I’m going to have to do a bit more digging on this, because I think I might be missing something. Yesterday Starmer and Wes Streeting announced that if Labour is elected, they’ll reform the NHS. Starmer has been saying for a very long time that the health service is in an existential crisis and that radical reform is required in order to save it. I think he’s absolutely right about this, especially as Sunak wants even more of it privatised as he deludedly thinks this has worked so well, and former Health Secretary Sajid Javid wants to introduce a £20 charge for people seeing their doctor. I also remember Lord Warner back in the ‘teens suggesting that there should be some kind of additional private insurance scheme or tax or something levied to support the NHS. This was, of course, another step on the road to full privatisation, as was pointed out to Warner. Who subsequently left the Labour party. Starmer also announced that Labour would demand increased efficiency in the NHS with targets set to reduce waiting times. This is all good stuff, but I don’t recall any mention on the mainstream news about how exactly he was going to do all this. It should be done through re-nationalisation and the statements from my local Labour MP, Karin Smyth, certainly suggests that Labour’s committed to a nationalised NHS. But Labour has also said that in the short term they’ll use private healthcare to clear the waiting list. This sounds good, but I have a feeling that the arguments for privatising the NHS the Tories have been using recently included the same statement that they were going to use private healthcare to cut the backlog created by the Covid crisis. New Labour was as committed to privatisation as the Conservatives and went further in the privatisation of the NHS than the Tories had dared. I’m therefore at a loss how Starmer and Streeting plan to reform the NHS so that it again meets the needs of this country’s great working people, and whether it’ll still be nationalised at the end of it, whatever the impression Starmer wants to give about it now.
Last week the government was forced to bring yet another rail company back into public ownership because of its dreadful failures and shabby service. As organisations like We Own It and Bring Back British Rail have been pointing out for years, this is just one in a long series of cases where failing rail companies have had to be renationalised. Rail privatisation, which was introduced by John Major’s Tory government and hyped as improving the rail network through private industry, has failed. As We Own It and Bring Back British Rail have long argued, it is high time the rail network as a whole was renationalised. They have therefore produced a standard letter for people to send to the responsible minister, Mark Harper, calling for this. Here’s their message about it.
‘Dear David,
The Government has JUST announced it is taking TransPennine Express (TPE) into public ownership.
A few months ago, 8000 of you emailed the Transport Department calling for both TPE and Avanti to be run in-house – for people not profit.
This is your victory. It shows that when you take action you get wins.
The next 24 hours are a huge chance to double your VICTORY. Email Mark Harper, the transport secretary, now to take the rest of our railway system into public ownership.
With allies like Bring Back British Rail, Association of British Commuters and the rail unions, you’ve forced the government to take TransPennine Express into public ownership.
Now that you’ve got this victory, you can press for more.
The first 24 hours after a government decision are crucial. Ministers and their staff will be watching anxiously to see how the public reacts.
If their inboxes fill up with your letters supporting the TransPennine decision, and demanding they go even further, they’ll know public ownership is popular.
Our latest poll shows 67% of the public support taking all of our railway into public ownership.
This groundswell of support for public ownership will influence their ongoing discussions about other railway lines.
Tell the Transport Secretary now: more privatisation won’t help our railways.
Thanks to your actions, TPE will be the seventh rail franchise to come into public operation in just 6 years!
LNER, Northern, Transport for Wales Rail, Southeastern, ScotRail, and the Caledonian Sleeper have all been brought into public operation since 2018.
By emailing Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, today you can get even more wins for a railway run for people, not profit – and also ensure these wins are permanent.
Thank you!
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, and Imogen — the We Own It team
P.S. Here’s a photo from the fantastic action We Own It, Bring Back British Rail, RMT and others held outside the Department for Transport in March demanding TPE be taken into public ownership.
I’ve signed it, because it’s badly needed and I’m sick of the public sector supporting failing private companies simply for reasons of Tory free market ideology.
I noticed that GB News had a Johnbosco Nwogbo on one of their programmes to debate the issue of rail nationalisation. This looks like the same John Bosco who appears as part of the We Own It team above. He’s been a speaker on many of the online meetings and rallies against the privatisation of our vital public services. I didn’t watch the GB News item on the grounds that it would annoy me. John Bosco himself has a very deep grasp of the facts and is, like the rest of We Own It and similar organisations, well able to marshal powerful arguments in favour of nationalisation. I’m therefore sure he was more than a match for his free market opponent. And for some of the other morons mouthing off on the network.
I got this petition today from 38 Degrees, and have absolutely no problem signing it. I think generally this country has one of the worst rates of infant mortality for a developed country, and it is clearly iniquitous that Black and Asian women should be especially in danger of death in childbirth. I’m putting it up because I hope other people will also sign it as well.
‘Content warning: this email makes reference to maternal morbidity in childbirth.
“Appalling” and “glaring” – that’s the verdict from MPs on the Government’s failure to address racial inequalities in maternal health.
David, did you know that Black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth, while maternal mortality is twice as high among Asian women? [1] The Women and Equalities Select Committee have labelled the Government’s inaction on maternal health as “frankly shameful” and “short of acceptable standards”. [2]
They, and campaigners, are calling on Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch to set a target for fixing inequalities in maternal health – tackling this scandal once and for all, and giving all mothers the care they deserve.
David, MPs are finally sitting up and taking notice of this, and it’s been splashed across the media. [3]But it’s going to take more than that for Kemi Badenoch to act. What’s missing is a huge backlash from thousands of us. If tens of thousands of us all add our names to a giant petition, we can send a clear message to the Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch: We won’t accept a lack of action once again!
So, David, will you add your name to the petition and hold Kemi Badenoch to account on maternal health inequalities? It only takes 30 seconds to sign.
The MPs who produced this report are calling for more ambitious targets, more education for maternity staff on disparities, and an increase to maternity services budgets. It’s the kind of overhaul to maternal health that will be vital if things are going to change for good. [4]
38 Degrees supporters come from different backgrounds. But we know that we’re at our most powerful when we act together – and we can make a difference when we join our voices as one. From keeping prescriptions free for over 60s to stopping Channel 4 privatisation, together we can win. [5]
So, David, will you add your name to the petition and hold Kemi Badenoch to account on maternal health inequalities?It only takes 30 seconds to sign.
It’s a crisis over thirty years in the making. Since privatisation in 1989, private water companies in England* have underinvested in pollution prevention to boost profits.
They’ve built a debt mountain of £53bn, while giving shareholders £72bn!
Attempts to regulate them have failed. Under privatisation, it clearly pays to pollute.
Send the Government a clear message: stop privatisation, stop the sewage.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The UK’s most trusted utility company is publicly owned Scottish Water.
They’ve spent £72 more per household per year than English water companies. That’s equivalent to an extra £28 billion being invested in England’s water network!
Yesterday’s pollution plan from Government includes just £1.6bn extra investment. That’s tiny compared to what we could reinvest by stopping private dividends!
Sign the petition now to demand the Government stop the pollution crisis by taking our water companies into public ownership.
The more signatures added just after the Government’s lacklustre announcement, the clearer it’ll be to ALL parties that any “plan for water” must end privatisation.
22,000 people just like you have already signed. Thank you for amplifying their message: water belongs in public hands!
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team
*If you’re in Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland — where water is publicly owned or not-for-profit — please still sign this petition in solidarity! By fighting for public ownership of English water, you’ll force the press and politicians to confront the truth: privatisation fails our public services. That will make it harder for politicians to justify leaving other essential public services across Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in private hands.‘
I’ve signed it, because these scandals have been going on for nearly 40 years, ever since Thatcher privatised the water companies in the 1980s. The Tories set up a body to protect the waterways, but gave it less power than the previous regulatory authorities. And over the past few years there’s been one scandal after another of sewage or untreated chemicals or both being poured into England’s rivers and seas, all to boost the directors’ bonuses and the companies’ share values.
It’s another Thatcherite failure. It’s time the whole charade that private industry is automatically better was ended, and we moved back to a mixed economy.
Yeah, I know – more fascism. I expect you’re getting fed up with it, and I agree. It’s not a very edifying subject. But I intend this little extract from Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile’s ‘The Foundation and Doctrine of Fascism’ as a response to all the self-styled, right-wing Conservative ‘Classical Liberals’, who think that if everything was privatised and there was no welfare state or health service, but only private charity and provision, somehow the country would become more prosperous and industry more efficient. In this extract, Mussolini states bluntly that Classical Liberalism is a failure and the only response to the economic crisis is state intervention.
‘Since 1929, economic and political developments have further confirmed these truths. The importance of the state is growing by leaps and bounds (giganteggia) in all parts of the world. Only the state can resolve capitalism’s dramatic contradictions. The so-called crisis can only be settled by state action and within the orbit of the state. Where are the shades of the Jules Simons, who, in the early days of liberalism, proclaimed that the “state should endeavour to render itself useless and prepare to hand in its resignation”? Or of the MacCullochs, who, in the second half of last century, urged that the state should desist from governing too much! And what of the English Bentham, who thought that the only thing that industry needed from government was to be left alone! And what of the German Humboldt, who expressed the opinion that the best government was a “lazy” one! What would they say now about the constant, inevitable, and urgent requests on the part of business for government intervention? It is true that the second generation of economists was less uncompromising in this domain than the first, and that even (Adam) Smith left the door ajar, albeit cautiously, for government intervention in business.’
In Jeffrey T, Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (University of Nebraska Press: 2000) 58-9.
Mussolini’s regime had practised what they preached, and learned from experience. When the Duce took power, he stated that his regime would practise Manchester school capitalism and he began a programme of privatisation, starting with the Rome telephone exchange. Private enterprise was declared to be the economic foundation of society and a duty. The state also set up a department to provide aid and technical assistance to failing businesses. But when the Crash hit, the regime reversed its policy, began nationalising firms and Italy had the highest amount of state interference in industry in Europe outside the Soviet Union.
This doesn’t justify Mussolini’s despotism or his destruction of human dignity, freedom and lives. But state intervention and a planned economy are not confined to brutal, tyrannical regimes. They were part of the social democratic consensus that gave Britain economic growth and prosperity before the depression of the 1970s and the rise of Thatcher. And as the current crisis shows, Thatcherism has ultimately brought nothing but poverty and starvation.
Out with the Tories! Time for a return to socialism!
I posted a video by Owen Jones taking apart the accusation that the Nazis were socialist a few days ago. Despite his claims to be one, Hitler stood for privatisation and cuts to the welfare state as well as racism and Social Darwinism, policies that are fundamental opposed to socialism. Oswald Mosley, like Hitler, also called himself a socialist despite not believing in socialist policies. He explains why he called his ideology ‘European Socialism in his answer to ‘Question 276: What is European “Socialism”? ‘in his book, Mosley: Right or Wrong? Mosley states
‘Any man has a right to call himself a socialist if he works for motives of public service rather than far private gain. That is why we used this phrase. Because our people have certainly proved that they work selflessly for the public good, and it is this spirit which is needed for the building of a new European system. But I am not going to use it in future because it has led to misunderstanding. British people in general think that socialism means the nationalization or bureaucratic control of industry, that it means the Labour party policy which was a concept of the last century. But Union Movement has never stood for anything of this kind. In practice, it has proved a mistake to use a phrase that can be misrepresented, and that is why I ceased to use it. I now use instead the term “European Service”.
Hitler took much of his ideology from right-wing authors like Moeller van den Bruck, who considered themselves revolutionary conservatives. One of these wrote a book called ‘The Worker’. They also called for what they considered to be socialism, but they also made it clear that by this they meant an ideology that encouraged individuals to work for the good of society as a whole, but did not mean the nationalisation of industry.
As for the question whether fascism is of the left or right, Mosley answered that in reply to ‘Question 285. Do you consider yourself to be of the Right or Left in politics?’ in his wretched book.
‘Neither. If any such description could be applied to us it would rather be the “hard centre”, the opposite to the present soft core. But I never use these terms in relation to our thinking, because they mean nothing to us. Our policy cuts clean across the “right” and “left” of the old world. These expressions are nonsensical when applied to us. In thought, we are no more Conservative than we are Socialist or Liberal. Our thinking is a creation of the modern age, though it has deeper roots in the European past than that of the old parties. I do not speak of our people as “right” or “left” but given them their true name: the vital forces of Europe.’
Fascism considers itself to be a third political ideology, neither left nor right, because it accepts private industry to subordinates it to state control. Thus, when the German neo-Nazis infiltrated one of the mainstream European parties in the ’80s, it wasn’t the left-wing SDP or the conservative Christian Democrats, but the liberal Freie Demokraten.
So much for Peter Hitchens’ idea that the Nazis were left-wing socialists.
Over the past few days Keir Starmer and the Labour party have been giving the Tories a pasting over the migrant crisis and Suella Braverman’s latest plans to control it. They’ve pointed out that the Tories have had three prime ministers and numerous Home Secretaries, and still have not managed to solve the problem. But watching an interview with Dr. Matthew Goodwin on the New Culture Forum channel this afternoon, it seems that the Tories under Johnson have actively contributed to it.
The New Culture Forum is an organisation that campaigns for traditional British culture and values. It’s the cultural wing of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a Tufton Street free-trade, privatise everything, destroy the welfare state and hang the consequences outfit. It was the clowns at the IEA and other, similar mad neoliberal thinktanks like the Adam Smith Institute and the Taxpayers’ Alliance who packed Liz Truss’ cabinet and gave her all those brilliant ideas that wrecked the economy and people’s lives and businesses.
Goodwin is an academic at Kent University. He argues that there is now a profound disconnection between the liberal elite running the country and the mass of ordinary people. The liberal elite are wealthy, White graduates, who believe Britain is racist, are obsessed with past injustice and feel no pride in being British. They are overwhelmingly from Oxbridge. People who consider themselves strongly liberal are only 20 per cent of the population, these people are overwhelmingly represented in the media, education and politics. Goodwin states that journalism is now far more elitist due to the domination of the graduates and that it will be a long time before we see more working-class journalists like John Humphries. These liberal graduates look down on the rest of the population, who don’t share their values, and were profoundly shocked by Brexit and that much of the country didn’t share their views.
What was particularly interesting is that he stated the Tories had conceded too much to them. The people, who voted Tory want to control immigration rather than stop it completely. They want to cut it down from 500,000 a year to 100,000 a year. They also did not want or expect Boris Johnson to liberalise the immigration process and end the requirement that firms advertising for employees abroad must first advertise for applicants in Britain. This is news to me, and strongly conflicts with the rubbish we’re told that Labour want an open door immigration policy. In Goodwin’s view, the Tories have lost all hope of winning the big cities like London, and so must concentrate on holding the second-rank towns. That means making economic concessions to the Red Wall – real economic concessions, not simply moving civil servants out of London. But he was also optimistic about the people on the new media, the internet, who are also appearing to challenge the liberal cultural consensus from which they have been excluded in print and publishing.
This confirms what I think the Tories will try to do at the next election. I think they’ll fight it on cultural issues, like the trans controversy, Critical Race Theory and so on. They’ve already started with immigration, which I think is being used to divert people from the poverty and starvation they’ve caused.
Excellent video by the Left-wing group Led By Donkeys which shows the pervasive connections between the former Prime Minister, swivel-eyed Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng and her cabinet and the mad, free enterprise groups located at or near 55 Tufton Street. These include the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Taxpayers Alliance. These groups are all in favour of privatisation, including that of the NHS, tax cuts for the rich and the ending of the welfare state. One of them also pumps out propaganda against global warming and climate change. Truss herself set up a Free Enterprise Group with the assistance of the IEA, and the group as how morphed into another organisation with a similar name, linked to them. Truss was among the authors of the noxious Britannia Unchained, which claimed that British workers were the laziest in the world and demanded more cuts and privatisation for the rich and that workers should be stripped of their rights. All of them were connected to the Tufton Street network. Kings College, Oxford, held a debate about whether the NHS should be privatised, put forward by one of the inmates of the IEA. And when one journalist asked them if Truss had handed the government over to the Tufton Street thinktanks, she was told ‘Yes’.
These organisations are very secretive and won’t disclose who funds them. Some of them received donations from BP, others from the tobacco industry. A number of them are American organisations. But for the most part, their donors are unknown. The video points out that nobody elected Truss except 0.1 per cent of the population, and her tax cuts benefited only 2,500 millionaires. It is for their benefit that she trashed the economy, an event Led By Donkeys commemorated by sticking a mock blue plaque about it on the front of 55 Tufton Street.
Their ideas don’t work and the economic collapse they caused showed they are catastrophic. But nevertheless, they benefit the rich and so the Conservative right definitely won’t question them, even when the force everyone else into poverty.
This appeared for me on YouTube on Sunday. From Bristol With Love appears to be, or have been, a radical blog based in Bristol. It declared itself to be a place for local music, local news and new way of local thinking. So, a local website for local people, to paraphrase the terrifying couple running the local shop in The League of Gentlemen. They display the anarchist/syndicalist flag, suggesting that their political sympathies lay with those brands of radical left-wing politics. And in this snippet of audio, posted on Durston Fletcher’s channel on YouTube, the tear into Julie Burchill.
And it’s entirely deserved.
Burchill’s a journalist and novelist, who comes from Brislington, one of the suburbs in south Bristol. It’s a mixture of residential housing and light industry, mostly now the big stores like Wicke’s. Burchill started out as a rock journalist on the NME when she answered their advert for a ‘hip young gunslinger’ to join them. She was also briefly married to another journalist and novelist, Nick Parsons, who was one of the panel discussing the week’s cultural highlights with Mark Lawson on Newsnight Review and then The Late Review. After that, she moved on to the lamestream press, writing demented pieces for the Heil on Sunday and the Spectator. For some reasons she considers herself some kind of communist. Private Eye put her remark, about how she and her then-lover, Charlotte Raven, spent their evenings crying over the fate of the workers, in ‘Pseud’s Corner’. It might be right, but nothing she has said suggests she has any real sympathy with radical left politics. Quite the opposite, in fact. She used to rave about Margaret Thatcher, privatisation and GM foods. At one time the Heil was trying to promote itself with adverts showing her and another noxious right-wing waster, the late John Junor. This showed two pencils being sharpened, one Burchill’s, one Junor’s, and was supposed to show two hacks with opposing views coming together. Politically there was nothing to choose between them. They both worshipped Thatcher. The only difference was their hatred and scorn for those of the opposite sex. Burchill’s column dripped venom about men, while Junor, from what I remember, sneered at women.
One of Burchill’s screeds from this time was particularly bonkers. She wrote a long piece in Hitler’s fave British paper declaring that the idealistic young men and women who joined the International Brigades to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War were, get this! the equivalent of the bloodthirsty British tourists who went to Spain to enjoy the bullfighting. It’s nonsense, and grossly offensive nonsense. People like the Gloucestershire poet Laurie Lee and the mighty George Orwell, along with countless others, joined up because they saw the spectre of the Fascist jackboot stamping on Europe’s face and wanted to stop it. They risked, and lost, life and limb fighting a brutal, merciless dictator. Many of those fighting Franco came from the radical left – anarchists, communists and more moderate socialists, like POUM, whom Orwell joined. But the regime for which they were fighting was liberal and democratic. Spain still has not recovered from the tortures and mass executions even now, and the excavation of the mass graves of those butchered by the monster is hotly contested by the Spanish Far Right. It makes you wonder just who Burchill would have supported back then.
Back in the ’90s Burchill also wrote a few bonkbuster novels, which were duly reviewed and criticised by Private Eye. She also joined the Groucho Club and its denizens among the media club, and became something of a massive drug hog if reports can be believed. According to Private Eye, once again, she once boasted of having stuck so much of the marching powder up her nose to stun the Colombian army. Since then she seems to have married again, to a man, and now lives with her family in Brighton. But she still pops her head up now and then.
In this bit of audio, the two hosts talk about how their mother’s can’t stand her, how she left Bristol when she was thirty, and used to come down to the city for the Punk gigs. Where she claimed about the place being full of liberals and middle class Trotskyites. Well, yes, they were about in Bristol. You used to see the adverts for Socialist Worker posted up on one of the bridges coming into Temple Meads, and there was a bloke selling it outside the railway station. They might still be around now, although in recent decades Class War and Bristol Anarchist Federation seem to have become more high profile. But it would be a bit of stretch to say that Bristol was full of them. She also, apparently, sneered at how unsophisticated we plebs down here in the West Country were when it came to drugs. According to them, she was amazed that if you asked a girl in Bristol if you could borrow her mirror, she thought it was because you wanted to touch up your make up. As opposed to snort coke off it. Oh, the naivete. Depending on where you go, that may not be quite the case now, unfortunately. But clean living and avoiding an addictive drug that rots your nose are hardly things to sneer at.
One of them also tells a story he heard from a woman in a pub about Burchill frightening a rat to death. The woman was at some kind of party Burchill was holding. Burchill retreated into her kitchenette to snort coke off her mirror, only to find a rat dangerously near it. She chased the rat into a corner, the rat adopted an aggressive, fighting posture, Burchill did the same, and the rat dropped dead of a heart attack, scared to death by her.
If that story can be believed, Burchill’s too toxic even for vermin. And she’s still a disgrace to Bristol.
I’ve also had this email from the pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation, We Own It about a planned demonstration they’re holding against the privatisation of the NHS in February. They’re appealing for people to go to it. I can’t, due to expense and illness, but I’m putting it up here in case there are people interested in it, who may be able to attend.
‘Dear David,
BREAKING: private health companies donated £800,000 to the Conservative Party over the last decade. Now we know why the government is doing nothing about NHS privatisation!
A recent Oxford study linked NHS privatisation to the preventable deaths of 557 people.
It is time to make the government feel the power of organised people over organised money.
Can you sign up to become one of 557 people in Parliament Square from 2 – 4pm on Saturday, 25th February demanding an end to NHS privatisation?
So far, 541 people have signed up. We need 89 people to reach our final goal of 630 (that is, 557 people representing the victims of NHS privatisation, 43 people to help carry signs and banners and 30 stewards to help manage the event).
You are involved in our NHS campaign because you believe that our NHS should work for people, not the greedy private companies that donate to the government.
Unite the Union, Just Treatment, Doctors for the NHS and Socialist Health Association fully agree with you. That is why they are now supporting our action.
It is time we make the government feel the power of organised people over organised money.
We want to bring together 557 people representing the 557 people whose deaths are linked to NHS privatisation to put on a powerful display that can get into the papers.
More press coverage means more pressure on the government. The more of us there are at the action, the more likely the action is to get press coverage.
We need 89 more people to reach our goal. Can you sign up now to join us?
Because of the incredible efforts of our NHS nurses and ambulance workers who are fighting to save our NHS, the government is already feeling pressure.
With the recent study that links NHS privatisation to 557 preventable deaths, there is no better time than now to pile onto that pressure they are feeling.
The government already knows that over 75% of the public, according to our last poll, want to end NHS privatisation. But they don’t feel that people will fight to see that happen.
You can show them from 2 – 4pm on Saturday 25th February in Parliament Square that you will.
The more people join this action, the more powerful it will be. The more powerful it is, the more likely it is to receive coverage from the press.
This coverage will pile on the pressure on the government and start forcing them to take action.
We need 557 people to represent the 557 people whose deaths are linked to NHS privatisation, according to a recent Oxford study.
But we need even more people to make sure the action is big and effective. So after signing up, please send the link to your friends and family, especially those who live in London and ask them to sign up too.
Thank you so much for always standing up against NHS privatisation.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate – the We Own It team
PS: 30 years ago today the British Coal and British Rail (Transfer Proposals) Act 1993 was passed, paving the way for privatisation of our railway. We’ve put together a list of 30 top failures of rail privatisation from the last 30 years. Take a read and share with friends and family.’
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