature that it is only interested in making a profit, and that if this doesn’t happen, it will divest itself of those loss-making interests. Louise Irvine stated that, as a doctor, you don’t think of making a profit, even though since the inception of the NHS doctors are actually private businessmen, who contract in to the NHS. The only way to make a profit is to reduce costs. Which means sacking people and actually providing a worse service by reducing the amount of care given. In Nottingham, when Centene took over the service, they dispersed 3,000 of the 11,000 patients in their newly acquired GPs’ surgeries to others.
They are purely in it for the money, the profits of which go outside this country to their American shareholders.
Keep Our NHS Public is planning a demonstration against the privatisation of the NHS In London on Saturday, 3rd July 2021. This also includes issues like patient safety, and pay justice. They are going to assemble outside UCH on Euston Road, NWI at 12.00 before marching to parliament square. There are other protests also planned elsewhere in the country for the same day. Details of them can be found at their website https://keepournhspublic.com/ They also recommended people looking at an essay on this privatisation by a member of the Socialist Health Alliance, whose website is https://sochealth.co.uk.
They are naturally extremely keen for people to join their organisation or set up their own. Whatever we do, we have to organise to show the strength of opposition to this privatisation. They state it will be a long struggle, but people have succeeded in getting contracts taken away from the profiteers Serco, Circle Health and others.
The message is clear: Get rid of Centene and the other private companies profiting from the NHS. Get Boris out, and a proper government in, one committed to ending NHS privatisation.
And that does not include the Labour Blairites, who were as keen to privatise the NHS as their Tory heroes.
The Tories really do seem determined to turn as much of the British public away from them as possible through their obstinate refusal to give free school meals to hungry children during the school holidays. Of course they’ve started making up excuses. They’re claiming that the vouchers given for the meals are being spent on drugs and in brothels. This seems to be something that they’ve just pulled out of their rears. There’s no evidence for it, and the organisations and people dealing with Britain’s drug problem haven’t every encountered any drug dealer who has taken food as payment for their wretched wares.
I know from experience that drug addicts will rob homes and premises for food. My mother used to run a elderly people’s club in south Bristol. It was set up by the local council to give the elderly of that area a meal out and allow them to meet other people, play games and exercise themselves for a few hours. One day they found they’d been broken into, but what had been stolen was mostly food. They contacted the police, who came round and took a few details. The cops believed that the people responsible were drug addicts and had had experience of similar cases in the past. As for food vouchers being used in brothels, Cynthia Paine, the notorious ‘Madame Cyn’ of Personal Services infamy, accepted payment in luncheon vouchers from her clients. But she was very much at the top end of prostitution servicing MPs and the like. Or so she claimed. I’ve never heard of any house of ill repute accepting food vouchers. But this seems to show the fantasy land in which the Tories making these excuses seem to live.
They’re also trying to deflect blame away from themselves. They’re being abused as ‘scum’ by an outraged public, and this is all the fault of Angela Rayner for calling one of nastier Tory MPs the term when he was speaking to defend the government’s odious policy. Of course, it’s unparliamentary language and Rayner should apologise. But I don’t think the British public need any encouragement from Rayner to abuse the Tories, who voted against giving children free meals. To state the blindingly obvious, people are very protective of children. It’s why there’s such loathing and hatred of child abuse. The Tories’ policy harms children, and so people are naturally enraged.
And besides, the Tories have previous when it comes to abuse. Like Boris Johnson and his highly racist description of Black Africans and newspaper article describing women, who wear the burka as looking like ninjas and letter boxes. After he wrote that, the number of racist assaults on Muslims increased, including assaults on women wearing the burka. Labour MPs also received more than their fair share of abuse. Margaret Hodge infamously called Jeremy Corbyn ‘a f***king anti-Semite’ in the House of Commons. Black MPs seem to be particularly targeted for vilification. the majority of insults and threats sent to female MPs actually go to Diane Abbott, while there was massive abuse of Dawn Butler after she was stopped by the cops for driving while Black. The whines and wails from the Tories about insults and abuse is just gross hypocrisy in this matter.
Mike and others have pointed out just how much the Tories supporting this policy are paid. Tories like Boris Johnson are making tens of thousands from their MPs salaries and from other work, as well as corporate and private political donations. This is very much the obscenely rich deciding that the poor should starve. And to add insult to injury, MPs also enjoy subsidised food in parliament’s restaurants and bars.
This short video comes from Carl Vernon’s channel on YouTube. Vernon shares the general public disgust at the Tories’ decision. He states that we don’t live in a socialist country, and people do have a responsibility to feed their children. Absolutely, but people have pointed out before, those forced to use food banks and charity to feed their children do feel this responsibility like every one else. They’re just prevent from acting on it by decades of Tory and New Labour policies that have kept wages below the level on which many people can afford to feed and clothe themselves and their families and heat their homes. Quite apart from the destruction of the welfare state, so that hundreds of thousands of people, who should receive benefits, aren’t.
Vernon points out that MPs’ meals in parliament are subsidized, so they eat very well at cheap prices. He shows this with examples from parliament’s own menus. Here’s the video.
The British public, local councils and businesses have shown immense generosity stepped in to feed these children. And in return some Tory MPs have responded with contempt and insults. One of those complaining about insults from the other side of the chamber is north Devon MP Selaine Saxby. When local businesses stepped in to feed the children the Tory government wouldn’t, she announced on Facebook
“I am delighted our local businesses have bounced back so much after lockdown they are able to give away food for free, and very much hope they will not be seeking any further Government support”.
So much for Tory support for the hospitality and other industries struggling due to the Coronavirus emergency and the lockdown! But there, as Mike, Zelo Street and a multitude of other peeps are pointing out, the Tories don’t care about anyone except themselves personally. Only when it directly affects them do they feel any remorse or pangs of conscience.
This is a national disgrace. Last night the BBC news announced that ours is the only country, which isn’t feeding its children.
We stand shamed and humiliated on the world stage. This is an outrage. But as Zelo Street has also posted, it also shows that Nye Bevan, the architect of the welfare state, was right. Bevan stated that he had always had a burning hatred for the Tories because of the way they condemned decent people to semi-starvation. And so he called them
‘lower than vermin’.
And they’re proving him right once again.
And they have the audacity to complain that people are calling them ‘scum’!
On Sunday, the current malign incompetent currently posturing as NHS secretary, Matt Hancock, issued a statement of the government’s current policy regarding the Coronavirus. This contradicted Boris Johnson’s previous statement, which was that we shouldn’t be afraid of catching it, because this would confer on us all herd immunity. The Tory party, like the Republicans in America, hate experts. This rather cavalier attitude owed something to the massive ignorance in the Republican party over the other side of the Pond. They had been loudly denouncing it as a scare dreamed up by the Democrats, until one of their number came down with it at CPAC after meeting and pressing the flesh with several of their leading politicos and activists. The result was complaints that the American public weren’t being told enough about it. Johnson here obviously didn’t know what he was talking about, and outraged people who did – doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, and informed laypeople – weighed in to put him right.
Both Buddyhell and Martin Odoni have put up excellent pieces shooting down Johnson’s spectacularly ignorant comments. They point out that herd immunity means that everyone, or at least the vast majority, would have to come down with it. Only a very few would become immune, and that immunity would only last a couple of months, not years or a lifetime. And because nearly everybody would have to contract the disease, even if the mortality rate is low, the result would be that a large number of people, perhaps as many as 200,000, would die for the rest to acquire this short-lived immunity. It’s an immensely callous attitude from a Prime Minister, who obviously doesn’t know what to do. Worse, as the French philosophical feline and Martin rightly pointed out, it shows the eugenicist thinking underlying Boris’ and Cummings’ response to the disease. Eugenics hold that the biologically unfit, which means the inferior lower orders, should not be allowed to breed. The handicapped should be sterilised to make sure they don’t. At the same time, health care should not be extended to the poor, and certainly not racial groups specifically held to be inferior, like Blacks, because this will interfere with the proper natural process by which inferior stock is weeded out of the population. Eugenicist arguments were invoked in America by the corporate rich in the 19th century to prevent the state passing legislation to improve standards of workers’ health and safety. Because if workers and their families contracted disease and had shorter lives, it wasn’t because living conditions were worse than their employers. It was because they were biologically unfit. Cummings seems to hold eugenicist views, as did Andrew Sabisky, before the latter’s unpleasant opinions meant that the Tories had to get rid of him. But you can bet that the attitudes still there. Maggie Thatcher’s mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, caused outrage in the mid-70s when he declared that single mothers were a ‘threat to our stock’. And that does seem to be how the Tories regard the British public – as stock, to be cultivated or culled according to the whims of their masters.
Hancock’s article seems to me to be partly an attempt by the government to allay some of the outrage Johnson’s comments caused, and to show that the government really does have a sensible policy to tackle the emergency. Despite all appearances to the contrary. But Hancock’s article also showed that Hancock and his masters have no understanding of or sympathy with the public service ethos underlying the NHS. This was shown not so much by what Hancock said, but how he said it. His statement was released as an article in the Torygraph behind a paywall. This caused more justifiable outrage. Zelo Street made the point that Hancock should have made his announcements publicly, not just in a single newspaper, and certainly not tucked away behind a paywall so that only Torygraph subscribers could read it. The Torygraph seems to have taken the hint, and made the article free, as it should be.
But this attitude, however, makes perfect sense from the Tories’ ideological basis in private enterprise. Private industry operates by offering a range of services for the consumer, priced according to what they can afford or are willing to pay. The poorest only get the basic package, if they can afford that. As you pay more, so service improves. Now this works fine if you’re buying a washing machine or computer, but it’s no way to run public services that have to be accessible to all. Like the NHS. When that’s left to the private sector, as it is in America, it means that millions of people can’t afford proper healthcare. It means that 40,000 people a year die because they can’t afford their medicines, and the poorest hoard what medicines they have or use veterinary medicines for animals. A similar situation existed in this country before the establishment of the NHS by the Labour party under Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan. Before then, healthcare varied according to how wealthy you were. You got excellent care if you were well-off or were one of the few occupations that was covered by government health insurance schemes. If you were poor, you either had to make do with the charity hospital, the municipal infirmary, where standards varied immensely, some being extremely poor and basic, or you went without.
What changed attitudes to produce a broad consensus in favour of a socialised medical system was the Second World War. German bombs during the Blitz didn’t distinguish between rich and poor, who were hit alike and often in the same locations, so that the same healthcare had to be offered to everyone, regardless of personal wealth and class. But that was over 75 years ago, and the underlying lesson that made the NHS possible seems to have been forgotten by the Tories. If they ever learned it in the first place.
And so we had the unedifying spectacle of Hancock responding to the Coronavirus in the pages of the Torygraph like a private entrepreneur responding to increased demand. The announcement was made in a broadsheet paper aimed at and read by the top ranks of British society. It was hidden behind a paywall, so that only paying customers could access it. You get what you pays for, and this was premium service for valued customers. Which means the rich, whom eugenicist doctrine holds are biologically superior than everyone else.
This attitude is incompatible with running the NHS and tackling the coronavirus. Progress will only be made through properly funded state health provision and a government that genuinely has a public service ethos, rather than just pays lip service to it.
More lies from the party of smear and bully: they’re denying they’re selling off the NHS. At around 10.00 O’Clock on Wednesday Jeremy Corbyn appeared, brandishing a copy of the documents of the negotiations between Donald Trump and his British counterpart, Boris. And two minutes after he made his speech, the Tory spin machine trundled into action using what Peter Oborne has called its paramilitary wing, Guido Fawkes. The site stated that they had all six of the documents Corbyn had seen, and one didn’t mention the NHS at all. And the second, he declared, showed that Britain was heading for cheaper drugs through the deal with the Americans.
The Torygraph’s Christopher Hope then claimed that Corbyn was a threat to national security, as those documents had been marked secret. Zelo Street has pointed out how hypocritical this is, coming from the man or the paper that leaked ambassador Kim Darroch’s confidential views on what a massive imbecile Trump is. Tory chairman James Cleverly decided to add his tuppence worth’s, a declared that this breach of confidentiality by Corbyn showed his wasn’t fit to be Prime Minister. This was then refuted by Aaron Bastani of Novara Media, who pointed out that if that was true, then what about Fawkes, which had uploaded the documents with the civil servants’ names attached. Which Corbyn hadn’t done. And Pete tweeted that the documents actually showed that NHS access to generic drugs is an issue for the US.
This was confirmed by Steve Peers, who cited the relevant texts to disprove the Fawkes’ lies utterly. Peers tweeted
This is either ignorant or dishonest about Trump’s trade policy on drug pricing. It’s the other way around – Trump’s policy is to *increase* the prices paid for drugs outside the US … Here’s Trump’s policy on drug pricing in his own words, objecting to ‘unreasonably low prices’ outside the US – from the House of Lords library briefing on ‘the NHS and future trade deals’, 4 July 2019.
Some have objected to Corbyn saying that Trump seeks ‘full market access’ for medical products. But this phrase is found in the Trump administration’s own public document setting out its objectives in the US/UK talks … this falls short of the claim that “the NHS is for sale” in the trade talks with Trump. But we do know: a) patents/NHS drug pricing is under discussion (although we can’t be certain what final FTA would say on this) … b) Trump’s objective is NHS paying *more*, not less.
Zelo Street concluded its coverage of this with the comment
‘Labour’s revelation has cut through. The Tory boot boys have confirmed it. Game changer.’
But the Tories are still pursuing a policy of NHS privatisation even without the wretched trade negotiation with Trump.
They and the Blairites have been doing it for forty years, ever since Thatcher got into power in 1979. She really did want to privatise the NHS completely, but was only prevented by a cabinet revolt. So she contented herself with privatising the ancillary services by opening them up to private tender, and trying to encourage a target of 15 per cent of the British population to take out private health insurance instead.
This piecemeal privatisation continued under John Major, who introduced the private finance initiative, in which private firms would cooperate with the government to build hospitals. A few years ago Private Eye published a piece on this, revealing that its architect, Peter Lilly, saw it as an opportunity to open up the NHS to private enterprise.
Then in 1997 Blair’s new Labour came to power, and the process of privatisation was ramped up. Blair was no kind of socialist. He was an ardent Thatcherite, who the Leaderene in her turn hailed as her greatest success. He immediately pushed through a series of reforms in which the management of hospitals would be opened up to private healthcare companies. At the same time, the NHS could also contract in private healthcare providers like hospitals. The new polyclinics or health centres that the Blair regime established were also to be privately managed by companies like BUPA, Circle Health and Virgin Healthcare. And the Community Care Groups of doctors, which were supposed to be responsible for allowing doctors to manage their own funds, were part of this policy. They could raise money through private enterprise and contract in private healthcare companies.
One of Blair’s Health Secretaries wished to reduce the NHS to nothing more than a kitemark on services provided by private companies.
And this policy was continued and expanded in turn by the Tories.
They have done nothing to repeal any of this legislation. Instead they have taken it further. Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill is particularly obnoxious as underneath its convoluted verbiage it absolves the Health Secretary from the responsibility of ensuring that everyone in the UK has access to proper healthcare. This overturns one of the core principles of the NHS that has been there ever since it was set up by Nye Bevan and the Labour Party in 1948.
And it has gone on. The Tories wanted to give whole regions over to private healthcare providers, which would have brought the NHS’ complete privatisation that much closer. At the moment the majority of medical contracts have been given to private healthcare providers. Mike revealed on his blog that about 309 contracts had been given out, thus refuting the Tory claim that they aren’t selling the Health Service off.
This is a process that has been going for decades. But it is extensively covered by books like Raymond Tallis’ and Jackie Davis’ NHS – SOS. I’ve also written pamphlets on it, one of which is still available from Lulu. See my publications’ page on this site. And there are other books. Many others.
The Tories are selling off the NHS, and it is only Corbyn and his team that oppose it. The Blairites in Labour and the Lib Dems are utterly complicit in it.
Boris Johnson and his odious chums must be feeling the pressure from Corbyn and Labour, as they’ve reverted to doing what they always do in a tight squeeze: start lying about how they’re really good for the NHS. Right at the start of the Tory conference, one of the candidate claimed that they founded it. Oh no, they didn’t! Mike over at Vox Political put up a piece demolishing this porkie. He pointed out that when Labour put the bill founding the NHS to parliament, they claimed to welcome it, but then sought to deny it a third reading. The reason?
It “discourages voluntary effort and association; mutilates the structure of local governent; dangerously increases Ministerial power and patronage; appropriates trust funds and benefactions in contempt of the wishes of donors and subscribers; and undermines the freedom and independence of the medical profession to the detriment of the nation”.
Even that was a lie. Healthcare before the NHS was a nightmare for working people. Read the books of Harry Leslie Smith for information on the way a private health system fails to work. That was a hindrance to the nation.
I’ve put up many posts myself on this blog pointing out how poor healthcare was for ordinary working people before the introduction of the NHS. There were hospitals run by local authorities, but these varied enormously in the quality of care. There were also charity hospitals as well as the fully private. However, the charity hospitals relied heavily on donations and so spent much of their time trying to raise cash, and care in them was also frequently poor. Doctors were outside the system of minimal state provision, and so charged fees. After the Liberals came to power there was a system of state insurance available to pay the medical bills of some, but not all types of worker. The result was that there were millions, who were not covered by any type of insurance. Many people simply could not afford medical treatment.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard the Tories try to claim to they invented the NHS, or supported it. They tried it again under Jeremy Hunt a few years ago. And that was also a lie. The NHS was first proposed by Lord Beveridge, a Liberal peer, and put into action and ardently supported by Labour under Clement Atlee and the awesome Nye Bevan. It’s ultimate ancestry goes back to Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s minority report on healthcare provision in Britain right at the start of the 20th century, which recommended a comprehensive system of state healthcare. In the 1930s the Socialist Medical Society, the Fabian Society, now sadly riddled with Blairites, and the Labour party all demanded the establishment of a system of state medical care.
I have had Tories turn up on this blog arguing that Churchill and the Tories were as in favour of the NHS as anyone else, but that they voted against it because it wasn’t costed properly for some reason. Just as Clement Atlee didn’t initially vote for it. Now it’s true that some Labour figures didn’t vote for the NHS initially, as you can see in the lists of those who did given in a book attacking the Tories for blocking the NHS, published by the Left Book Club. But the above statement by the Tories attacking the embryonic NHS and defending a system of largely private healthcare that left millions in grinding poverty with no chance of any proper medical provision refutes this nonsense. And in case there’s any doubt of the Tories’ attitude towards the NHS, a few years after its foundation, in the early 1950s the Tory right tried to have it abolished on the grounds that it was too expensive.
And where have we heard that one before? Oh yes, from Maggie Thatcher, Dave Cameron, Tweezer and the rest of them, all arguing that the introduction of private medicine into the NHS will make it cheaper and more efficient. Only it doesn’t. It makes it more expensive. Hospitals under the Private Finance Initiative are more expensive and have fewer beds than hospitals build using direct state funds. PFI is a fraud, and merely a way-station on the road to the complete privatisation of the NHS. As Mike blogged a few days ago, it’s now saddled the NHS with a debt £50bn, which will probably be closer to £80bn when the debts come to an end in the 2030s. Yes, Labour massively increased the use PFI contracts as part of Blair’s ‘Third Way’. But it was introduced by Peter Lilley under John Major as a deliberate way of opening up the NHS to private industry.
The Tories, or at least some of them, have always wanted to privatise the NHS, because they hate the idea of working people receiving free healthcare at the point of need and service.
And then a few days ago, Boris announced that he was going to be build 40 spanking new hospitals. Except that he won’t. According to the Sage of Crewe on Zelo Street, the greatest number of hospitals that will get built are six. When questioned about the number by Andrew Marr on his show, Bozo blustered that he had a long-term infrastructure plan, and there was seed funding for these hospitals. Zelo Street pointed out that his ‘long-term infrastructure plan is just a rip-off of Cameron’s ‘long term economic plan’. And the seed funding means that while the government pays of securing the land, legal work and ensuring access. someone else will actually have to build them. Yes, it the PFI once again.
‘That sounds like either the PFI that began under John Major, was carried on by Tone and Pa Broon, and even though Cameron and Osborne slagged it off, they did it too – or it means someone else will own and run the hospitals – not necessarily the NHS.
Bozo just confirmed what we already knew – you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS.’
And the Skwawkbox also reminded people of the last time the Tories started lying about the NHS when an election was looming.
This was in the run-up to the elections that allowed the Tory-Lib Dem coalition to seize power, c. 2008 or so. Cameron was claiming to defend the NHS from Blair’s cuts. He and IDS very ostentatiously set about a campaign against hospital closures. When the Gruesome Twosome of Cameron and Clegg got in, of course, that campaign suddenly vanished. And it was back to cuts and hospital closures as normal.
This also reveals that the Tories have closed down 166 mostly maternity and A&E units, and closed down another 100 NHS walk-in centres.
These closures are presented as local decisions, but the Skwawkbox shows that it is the result of sham consultations and a central plan to cut costs. As for the six hospitals BoJo claims will be built, they aren’t new either. And some of them aren’t even fully fledged hospitals. One will actually take patients and beds from another hospital, resulting in even less care for local people.
The Skwawkbox comments on the Tory lies:
Boris Johnson’s lips will be moving today. Don’t believe a word that comes out of them.
There is only one party with safe hands for the NHS: Labour.
The Tory chairman, James Cleverly, whose name is surely a contradiction in his case, has tried rewriting history. According to him, William Wilberforce, the great 18th – 19th century campaigner against the slave trade, was a Tory MP from Yorkshire.
Er, no. He wasn’t. As Mike has posted on his blog, Wilberforce was an independent. Mike quotes two Tweeters, who know far more history than Cleverly, who point out that the Tories largely hated him, and that the Conservative Party only came into being in 1834, a year after the Act banning the Slave Trade throughout the British Empire and Wilberforce himself had died in 1833. And Philip Lowe, one of the Tweeters, also points out that the Tories tried to break him as a politician and a man, just like they’re trying to do with Corbyn.
This looks like another example of the Tories trying to appropriate anything progressive from an earlier era. They tried it a couple of years ago with the National Health Service, despite the fact that it was very definitely launched by Clement Attlee’s Labour government with Nye Bevan as the minister responsible for it. Then there was the ‘Red Tory’ movement launched by David Cameron and his mentor, Philip Blonde, which used the example of the great 19th century Conservative social reformers and radical socialists like the anarcho-communist thinker Peter Kropotkin, to try to position the Tories as more left-wing than Blair’s Labour. In opposition, Cameron had the Conservatives campaigning against hospital closures. Once in power, however, anything left-wing was very quickly dropped. Cameron went on and accelerated hospital closures and the privatisation of the NHS.
He also tried to present the Conservatives as being eco-friendly. ‘This will be the greenest government ever!’, he announced. And put a windmill on his roof as a symbol of his commitment to green policies and renewable energy. But once he got his foot in the door of No. 10, that all went for a Burton too. He and his government decided that they loved fracking and petrochemical industry, cut funding for renewable energy. And took that windmill off his roof.
And somehow I don’t think Cleverly’s attempt to claim Wilberforce for them is unrelated to the current furore about Tory racism. Cameron attempted to present the Tories as nicely anti-racist, severing links with the Monday Club and throwing out anyone who had links to the NF and BNP. Now that Brexit’s the dominant issue, racism and Fascism has come back with a vengeance. There have been revelations about the vitriolic racism and islamophobia in the Tory party, and particularly in online Twitter and Facebook groups for friends of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. And people very definitely remember BoJob’s comments about Black Africans and ‘grinning picaninnies with water melon smiles’. So Cleverly is trying to sanitise their image by appropriating Wilberforce.
Don’t believe the lies. The Tories are racist and viciously islamophobic. Get them out!
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