I thought so as soon as I saw his wretched video attacking the NHS yesterday. It struck me then as the act of a frightened man trying to discredit a rival political and medical institution. Yesterday Black American conservative Thomas Sowell put out a short video, just under five minutes, urging Americans to choose the American healthcare system over the British because it was better. Er, no. On so many levels. The American healthcare system is so dire that when Thatcher sent her personal private secretary Patrick Jenkin to America to see how it worked so she could do it to Britain, he joined the full-on cabinet rebellion against her when she tried to privatise the NHS. Yes, private American hospitals don’t have the crowding, and I dare say have more choice, than the NHS but that comes at a price. And more and more Americans are unable to afford it. As a result, good, hardworking, severely normal Americans have to say up years before they can afford the hospital care for American mothers to give birth. There is also a much higher infant mortality rate than Europe. Our NHS is no longer the world’s best because it has been comprehensively run down by the Tories and Blairite Labour for decades. But it’s still better than the American system. And the private American system is in crisis. Robert Reich put up a post on YouTube about how it’s falling apart. I’ll try to find it. A friend of mine trained as a doctor, and according to him, American private hospitals are being kept afloat by American public subsidies. As for the utilities, a number of American states have state-owned electricity companies that produce power more cheaply than private firms. In that sense, Reaganite capitalism is failing.
Now Sowell has put out another video with the title that more Americans are falling for socialism. ‘And it’s bad’. Naah. America has a very respectable socialist tradition going all the way back to the Knights of Labor in the 19th century. From what I can see, socialism may even have been stronger in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It seems that former president Barack Obama has also stirred things up a little by saying that America needs single-payer healthcare. Of course, it’s a bit rich that he says that now, when he refused to implement it in office and went for Obamacare instead, which is based on a Republican plan from Newt Gingrich. What the west needs is a return to the social democratic consensus of a strong welfare state, properly funded public healthcare, nationalised utilities and strong unions. The consensus that gave Britain a rising standard of living up to the 70s. A form of politics that could and should stop the movement to the far right as immigrants get blamed for the poverty caused by neoliberalism. But obviously even this mild form of socialism is anathema to someone like Sowell, who’s a fan of the discredited economics of Milton Friedman.
Monetarism died in the late 1980s. Reaganomics and Thatcherism have run their course. And the Tories have run out of candidates for prime minister so they’re recycling old ones like Johnson and Rishi Sunak.
I’ve just been to the barbers for a haircut, and while waiting I leafed through some of the papers left out. One was the Heil, so I looked through that. Okay, I’m not proud of it, but it was something to read while waiting. Needless to say, it was as it usually is. There’s a story about the cost of housing asylum seekers and the channel migrants. But what really disgusted me was an opinion piece. This was by a supposed NHS consultant urging patients to ‘beg, borrow or steal’ to go private.
This is essentially the Tory strategy for running down the NHS, ever since Maggie Thatcher. She wanted the health service privatised and replaced by an American-style healthcare system funded by private health insurance. She was only stopped by a cabinet revolt and the finding of her personal secretary, Patrick Jenkin. Jenkin had been to America and knew exactly how poor in comparison the American system was. So Thatcher had to content herself with aiming to get 10 per cent of the population to take out private health insurance.
She also began process of piecemeal privatisation, selling off or opening up the ancillary services to private competition. This process was carried on by John Major’s administration and then by Tony Blair, who was ostensibly Labour. And Cameron, Tweezer and Bozo have in turn continued the wretched process. Private healthcare firms are allowed to compete with the NHS itself for contracts for medical services. Thanks to this privatisation, administration costs in the NHS have sky-rocketed where they approaching the levels -25 per cent or so – which the American private health system spends on administration. Privatisation does not bring savings. Quite the opposite. At the same time, the Tories have cut spending on the NHS, and grotty Tories like Truss and Mogg are saying they’ll cut more NHS ‘waste’. Meaning, presumably, more expensive privatisation and cuts.
The only way to cut waste is to renationalise the NHS.
But the article shows the direction of travel British healthcare is taking under the Tories: a two-tier system, with poor NHS services for the people at the bottom, and expensive private healthcare for those who can afford it. And the Tories stand to profit from it personally. Under Cameron, 100 MPs had personally connections to private healthcare firms.
If you really want to ensure that you and the rest of this great nation has the healthcare it needs and deserve, then kick the Tories and the other privatisers out, and demand the renationalisation of the NHS!
Okay, yesterday I flicked through the Daily Mail. I’m not proud of it, but there was precious little else to read and I was in the barber’s waiting for a haircut. The Heil was there as one of the newspapers put there for the customers to peruse while waiting. There was, as you’d expect, a great deal about the war in Ukraine. But what struck me was a little article at the bottom of a page further in. The headline of this little piece announced that, according to polls, 85 per cent of Brits would consider paying for private treatment to jump the queues in the NHS. I didn’t read any further, as I was feeling a bit rough already from the anticancer drugs, and didn’t want to feel worse. I don’t know what polls these were, who was behind it or even how accurate they were.
But I bet the Tories and the Heil were delighted.
The Tories and the Labour successors have been pushing for the privatisation of the NHS ever since Maggie Thatcher. She wanted to sell it off and replace it by an American-style for-profit system, financed by private health insurance. She was prevented from doing so by a massive cabinet revolt and the information from her secretary, Patrick Jenkin, of how terrible the American system was in practise. So she satisfied herself by aiming to get at least 10 per cent of the British public to take out private health insurance. The Tories also went on to try and get the NHS opened up to private healthcare companies, firstly through the Private Finance Initiative, in which new hospitals were supposed to be a joint project between the state and private industry, but which largely results in the state having to shoulder all the costs. This was then followed by Blair’s NHS reforms, in which the new health centres and polyclinics were supposed to be built and run by private firms for the NHS and the introduction of the Care Commissioning Groups of doctors within the health service, which were empowered to raise funding through private means as well as buy in services from private health companies. Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, wanted the NHS to be sold off completely and become nothing more than a kitemark on services provided by private healthcare companies. And private healthcare companies were to be allowed to compete for NHS contracts. These reforms were taken over and extended once again by the Tories under Dodgy Dave Cameron, Tweezer and now the blonde abomination occupying No. 10. At the same time, NHS budgets have repeatedly been cut as part of an efficiency scheme which has left the health service which lower levels of funding than other first world countries. And this is all part of pattern.
Mike has repeatedly quoted the awesome Noam Chomsky, who has said that the right’s strategy for gaining popular support for privatisation is always to run it down through repeated cuts before finally privatising it.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing here, and I doubt it’s a coincidence this story emerged just as the House of Lords was prepared to go through a reading of the government’s Health and Social Care bill which will push the NHS’s privatisation even further.
The Tories will no doubt blame the queues on Covid. The disease is part of it, but the queues and the problems of the NHS in coping with it were due to over ten years of Tory cuts and privatisation, which has seen the bureaucracy and consequent administration costs increase as service has declined. it’s been remarked that the Tories never waste a crisis to make things worse. And that’s what they’re doing with the Coronavirus and the delays it’s caused in routine health treatment.
And right-wing internet media hosts are all too keen to help the Tories privatise the NHS.
Alex Belfield, who says he’s about to depart YouTube for Ustreme and a paywall at the end of the month, has posted numerous videos demanding the health service’s privatisation. So has Nana Akua on GB News, Calvin Robinson and Nigel Farage. The latter should be no surprise, as when he was head of UKIP he’d made noises about it being possible that Britain would have to turn to a system of funded by private health insurance. But these people are only saying what the Tories believe secretly.
Don’t believe that the Tories even remotely care about the NHS. Many of them, including the owners of the right-wing rags, will be delighted by this story.
Get them out, and get their collaborators the Blairites out of Labour.
This comes from a video on YouTube I was watching the other day. It wasn’t about health services except that at one point the person talking mentioned that where she was – America – you have to pay $200 simply to see a doctor. And that’s before he treats you or gives you medicine.
At a very rough estimate, that’s about £130 or so. Very roughly, and I might be wrong.
But it used to be like that over here as well before the establishment of the NHS by the 1945 Labour government. And people suffered and died because they couldn’t afford to pay for it. I’ve been watching Ken Loach’s excellent film on the establishment of the British welfare state, The Spirit of ’45. This is another flick I fully intend to blog about in due course and highly recommend it to anyone interested in the origins not just of the welfare state, but of the mixed economy that gave us jobs and prosperity for thirty years before the election of Thatcher. And it clearly shows as well how and why capitalism is failing but still being pushed, and why we must never allow the NHS to be privatised. It mixes archive footage from the period, including speeches by Clement Atlee, Nye Bevan, George Lansbury and others with filmed interviews with politicians, activists, writers, union representatives and ordinary working men and women. These include not only the awesome Tony Benn, but also Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist who co-edited NHS: SOS against the privatisation of the NHS with Ray Tallis. Doctors appearing in the film explain that before the NHS was established, you had to pay half a crown simply to see the doctor. Very poorly paid workers, like agricultural labourers, could be paid five shillings a week. If they fell ill, one of those shillings would be taken in doctor’s fees. And doctors employed debt collectors to get money owing from patients, who’d paid on credit.
This is what is going to happen if Johnson and his jackals privatise the NHS.
I mention this because there was a news report last week that more people are taking out private health care. This is not by accident. It is a deliberate Tory policy. Thatcher would have liked to have privatised the NHS, but she was prevented by a cabinet revolt. Patrick Jenkin, her private secretary, had visited America and was shocked by the American private healthcare system. Unable to get her way, Thatcher instead aimed to get a certain percentage of the British public to take out private health insurance.
As Mike has pointed out again and again, the way the right prepares industries for privatisation is by starving them of funding until they are near collapse and then claiming that privatisation will provide more investment and improve services.
And this is what the Tories have been doing since they got into power eleven or so years ago. The NHS is in crisis with cancelled operations and treatment due to priority being given to combating the Coronavirus. But the Tories never waste a crisis, and they are using it to demand further privatisation. The mad internet radio host, Alex Belfield, released a video last week yet again demanding the privatisation of the NHS because of the crisis and the suffering it was causing his listeners, some of whom had relatives die as a result.
I have every sympathy for them. But the truth is that people are suffering and dying not because of any inherent fault of the NHS but because it is deliberately being run down so the Tories can privatise it.
Boris and his cronies would like to take us to a completely private healthcare system, financed through private health insurance. And if that happens, people will once again have to pay money simply to see a doctor.
And so we come back to the question: do you have the equivalent of $200 to see a doctor? Because this is what it’s going to cost you if Johnson and the private American healthcare companies that want a bit of NHS action get their way.
This fortnight’s issue of Private Eye also has a few choice things to say about David Cameron’s new book, For the Record. This seems to be largely his attempt to justify his wretched tenure of 10 Downing Street and the havoc he caused. The book’s reviewed, and comprehensively and thoroughly trashed, in their ‘Literary Review’ column on page 34 in a piece titled ‘Shed tears’. It’s a long review, which can be summed up by saying that Cameron keeps trying to claim that his government left Britain stronger, more stable, and more prosperous. To which the Eye’s answer – and just about everyone else’s – is Brexit, and a few telling details refuting the Old Eton’s bogus claims.
The magazine’s ‘Medicine Balls’ column also attacks some of Cameron’s claims. It begins by refuting BoJob’s claim that he’ll build 40 new hospitals, before going on to tackle Cameron’s little stories. Including the former PM’s claim that he wasn’t really responsible for the Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This is a nasty little piece of legislation which, behind its convoluted verbiage and tortuous clauses, exempts the Health Secretary from having to provide Brits with universal healthcare which is free at the point of service. It’s a piece preparing for the wholesale privatisation of the NHS, and is duly attacked as such in the book NHS – SOS. As Prime Minister, Cameron is responsible for the Act. Except he claims it’s all the fault of his Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, and the Lib Dems. The Eye writes
Then there is the small matter of repairing the disastrous Health and Social Care Act, a Trojan horse for outsourcing NHS services to the private sector via an astonishingly wasteful process of repetitive, competitive tendering. David Cameron, in his autobiography, places the blame for the act on his health secretary Andrew Lansley, the Lib Dem coalition partners and the British Medical Association (BMA): “Andrew Lansley … was too submerged in the detail. The jargon he’d use was baffling. I remember sitting in cabinet when he shared his reform white paper. it was like an artist unveiling a piece he’d spent years on, and everyone wondering what on earth it was.” So why did he allow such chaos to progress?
It was the Lib Dems fault, claims Cameron, that he was forced to abandon his pre-election pledge of “no top-down” reorganisation” of the NHS, because they insisted that primary care trusts should be abolished rather than left “wither on the vine”. Then there is the BMA, which Cameron declares “will oppose anything, whether it is a good idea or not.”
(Eye page 17).
From this it’s clear that there was little ideological difference between Cameron and the Lib Dems. Both wanted the primary care trusts to go. It was simply a difference of the means.Cameron wanted them to decay quietly, the Lib Dems wanted abolition.
The column also attacks Comedy Dave’s pledge to support the NHS:
But he also promised to “always support the NHS with the funding it needs”, which he manifestly failed to do. And the promises in his 2015 manifesto – “to make the NHS the safest and most compassionate health service in the world” – were always phoney given the lack of resource, capacity and staff.
The article does admit that Cameron did some things right, such as highlighting the dangers of anti-microbial resistance, but attacks his role in provoking the junior doctor’s strike by demanding they work weekends, based on flawed, decades-old statistics.
From this it’s very clear that, whatever he says about Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act, Cameron was in favour of the privatisation of the NHS. No surprise there, then. He’s a Thatcherite, and Maggie Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS. She couldn’t, because her Personal Private Secretary, Patrick Jenkin, found out how awful the American, insurance-based system was, and there was a massive cabinet rebellion. But she was determined to open it up to private industry. This was taken over by Peter Lilley and John Major, who introduce the Private Finance Initiative, and then by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who expanded it in their turn. It was then taken up, once again, by David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Tweezer. And I’ve no doubt Johnson also wants to privatise it, after he gets through ruining the country with his assaults on the sovereignty of parliament and a ‘no deal’ Brexit.
And the Lib Dems share the Tories’ determination to destroy the NHS. At the last election, Nick Clegg stated that he wanted to open the NHS up to private industry, as those countries, whose healthcare had a mixture of state and private provision had ‘better outcomes’. It’s a flat-out lie, or it was until he and the Tories started their disastrous campaign of trashing the NHS. And Swinson shares his goal of privatising it. She consistently voted for the government’s bills, and supported them far more than some front bench Conservatives.
Despite this, she claims that she and her party are ‘progressive’, solely because it ostensibly supports ‘Remain’. But this is sheer opportunism. When it came to the referendum, she issued a single, lukewarm tweet and was nowhere to be seen, while the Labour leader she reviles was travelling up and down the country. As for her party, the proportion of Lib Dems who support ‘Remain’ is only two per cent higher than that of the Labour party. Her whole pro-Remain stance is a lie, as is just about everything she says.
Don’t be fooled. Both the Tories and Lib Dems want to privatise the NHS. The only person who doesn’t, and will block it, is Jeremy Corbyn.
Last week the orange generalissimo managed to cause massive offence and outrage on his state visit here. And it wasn’t just for merely being present, although that was certainly a major factor in the protests his visit provoked. No, Trump and his spokesman were touting for a trade deal with Britain after Brexit. And he demanded that ‘everything should be on the table’, including healthcare.
Which means the NHS.
MPs from all sides of the House immediately swung into action to condemn the Fascist cheeto’s demands that the NHS should be opened up to private American healthcare companies. There were a string of high profile Tory MPs, including former health secretary Andrew Lansley, loudly denouncing Trump’s demand, and stating that they weren’t going to include the NHS as part of the Brexit deal and were going to defend this most precious of British institutions. Lansley in particular was scathing about Trump’s opposition to the way the NHS controlled drug prices. He was afraid that if Trump has his way, this would be discarded to allow predatory American pharmaceutical companies to charge excessive and unaffordable prices for needed drugs.
He’s absolutely right.
One of the current scandals with the American private, insurance-driven healthcare system is that the drug companies can and do charge whatever they like for their products, which means that these are often beyond the ability of ordinary Americans to afford. I’ve blogged on here about a piece from The Young Turks about how Americans are hoarding drugs or buying those intended for animals from vets because they can’t afford them. And the worst example of a drug company actually raising prices is the case of Martin Shkreli. When he took over one company, he raised the price of an anti-AIDS drug to well over $300 a pill. He said he only wanted rich Americans to be able to use it, not poor Indians. He was rightly massively vilified for his gross racism and profiteering, but continued to defend himself, as he really couldn’t see that he had done anything wrong.
But while it’s heartening to see all these politicians stand up to defend the health service, I don’t believe them. With one exception, of course: Jeremy Corbyn. The Tories and the Blairites simply can’t be trusted to defend the NHS because they haven’t done it up to now. Indeed, they’ve done the exact opposite, all the while denying it.
Remember how Maggie Thatcher loudly declared that the NHS was ‘safe with us’, and she would keep her wretched claws off it. She even put it in her memoirs, denouncing the claims of the Labour party that she was planning to privatise the health service as lies. But she herself was lying. Cabinet minutes released a couple of years ago showed that she very much wanted to privatise the NHS. She was only stopped because of a massive cabinet revolt and the fact that her Personal Private Secretary, Patrick Jenkin, had visited the US and had seen personally what a travesty American private healthcare was.
So she satisfied herself with cutting its budget and trying to encourage Brits to take out private health insurance instead. She was aiming for about 11 per cent of the British population to take out such insurance.
She was followed by John Major, whose health secretary Peter Lilley was, I believe, one of the others who attacked Trump’s demand for a slice of NHS action. But Lilley was responsible for the Private Finance Initiative, under which private firms were to be allowed to bid for NHS contracts and building and running hospitals in partnership with the government. It was deliberately introduced with the intention of opening up the health service to private healthcare companies. And Lilley was advised in his health policies by John Lo Casio of the American private health insurance fraudster, Unum.
Well, the government changed with Labour’s 1997 electoral victory, but the Thatcherite privatisation of the NHS remained on course. Blair was an unashamed Thatcherite, and she had reciprocated his feelings by calling him and New Labour her greatest achievement. Blair also took over Lo Casio and Unum as his advisers on health policy, and continued the stealth privatisation of the NHS. The Community Care Groups of GPs he set up to contract in healthcare services were given the power to purchase it from the private sector and to raise funding privately themselves. The health centres and polyclinics he set up were to be run by private healthcare firms, like Circle Health, BUPA and Beardie Branson’s Virgin Health. NHS contracts, including out of hours services in many regions were privatised and the contracts awarded to private healthcare firms.
And yes, American healthcare firms were among them. Private Eye reported how Blair was surrounded by American public sector contractors, all lobbying for their share of British state business. Like the private American prison company, Wackenhut. And this included private healthcare companies. Blair was particularly impressed by the private American healthcare provider, Keyserpermanente, which he thought provided better value for money than the traditional NHS structure. It doesn’t, but that was ignored, and the American company provided the model for his NHS reforms. His health secretary, Alan Milburn, wanted the NHS to become nothing but a kitemark for services provided by private companies.
And this continued under David Cameron and Tweezer. Despite the loud shouts by Lansley and Jeremy Hunt that they ‘treasure’ the NHS, both of them preferred private healthcare and previously stated that they wanted the NHS effectively abolished and the lines blurred between state and private provision. There’s also a solid block of Tory politicians that would like the NHS sold off completely. Like the Devon Tory MEP, Daniel Hannan, dubbed by Guy Debord’s Cat ‘the Lyin’ King’ because of his gross mendacity. The majority of NHS contracts are being awarded to private healthcare firms, rather than kept in-house, and they have been angling to win the contracts for whole regions. Which brings the complete privatisation of the NHS even closer.
Andrew Lansley’s convoluted Health and Social Care Act of 2012 also enabled its privatisation by removing the obligation of the health secretary to provide healthcare to everyone in the UK, which had been a statutory requirement since the founding of the NHS in 1948. The Tories have also consistently voted to introduce charges for certain NHS services. Mike over at Vox Political has frequently given the voting record of some of the worst Tories, who have not only done this, but also supported other attacks on the poor like cutting welfare services, raising tuition fees and supporting the bedroom tax.
And I don’t trust the Lib Dems either. They went into coalition with the Tories and did absolutely nothing as their partners in government continued to attack the welfare state and the NHS. Indeed some of them, like the former MP for Taunton Dean, strongly supported it.
I have to say that I think that the outrage from the Tories at Trump’s demands is largely hypocritical. They’d very much like to make a deal with Trump, that includes the NHS along with other essential services that should only be run by the state. But, as with the cabinet revolt against Thatcher, they’re afraid that if they agree, they will be voted out in a devastating landslide, possibly never to get back into power.
The only person, who can be trusted to defend the NHS and keep it safe from Trump and the other privatisers, is Jeremy Corbyn.
Don’t trust the Tories. They still want to and are privatising the NHS. Nor the Lib Dems or ‘Centrist’ Labour, who are exactly the same. The only real hope of defending and reviving the NHS is with Corbyn and the victory of a genuine, socialist Labour party at the next election.
Charlie Kirk is an American Conservative mouthpiece. A little while ago he got very angry at some public meeting his was holding with The Young Turks Cenk Uygur. Uygur committed the terrible crime of asking him how much money he was making. This set Kirk off ranting that ‘He lived like a capitalist every single day’ before rushing off the stage and apparently challenging Uygur to a fight, asking him if he ‘wanted to go’. Fortunately, he managed to calm down and return to the stage without engaging in fisticuffs.
Kirk’s on record as saying that ‘Healthcare is not a right’ and raving about how wonderful America’s private medical system is. It’s therefore highly ironic that he should have experienced its failings first hand. A few days ago Kirk’s mate, Kyle Keshuv, sent a tweet stating that he was outside Cedar Sinai hospital in LA with Kirk. Kirk had put his back out, gone down to the hospital seeking help, only to be told there were no beds available and he’d have to wait on a bench outside. The tweet carried a photo of Kirk lying on said bench, and ended with ‘Cedar Sion Hospital – Disgrace’.
In this video from The Young Turks, hosts Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss the incident, laughing at Kirk and his comments about the superiority of American healthcare. They state that they’re only doing so because Kirk is actually now well. Sam Seder also carried the story on his show with the news that Kirk was now in the hospital. He was confined to bed, couldn’t physically stand, but still stood for freedom. The Turks in this video comment on Kirk’s apparent sense of entitlement – he doesn’t believe that people have a right to healthcare, but when it’s him in trouble, he wants to be first in the queue. He also believes that the American healthcare system could be made better through more competition lowering costs. They point out that LA has many excellent hospitals. He could, using his own logic, have gone elsewhere, and then written a bad review of his treatment at Cedar Sion hospital on Yelp.
Uygur and Kasparian defend the hospital, saying that it’s a good one. Uygur himself has taken his child down there many times. But you do have to spend a long time in queues. He also makes it clear that its failings of the American medical system that makes him support Medicare for All. He points out that the system exists in Norway and Northern Europe, and that it’s part of a mixed economy. America also has a mixed economy. Uygur also points out that he’s a capitalist, but it’s because, as a progressive, he wants everyone to have access to good healthcare that he supports Medicare for All and believes medicine should be in the state part of the equation. Everyone, even Charlie Kirk, should have proper medical care. Although Kasparian states that she thinks Kirk shouldn’t have it so much as everyone else.
I’m putting this up because it shows the failures of the American healthcare system, a system which the Tories and New Labour wish to import to Britain. Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS completely, but was only stopped by a massive backbench rebellion. And the fact that her personal private secretary, Patrick Jenkin, returned from America pointing out how rubbish it was. But she still wanted a certain percentage of Brits to have private health insurance. And the Tories and their counterparts in the Labour party, the Blairites, have been determined to privatise the health service ever since. Alan Milburn wanted to reduce the NHS to nothing but a kite mark for privately provided services.
According to the privatisers swarming around Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron and Tweezer, private industry always provides better quality service than the state, even in healthcare. If you believe some of the twaddle coming from American supporters of their rubbish system, the healthcare is wonderful and you don’t have to wait to be seen. The truth is, it’s expensive, millions of Americans can’t afford private health insurance. I understand the figure is now up to 20 per cent of the population. 40,000 Americans die each year because they can’t afford proper medical care.
But you won’t hear any of this from Nuffield Health or BUPA and their adverts on the TV, nor from Virgin Healthcare or the other private healthcare firms trying to get a piece of that sweet NHS action. Nor will you hear it from Tory health secretaries, like Andrew Lansley or Jeremy Hunt. Or even from Lib Dems like Nick Clegg, who claimed that privately run healthcare, as on the continent, was associated with excellent health outcomes. Or some similar piece of bullsh*t managerial jargon.
The whole Tory/Lib Dem idea has been to run down the health service to the point where the middle class will start turning to private healthcare. The endpoint of that is the American, for-profit system, where if you’re poor, you go the Emergency Room or a charity hospital. And that’s it. It’ll return the healthcare in this country to the appalling state it was in before the Second World War. But who cares if millions of poor suffer and die through disease, so long as the private healthcare company they and their donors head makes big bucks.
Don’t believe their lies, and don’t believe that they’re not trying to privatise the health service. Stop them. Get Tweezer and the rest of the loathsome Thatcherites out, and Jeremy Corbyn and Labour in.
It seems that the Tory party is once again trying to lay some kind of claim to the NHS, even as they destroy it. At the Tory party conference last week I seem to recall one of the speakers claiming that the Tories could be relied on to keep it in budget and governed according to sound financial management.
Which must be why so many NHS Trusts are saying they’re seriously underfunded and in debt.
We’ve heard this nonsense before. A few years ago, former Health Secretary and maliciously incompetent clown, Jeremy Hunt, claimed that the NHS was a Tory invention. It wasn’t. The modern welfare state was created by the Atlee government under the direction of the great Nye Bevan. One right-wing commenter came on this blog to try to argue that the NHS wasn’t the creation of the Labour party, as it was based on the Beveridge Report. Beveridge was a Liberal, who based his report on consultation with a number of sources inside the civil service. But the ultimate origin of the NHS actuall predates the Report. In the 1930s the Socialist Medical Society had also issued demands for the creation of a National Health Service, and the Labour Party had included it in their manifestos. And the ultimate origin of the NHS goes back to the Webbs and their Minority Report on the Poor Law of 1909.
I found a couple of quotes making the socialist origins of the NHS and welfare state very clear in the booklet 100 Years of Fabian Socialism 1884-1984, edited by Deirdre Terrins and Phillip Whitehead (London: Fabian Society 1984).
With Lloyd George and Beverdge, Beatrice and Sidney Webb can just be said to be the founders ofthe modern Welfare State. In particular, Beatrice’s 1909 Minority Report to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, and the Webbs’ subsequent Prevention of Destitution campaign, laid down a blueprint for the development of welfare programmes to cater for the disadvantaged. (p.7)
Discussing the activities of the Fabian Society during the War, the book states
At home the essays Social Security, edited by William Robson, paved the way for the Beveridge Report. This book, and five others, with a further nineteen research pamphlets, comprised the Fabian war effort. It was condensed in the 1945 Manifesto Let Us Face the Future, written by the Fabian Michael Young, and successful as no manifesto has ever been before or since. (p.17).
As for the Tories, they’ve been repeating the lie that only they, not Labour, offer the sound financial management required to keep the NHS afloat since the 1980s, if not before. I can remember the Torygraph declaring c. 1987 that while Labour had founded the NHS, only the Tories’ good financial management could be relied upon to maintain it. To support this assertion, they stated that when the Italians had set up their version of the NHS in the 1970s it had gone bust within a week.
I really don’t know anything about the Italians’ attempts to set up a system of state medicine, and so can’t comment on that part of the Torygraph’s claim. But the rest of it – that it’s the Tories prudent financial management that has kept the NHS solvent, is nonsense. Dangerous, pernicious nonsense.
And the Torygraph was aware of it at the time, which is why it said it. Thanks to Maggie Thatcher’s management, the NHS was in crisis, with lengthening waiting lists, the postponement of operations and the closure of hospital wards. Maggie, despite her loud denials and denunciations of the Labour party for claiming otherwise, had planned to privatise the NHS. She was stopped because of a full scale Cabinet revolt and the fact that her private secretary, Patrick Jenkin, had been to America and seen for himself just how dreadful the American healthcare system was, funded by private health insurance. Thatcher thus rowed back, and resorted instead to trying to get a certain percentage of the British population to take out private health insurance instead.
The party then went ahead with a programme of piecemeal NHS privatisation through the Private Finance Initiative, which was picked up and expanded by Blair and New Labour when they came to power in 1997. And after Labour lost the 2010 election, the programme has been resumed and expanded in turn by the Tories under Cameron and Tweezer, and their Health Secretaries Andrew Lansley, Jeremy Hunt and their successors.
However, under New Labour the NHS was kept in the black, so any claims that Labour was responsible for overspending or bankruptcy there is a lie. And even in the 1970s the compilers of a report into the NHS stated that further NHS expenditure would easily be met through natural increases in government funding.
Ultimately, the Welfare State and the NHS have been largely the creation of Socialists and the Labour party. The Conservative commitment to state medical care has, by contrast, always been tenuous. In the 1950s the Tory Right revolted and wanted to privatise the new NHS, claiming that it was financially unsupportable. Just as the Tories now claim that it would not be properly financially supported by the Labour party. Even though the Tories themselves have partially privatised it and driven it into debt.
The only solution is for the NHS to be returned to its Socialist origins and be renationalised. Which is what Corbyn promises, and one of the reasons the Tories, New Labour and the media are so scared of him. And why we need Corbyn, and a proper, traditional, Socialist Labour party in government.
Oh dear! It seems the attempts of the Tory party in the 1980s and ’90s to purge the offensively extreme right-wing element among the party’s youth and student organisations hasn’t entirely been successful. According to today’s I, Thursday, 4th October 2018, a group of students from Plymouth University Student’s Union Conservative Society have been condemned by the Tory MP Robert Halfon after a photo of them appeared in yesterday’s Mirror wearing very offensive T-shirt. These showed what they really thought of the NHS and Adolf Hitler.
The article on page 8, by Serina Sandhu, reads
Students Condemned for Explicit T-Shirts
A Conservative MP has condemned a group of students believed to be part of a Tory university society for wearing T-shirts with explicit wording including “f**ck the NHS”.
An image of the group from the University of Plymouth on a night out was published by the Daily Mirror yesterday.
The students wore blue T-shirts with hand-written slogans and messages. One also appeared to have drawn a Hitler-style moustache on his face.
Denouncing the behavior, Harlow MP Robert Halfon said the image reinforced people’s stereotypes of the party.
The image came to light on the final day of the Tory conference but contrary to speculation, the picture was not taken at the event. It is not clear how many of the students are part of Plymouth University Students’ Union Conservative Society.
So, it seems that some Tory students, at least, are going back to the old days, when members of the Union of Conservative Students used to go around singing ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ and ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks and Asians’, the latter to the tune of Pink Floyd’s ‘Brick in the Wall’.
But it’s wrong for Halfon to complain that they’re presenting a stereotyped image of the party. While they are indeed reinforcing an established, negative view of the party, it’s also one that is also true.
The Tories are trying to privatise the NHS, whatever they say to the country. You only have to look at the stats showing the hospitals that have been given over to private firms to manage, and the operations and other NHS functions that have also been contracted out to private firms. And then there’s the speeches and attitudes of leading Tories themselves, beginning with Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher really did want to privatise the NHS, and was only prevented from doing so by a back-bench revolt and the findings of her own private secretary, Patrick Jenkin, about how dire the American private healthcare system was. So she contented herself with trying to get a certain percentage of the British public to take out private health insurance, and her party embarked on a forty-year programme of privatizing it by stealth. Which was also continued by Blair and his cronies when they were in power. And it wasn’t just Maggie. The Dorset Tory MEP Daniel Hannan also wants the NHS privatized. Philip Hammond, before he became health secretary, wrote that he wanted the health service to disappear and be merged with private healthcare. And I remember the furore a few years ago when another Tory privately declared that in a few years the NHS would cease to exist. Then someone at Tory Central Office took fright, and declared that the comments attributed to him in the press were incorrect, and that what he really said was that the Tories were cutting down on bureaucracy and combatting inefficiency. The usual Tory lies.
As for Nazism, there always has been a section of the party which supports the Far Right. Despite Cameron cutting links with the Monday Club and purging members with connections to the BNP. The Traditional Britain Group, whose annual dinner a few years ago was attended by Jacob Rees-Mogg, is led by a Tory activist with a very strong fascination with Hitler and the Third Reich. The Libertarians in the party, of which Paul Staines, AKA Guido Fawkes, was a part, invited over to their annual dinners the leaders of South American Fascist death squads. The late Alan Clarke insisted that he was a Nazi, and called his Rotweilers Himmler and Goering.
Quite apart from the barely disguised racism of Tweezer’s own administration – its unjust deportations of Windrush migrants, its hostile atmosphere policy to deter immigrants and the far right rantings of the Tory press, like the Heil and the Scum.
However embarrassing the students and their wretched T-shirts were for the Tory party, they honestly showed what a sizable, influential chunk of the party really thinks.
The Tories really can’t stop lying, can they? Now that the British public’s becoming very disenchanted with neoliberalism, and the Thatcherite ideological legacy is up against the wall, waiting for Corbyn to shout ‘Fire!’, they’re doing their best to steal the credit for Labour policies. On Tuesday Mike reported that, while Nye Bevan did indeed set up the NHS in 1948, it was ultimately created by the Tory MP, Henry Willink, who authored a government White Paper about it in 1944.
Willink did indeed author a White Paper laying out plans for something like the modern NHS. However, Mike’s article quotes the Independent’s report on the matter. This in turn cites the comments of Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister, who states very firmly that the Tories voted against it 22 times. The Indie wrote
“Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: “Jeremy Hunt’s claim the Tories created the NHS is laughable. The Tories fought it tooth and nail all the way through Parliament on a three-line whip. In fact they voted against the creation of the NHS 22 times including at the third reading.
“Over the last 70 years, the Tories have under-funded and tried to sell off the NHS. Labour governments have always stepped in to fully fund and rebuild the NHS. And so it will again fall to the next Labour government to give the NHS the funding it needs and rebuild it to deliver the quality world class health service every patient deserves.”
Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine added to was “astonishing” that Mr Hunt has the gall to claim a Conservative minister was responsible for setting up the NHS, then in the next breath says the health service should be above party politics.”
Quite. In fact, the NHS and the welfare state is based on the Beveridge Report, written in 1944. Beveridge was a Liberal. However, the Socialist Medical Association had been campaigning for a state-owned health service since in the 1930s. And the ultimate origins of the NHS can be found in the minority report published by Sidney and Beatrice Webb way back at the beginning of the 20th century in their comments about the state of medical care in Britain.
A little while ago I had someone turning up on this blog to try to argue that the Tories had also been involved in the creation of the NHS, and weren’t its enemies. As I’ve said, Willink was involved. But Labour was the strongest champion of the Health Service, while the Conservatives lost support in the 1940s by postponing its implementation, citing concerns about cost. Then, five years after the NHS was set up, the Tory right revolted and demanded its privatization, on the grounds we couldn’t afford it.
And coming from Jez himself, this is just more hypocrisy. Thatcher wanted to privatize the Health Service, and was prevented from doing so because there was a massive cabinet revolt. Indeed, it was described as the closest thing to a riot. Her personal private secretary, Patrick Jenkin, made her very aware that the American, private healthcare system, was rubbish. So she modified her policy to simply recommending that 25 per cent of all Brits should have private medical coverage.
Then there was the introduction of the Private Finance Initiative by John Major and Peter ‘I’ve Got a Little List’ Lilley, under which private healthcare companies were and are being given license to build and run hospitals and provide other medical services. Why? Not because of efficiency. The system is spectacularly inefficient, and leads to smaller, fewer, and more expensive hospitals than under the normal system of state funding and management. But Lilley and his Tory colleagues were upset that there was this highly lucrative state sector that their pals in private industry couldn’t get their mitts on. They wanted to open the NHS up to private investment. Providing better healthcare didn’t come into it.
And New Labour continued the privatization of the Health Service. This shouldn’t be surprising, as Blair was Thatcher’s protégé across the Green Benches. She stated that he was her greatest achievement, and was the first person to visit him in 10 Downing Street after he moved in.
And then, in 2012, came Andrew Lansley’s Healthcare Bill, which effectively absolves the Health Minister of his statutory duty to provide effective medical care to everyone. It’s heavily disguised in tortuous, convoluted prose, but this is what it does.
And Jez himself is a massive hypocrite in all of this. As Mike has blogged over and again, Hunt has said in his own book that he wants the NHS privatized. But in order to lull the British public into a false sense of security, he’s trying to tell us how much the Tories ‘treasure’ it. And that they set it up.
He’s saying all this because Labour is going to renationalize the NHS, end PFI and move it all in-house. And that scares him and his big business paymasters absolutely witless. But we desperately need this to happen. We really cannot afford for Britain to succumb to the Tories and their free market hogwash, and become like America, where millions cannot afford medical insurance, and where thousands wait in their cars overnight to get access to free healthcare, when it’s offered.
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