I had another email on Wednesday from the anti-privatisation, pro-NHS organisation We Own It about their efforts to block the further privatisation of the NHS. They’d sent me an email previously explaining that our criminally useless health secretary, Matt Hancock, wants to put private healthcare companies in charge of NHS boards and official bodies. This has already been done in the NHS organisation(s) in charge of Bath and North East Somerset and Swindon and Wiltshire.
This follow-up letter explains the issues, and takes matter further. There are links which take you to a page where you can add your name and create a form letter to be sent to the NHS organisations, who have appointed Virgin to their board, protesting against it. This is in addition to the tug of wars We Own It hoped to organise up and down the country in Friday also as a symbolic protest against this privatisation. They were to feature people pulling against private healthcare companies on the other side. I haven’t seen anything about such protests in the news, so I guess there weren’t many of them. Or perhaps the lamestream media have blocked the coverage. That’s happened with protests before, so I really wouldn’t put it past them. Here’s the email, plus links.
“Virgin Care Ltd has been given a seat on the TOP NHS decision-making body in the region covering Bath and NE Somerset, Swindon AND Wiltshire.
This means it will make decisions about what NHS care is provided locally (and what ISN’T provided).
If this is allowed in that region, it endangers all of us and sets a precedent for other regional NHS boards – we can’t let this go ahead. WHEREVER you are, email the top local boards now to get Virgin kicked OUT of decisions on your NHS.
Matt Hancock’s legislation plans to let private companies on to decision-making boards and we’re seeing this creep in already.
If this is allowed to go ahead in Bath, North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire, it’s a really worrying precedent for the new set up of our NHS.
Stop this now by writing to both the new ‘partnership’ board and the old CCG board – the two most important local NHS bodies – to say NO – now.
To say that you don’t want Virgin making decisions about our health service.
That your NHS was founded based on solidarity and a shared want for universal care at the point of need.
Virgin Care Ltd want profit. Can you join the call that they are kicked off this top regional board, to stop these private companies taking hold of our NHS nationally?
What about the rest of the UK? This decision only affects this region, and this bill will mean disintegration of our NHS in England. Luckily the rest of the UK is not going ahead with these plans YET.
Your voice is crucial to winning this fight against privatisation. Thank you.
In solidarity,
Cat, Zana, Johnbosco, Chris, Alice and Pascale – the We Own It team”
I’ve joined their campaign and sent a letter of protest against the inclusion of Virgin Care in NHS decision-making in those areas. It is a form letter, and the process is very simple. It really is just a case of following the link and adding your name and email address, etc. But I hope it has some effect and demonstrates to the authorities that we really don’t want beardie Branson and his ilk destroying the NHS and our health for their profit.
Please feel free to do the same if you feel the same way too.
Mike yesterday put up a piece reporting that Virgin Healthcare has won £2 billion worth of NHS and local authority contracts, but hasn’t paid any corporation tax. The company has claimed that it has racked up losses since it was founded in 2010. Mike said that it didn’t make sense for him for a company to win such contracts with the promise that it would fulfill them in budget and making a tidy profit for itself. He thought someone was being shortchanged, and if he was in a hospital run by Branson’s wretched firm, he’d work out who they were shortchanging in a very short order.
The snippet from the Mirror article Mike’s report refers to quotes health campaigner Dr. John Lister, who called the company ‘parasitic’ for this. And his right. Branson is a parasite, who’s had his scolex in the guts of the British state and NHS for a very long time. He was chums with John Major’s government, and when that fell switched sides to supporting Blair. Among other services, Virgin Healthcare runs some of the polyclinics or health centres Blair set up.
Mike wondered if Branson’s firm was able to dodge paying tax through creative accounting. And he’s right about this, as well. The Canary’s Emily Apple also wrote a piece about this story. She also quoted the Mirror’s article, which reported that Branson’s firm had a turnover of £248.8 million last year, making a cool profit of £503,000. But this was wiped out by losses elsewhere in the group, so that Beardie’s firm didn’t have to pay cough up £96,000 in corporation tax. Oh yes, and you won’t be surprised to learn that its registered in the Virgin Islands, where Branson has his home. A notorious tax haven.
Dr Lister (any relation to the man who discovered antiseptic?) called Virgin Healthcare parasitic because, fragmenting services and poaching NHS-trained staff and undermining nearby NHS trusts, and not paying corporation tax, it only took from the state and added nothing of value.
Branson’s firm was criticised by former leader of the Green Party, Natalie Bennett, and Labour leadership candidate Keir Starmer. Prem Sikka tweeted that this wasn’t the only company Beardie owned that was trying to get more state money. So was the airline Flybe, which Beardie has a 30 per cent stake in. However, it can’t offer collateral as billionaire investors already hold charges over many of its assets. He summed this up as the wealthy elite continuing to pick everyone else’s pockets.
Devutopia also remarked that Branson’s firm wasn’t the only one profiting from the NHS. Linking to a story published last year by the Mirror, that noted 10 connections between them and the NHS, he stated that the Tories had also been using the health service as their cash cow. He wondered when the Beeb and Sky were going to notice this.
Apple concluded:
Between these deals and whatever deals Johnson ends up concocting with Donald Trump, our NHS needs us more than ever. It’s already being sold off piece by piece with parasites like Branson feeding on every bit he can get his sticky fingers into. We need to wake up. This is happening now. And if we don’t act now, it’ll be too late, and what’s left of our NHS will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
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.
This is another satirical video from those merry funsters at JOE. Unlike the others I’ve posted, it’s not musical. It simply pokes fun at Farage and his megalomaniac ambitions as a kind of mini-me of Trump. It seems to be based on footage of a Trump rally at which a small boy came on to the stage. Except that the child’s head has been replaced with Farage’s.
The video begins with Trump introducing Farage to the crowd as the man behind Brexit. Mini-Farage then walks on stage, to be picked up by Trump. The Orange Buffoon asks the lad what he’s called. Mini-Farage answers, ‘Well, people in Oxfordshire call me Farage’. Trump also asks him if he’d like to go, or stay with Trump. After thinking about it, Farage replies ‘Stay with Trump’.
The video comes from 2016 when Farage and UKIP were far stronger than they were. If memory serves me right, it was before Farage left to found the Brexit Party and UKIP was taken over by Batten, who introduced into it the far right internet personalities Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin, Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and Paul Joseph Watson. Instead of boosting UKIP’s fortunes, their arrival has very effectively destroyed it, leading to the massive implosion after the local and European elections and the acrimonious recriminations that have broken out since.
Farage now appears to be pinning his hopes on becoming a political force with the Brexit party. But he’s now stood a very great number of his candidates down in Tory constituencies so as not to split the right-wing Brexit vote, the Tories are demanding the removal of the rest of his people, and the former candidates themselves are angry and considering legal action. And he himself is not standing for election, as he’s never personally won an election before. His view of himself and his party as becoming a significant power in British politics is thus probably more than a little exaggerated.
But at that time he was running around with Trump at Republican and American Conservative conferences and other gatherings. And he was very much boosting Trump and his policies as well as his own. I don’t doubt for a single minute that Farage would happily give Trump everything he wants from a Brexit Britain – our agriculture, manufacturing industry and a privatised NHS. Farage has said himself that ‘we may have to move to an insurance-based system’, which is precisely what American private healthcare companies, as well as British firms like Virgin Healthcare, Circle, BUPA and so on want to hear.
But Farage’s fortunes have definitely waned, and it’s Boris who’s now occupying No. 10. But he also wants to give Trump what he wants. And despite Tory splutterings that the NHS was ‘off the table’, they held six secret meetings with Trump’s negotiators about it. Boris Johnson sees it very much as something that is for sale. He just doesn’t want to tell the British public about it, just as Thatcher in her memoirs also lied, claiming that she didn’t want to sell off the NHS. It’s now Johnson who’s running around as Trump’s mini-me.
Don’t be tricked by either Farage, Johnson or Blue Lib Dem Swinson, who would also like to sell off the NHS. If you value the Health Service and wish to defend it, you really have no choice but to vote for Corbyn.
On Monday Mike published a very interesting piece revealing that Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, has been receiving donations of between 2,000 and 4,000 pounds after his election in 2010. The donor is one Neil Record, a currency manager. Who is also the head of the board of the Institute of Economic Affairs. The IEA is one of the key think tanks behind Thatcher’s programme of privatizing everything that isn’t nailed down, and destroying the welfare state. All for the benefit of private industry, of course. It is very firmly behind the privatization of the NHS, and the IEA is campaigning to introduce a private medical service funded by private health insurance, as in the US. Where their system has broke down to such a level that 40,000 each year die because they can’t afford their medical care, and where 7 million Americans last year lost their insurance cover.
However, the IEA, according to Mike, has responded to critics of NHS privatization by saying that they’re opposed patients having a choice.
Ah yes, ‘choice’. That old Thatcherite canard. I can remember being told by one of the Tory students at College that private industry provided ‘choice’. It was one of the mantras of Maggie Thatcher. Someone once asked her what the essence of Christianity was. Her answer was simple: ‘Choice’. So, nothing about salvation from sin, the healing of a broken world, the moral duty to work for the public good and create a better society, provide for the poor, the sick, disabled and marginalized. No, nothing about that. Just ‘choice’. No wonder she fell out with Archbishop Runcie and the Scots Kirk. She had no idea.
Mike concludes his piece on Hancock with the words
In fact, privatisation would force patients into insurance schemes that are unlikely ever to pay out, meaning patients would end up with no choice at all.
The IEA is a firm fan of such insurance schemes.
And our Health Secretary takes its bribes cash.
We’ll need to watch this one carefully. Will he try to use Brexit to put through his real paymasters’ plan?
It isn’t just the fact that the private insurance schemes the Tories and New Labour would love to force us all into won’t pay out that makes all the claims of ‘choice’ a farcical lie. It’s the fact that under Blair’s introduction of private medical care in the NHS, costs still have to be kept down. Blair’s reforms were based on those of the private healthcare group, Kaiserpermanente in America, which he wrongly believed provided better value for money that state-managed healthcare. Under their system, there was a special office that looked into the comparative treatment prices of different hospitals, and the patient got sent to the cheapest, regardless of what he or she personally wanted. There was no choice.
I’m not at all surprised that Hancock has been receiving money from the privatisers. All the Tories and New Labour have. The privatization of the NHS was heavily pushed by private healthcare firms like Unum under John Major and his wretched health secretary, Peter Lilley, and then under Tony Blair. Who was surrounded by any number of private healthcare companies desperate for some of that sweet, sweet NHS action. Like BUPA, Nuffield Health, Virgin Healthcare, Circle Health and others.
As for the IEA, I found a slew of their pamphlets in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, and actually couldn’t believe how bad they were. There was one pamphlet arguing that the state can’t run industries, as shown by about 4-6 very carefully selected examples. One of them was Concorde, which did initially have a very difficult time selling the plane. However, while British aerospace companies have continued to be troubled, the French used the expertise they developed with the project to expand theirs. And Ha-Joon Chang in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism shows very clearly that the state very much can run private companies very successfully. The examples in the IEA pamphlet are obviously very carefully cherrypicked.
And I don’t think it’s just in the economic sphere that the IEA is a backward influence. Along with this pamphlet was one Liberating Women from Feminism, which I think was basically arguing that the ladies should give up any hope of having a career or equality, and go back to running the home. I’m sure some women would like to, and that’s fine if it’s their free choice and they find it fulfilling. But the majority of women these days want a career and economic parity with blokes. And the IEA’s campaign against that would leave many women without any choice, as it was until only a few decades ago. Which all shows how much they really believe in ‘choice’.
Get the IEA and the other privatizing think tanks out of politics, and Matt Hancock and Tweezer out of government. We need a real, socialist Labour government to restore the NHS. A government that has to be led by Corbyn.
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.
The I newspaper on Friday, 11th January 2019, carried this story, ‘Hundred of Doctors Plan to Quite NHS Before Retirement Age’ by Paul Gallagher on page 11. The article reports that hundreds of senior doctors and consults wish to leave the Health Service because they feel they are overworked. The article runs
Hundreds of senior doctors will quit the NHS before retirement age, according to new analysis.
Six out of 10 consultants say that the main reason for their intention to leave the health service before the age of 60 is the need for a better work-life balance, a survey by the British Medical Association (BMA) reveals.
Concerns about the impact of current pensions legislation is the second most important factor influencing consultants’ planned retirement age, they said. Less that 7 per cent say they expect to remain working in the NHS beyond the age of 65.
Almost 18 per cent of consultants are in the process of planning to reduce their working time even further, including a complete withdrawal from service. More than 40 per cent said they were less likely to take part in work initiatives to reduce waiting lists.
The implications of such a significant loss of skilled and specialist clinicians both on the junior staff they teach and the patients they care for is potentially disastrous for the already beleaguered health service.
Dr Rob Harwood, who chairs the BMA’s consultants’ committee, said: “Such a situation is clearly untenable. During the a deepening workforce crisis, the NHS needs its most experienced and expert doctors now more than ever. I struggle to understand how the Health Secretary can talk about increasing productivity… while allowing the NHS to be a system which perversely encourages its most experienced doctors to do less work, and, in some cases, to leave when they do not want to.”
I am not surprised that this is happening in the NHS at all. There have been very many reports over the past few years about the numbers of doctors planning to leave the health service because of overwork and other issues. And I have seen zero evidence that the government intends to tackle the problem or has any interest in solving it. Beyond the current Health Secretary publicly opening his mouth to proclaim that the government will recruit tens of thousands more doctors and other medical staff, like Tweezer did with her bold ten-year plan for the NHS last week.
Mike has already put up a piece on his blog pointing out that the government has consistently and spectacularly missed its targets for cutting waiting times and recruiting more medical staff for the NHS. He also reported that when the Health Secretary was question about how he plans to recruit more personnel, he put this off, stating it was a question for another review later. So all we have from the Tories in this issue is vague promises. Promises that aren’t going to be honoured.
It looks to me very much that all this is planned, that the government is deliberately creating conditions to encourage doctors, consultants and other medical professionals in the NHS to leave, while publicly doing their level best to give the impression that they genuinely care about the Health Service.
They don’t. Since Thatcher the Tories and New Labour have been absolutely set on running down and privatizing the NHS for the benefit of private healthcare companies like the American insurance fraudster Unum, BUPA, Virgin Healthcare, Circle Healthcare and others. Journalists and activists commenting on this attack on the fundamental principles of the NHS have forecasted that ultimately we may end up with a two-tier health service. The affluent middle class will have access to excellent care from the private sector, but only, of course, if they can pay for it. The rest of us will have worse care from an underfunded and understaffed rump NHS.
If the NHS exists at all, that is. The same observers also forecast that the Tories may well be aiming to introduce the American system of private healthcare, where those who can’t pay are treated at the emergency room. And where 45,000 people a year die because they can’t afford medical treatment and the highest cause of bankruptcies is medical bills.
I’ve seen the Tories use the same tactics to decimate another part of the NHS nearly thirty years ago under Thatcher or John Major. This was the dental service. A majority of dentists left the NHS after one or other of these two Tory prime ministers refused to increase their pay and spending on their surgeries. The result is that now most dentists are private and it’s often difficult, very difficult, to find one of that will take NHS patients.
Make no mistake: the Tories plan to do this to the rest of the NHS. But it’s being done subtly, away from public attention, which they are distracting and misleading with promises to increase NHS funding and personnel recruitment. Promises which they don’t intend to honour.
I know the Tories will immediately complain about the title of this article, but that’s exactly what’s going on. The Tories have been privatizing the NHS piecemeal since the 1980s, when Maggie Thatcher wanted to sell it off completely and replace it with an American-style insurance based system. Thatcher was prevented from doing so through a massive cabinet revolt, plus the fact that her private secretary, Patrick Jenkin, found out how appalling the American system was after he actually did some research and went there.
But the privatization is still going on. There was a mass exodus of dentists in the late ’80s-early ’90s, after Maggie – or was it Major?-refused to give them any more money. Then came Peter Lilley and his Private Finance Initiative, in which hospitals were to be built and run for the NHS by private contractors. Then New Labour expanded this massively, breaking up the NHS internal structure to model it after the American private healthcare system, Kaiser Permanente. Blair was approached by a whole slew of American private healthcare companies. His idea was that hospitals and clinics should be taken over by private healthcare companies, like Circle Health, Virgin Healthcare and so on. The community care groups of doctors, which were supposed to commission healthcare for their patients, where to obtain it from both private healthcare providers as well as the NHS. And they were also given the powers to raise money from private enterprise.
And before anyone objects that Blair was a Socialist, no, he wasn’t. He had Clause 4 removed from the party’s constitution. He was also profoundly hostile to the trade unions, who have formed part of the very core of the Labour party since it was founded in the very early 20th century.
Blair was a true, blue Thatcherite. The first thing he did when he got into power was invite Thatcher round. And she responded warmly, declaring New Labour her greatest success. Remember, this is the woman, who proudly shouted about how she was going to destroy socialism.
And the Tories have carried on her project of gradually destroying the NHS, bit by bit, while loudly proclaiming how much they’re in favour of it.
The present Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is a prime example of this. He even wrote a book in which he declared how much better everything would be if we had a private healthcare system, like America.
Yeah, like America, where the poorer parts of the country don’t have any doctors at all, because it isn’t profitable. Where once a month, in Virginia, people sleep in cars overnight in order to join the queue for the doctor’s or dentists’ surgery offering free dental care that Saturday.
Where something like 20 million Americans can’t afford their medical coverage, and 30,000 people die every year because of this.
And where the Republicans and corporate Democrats have been lying and smearing Bernie Sanders, because he dared to run on a platform of ‘Medicare for all’. You know, giving Americans state-funded healthcare, like in the other parts of the world.
This is what the Tories are doing to Britain. And last week, as Mike reported on his blog, Stephen Hawking, the great cosmologist, called them out on it. He also accused Hunt of cherry-picking the data about the supposed deaths caused by NHS staff not working Saturdays.
Hunt got terribly upset about this, and declared that Hawking didn’t understand statistics.
This is a joke from a professional moron. Statistics are a vital part of science and medicine. Much of modern science, including astronomy and cosmology, is going through the data, trying to find something that is statistically significant. It can be time-consuming, tedious work, requiring sophisticated techniques to sort out what’s importance from apparently random results.
Hawking’s a physicist, who has been working with some extremely advanced maths as part of his investigation into the origins of the cosmos and the nature of Black Holes for his entire career. I don’t believe in his ‘No Boundaries Solution’ to the problem of the origin of the universe, but it’s abundantly clear that he understands stats. And as a man stricken with Motor Neurone Disease, a terrible illness, which has left him confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak and scarcely a muscle, Prof. Hawking clearly has first-hand experience of NHS care.
In short, don’t believe Hunt. Believe Hawking.
And yesterday one of the doctors weighed in, to request that a televised debate should be held between the two. See that story on Mike’s blog.
I’ve got no doubt that this will never happen. The schedules are full already, and the last thing the Tories will want is putting their man in a position where he’ll lose against a vastly more popular, far more respected and definitely more intelligent opponent.
Although they’re both authors. Hawking’s most famous work was A Brief History of Time, published back in the 1980s. It was a national bestseller, following very much in the footsteps of Carl Sagan’s epic Cosmos, another pop-sci blockbuster from a great science communicator, as well as a concerned scientist who attacked militarism, imperialism and man-made global warming.
As for Hunt, very few have read his book, which is why he can still repeat the lie that the Tories aren’t privatizing the NHS with a straight face, despite having advocated himself.
Such a debate would be so unequal in Hawking’s failure that I’ve no doubt that the Tories in charge of BBC News, the same people, who gave Corbyn such overtly biased coverage during the general election, are blanching at the very thought of it. Such a debate will never happen, just as the BBC will never own up, and confess that they, and particularly Laura Kuenssberg, are massively biased and everyone, who has complained about this painfully obvious fact is absolutely right.
I caught Labour’s election broadcast last night, and found it deeply moving and very informative. The short film featured interviews with doctors and other healthcare professionals talking about the current crisis in the NHS. One of the speakers was a senior doctor, who explained that the NHS is being underfunded by 3 per cent per year. This debt has accumulated to a shortfall of 10 per cent, and is expected to grow to 30 per cent. He and the other medical professionals made the point that this was part of the Tories’ campaign to privatise the NHS.
They made the point that the NHS is on the verge of collapse and privatisation. Over half of NHS services are now commissioned from private healthcare providers. There are record levels of people waiting for operations and increases in diseases such as cancer.
The senior doctor was visibly moved to the verge of tears when he described one boy, who had a serious illness, but the nearest hospital that could take him was in Scotland, despite the fact that he and his family lived in England. They thus had to make a four hundred mile round trip to visit him.
This section was followed by a teacher, a young Asian woman, talking about the way education too, and teachers, was being deliberately starved of funds. She and the doctor made the point that the Tories were only interested in running services for profit.
And this will include the NHS.
The doctor warned that if the Tories win another Term, they’ll destroy it.
This is exactly what Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis have been warning about in their book, NHS-SOS. As has Dr. David Owen in his book, and very many others.
Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS, but stopped due to a cabinet revolt and warnings about how appalling the American private healthcare system was. Nevertheless, she carried on with a campaign to encourage 25 per cent of British people to take out private health insurance.
And it was Peter Lilley, the prancing pratt with the ‘little list’ of people he hated at a 1990s Tory conference, who set in motion the handing over of NHS hospitals and services for private companies like Circle Health, Virgin Healthcare, et al to run, because he wanted to open up the state sector occupied by the NHS to private industry.
This programme of privatisation has been carried on by Blair, Brown, Cameron, Clegg and now May.
Don’t believe May’s lies about increasing NHS funding. She and her party have lied so often before you can’t trust anything she says.
Believe Labour.
And vote for them, to reverse the privatisation of the NHS on June 8th.
I’m writing this up because I’ve just had all I can stomach from the biased BBC and its blatant partisanship against Jeremy Corbyn and in favour of Theresa May. As Mike has already blogged, Jeremy Corbyn was asked on Woman’s Hour about how much his plan to give free childcare for children between the ages of two and four would cost. The Labour leader had forgotten it, and so the interviewer, Emma Barnett, pressed him on this point. Mike states that the Beeb has been making much of this, running it on their website and discussing it on the Daily Politics.
It has also been played up on this evening’s Six O’clock News, where George Alagiah and John Pienaar have been gloating about it. They’ve played the interview as if it was a triumphant ‘Gotcha!’, with Barnett asking how the public can trust him with their money if he doesn’t know how much this will all cost. Alagiah and Pienaar were saying pretty much the same thing themselves, with Pienaar commenting that Corbyn would need to convince more people.
Pienaar did cover the loud welcome the Labour leader was given when he went to meet his supporters, but he sneered that it couldn’t be worse (than the Woman’s Hour interview) and declared that he needed all the friends he could get.
The programme then moved on to the Tories, where it was all about Theresa May’s claim that she was the best person to negotiate with Europe, and then if Corbyn goes into negotiate, he will be ‘naked and alone’. This was then followed by a vox pop with two ladies with Brummie accents saying how impressed they were with Theresa May, because everything she did was wonderful, and they didn’t like Corbyn.
At that point, I gave up. It was one of the worse, most blatantly biased pieces of journalism I’ve seen outside the Tory press.
And many people have been similarly unimpressed. Mike over at Vox Political has reblogged some of the Tweets people have put up condemning the Beeb for the handling of the Woman’s Hour interview. They’re worth reading, as they rightly point out that Corbyn and the Labour party have costed their proposals. It’s the Tories, who haven’t. Owen Jones commented that the press is rewarding the Tories for insulting the electorate by not costing their proposals, while ‘Isobel’ commented that this was ‘typical Woman’s Hour, insulting women and children just to get at Corbyn. She also made the point that the programme apparently had the attitude that only good Tory women listened to their programme.
Alagiah and Pienaar made much of the Labour leader’s failure to provide the costing for childcare, citing that it showed that Labour didn’t know how the extra money would have to be raised through new taxation. This shows where the real anxiety comes from.
Yes, folks, we’re back to the Tory scare tactics that Labour is going to grind ‘hard-working’ people down with a massively increased tax burden.
In fact, most people won’t be paying any new taxes. The only people who will, will be the extremely wealthy earning over £80,000.
People pretty much like upper 25 per cent of the population, who have done extremely well from the Tories, and from the poverty, insecurity and hunger they have inflicted on the other 75 per cent of the population. That means top earning BBC producers and presenters. Such as, I’ve no doubt, George Alagaiah and John Pienaar.
As for Theresa May being a tougher, better equipped negotiator for Brexit than Corbyn, don’t make me laugh! Mike also reblogged this little piece of damning judgement from Ian Dunt of the politics.co.uk website.
“So what can we learn about May’s negotiating tactics over Brexit from the way she has handled this election? She makes spur-of-the-moment decisions for which she has not prepared. She is a control freak who receives too little advice from outside her immediate circle. She pays insufficient attention to limitations in her operational capacity. She does not stress-test ideas before implementing them. When the ideas then fall apart she quickly capitulates, but even then is unable to halt the bleeding. She U-turns in a way which maximises the humiliation but does not close down the issue. She makes promises which will do little to benefit her but which make her disproportionately vulnerable in other areas. She diminishes her reputation with the very people she most needs on side in order to placate those who she already has on side. She adopts a strategy upon which she is unable to deliver.”
In fact, it’s very clear that Theresa May is nothing like a good negotiator. Remember when she turned up at a Euro meeting, and they all snubbed her? And she has absolutely no clue what she thinks she can achieve, or at least she didn’t. For some time when asked about Brexit all you got was waffled about how she would try to get the best deal for Britain – as if nobody else would have the same objective – and then follow it up with the mantra ‘Brexit means Brexit’, repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
What makes this all worse is Pienaar’s sneer about Labour promising us all ‘nice things’. No, John – Labour’s proposals aren’t about ‘nice things’, as you so patronisingly call them. This is about issues of life and death.
Let’s put some stats to this.
There are over 100,000 people in this country, who have to use food banks. Whatever lies Dominic Raab and Tories like him spew, they don’t do it because it’s free food. They do it because if they don’t, they die of starvation.
And there is something deeply wrong in this country, when nurses have to use it. Well, Andrew Neil asked May about this, and it was damning that she didn’t have an answer except, ‘There are complex reasons’.
And 600 or so people have died of starvation after being thrown off disability benefit through the heinous work capability tests. They have been the subject of artworks, very moving videos on YouTube, and commemorated by Johnny Void, Stilloaks, Vox Political, and so on. Mike a few days posted a piece about a disabled man, who took his own life after the DWP told him his benefit had been overpaid, and he was due to be investigated for fraud.
As for the NHS, the Tories are starving it of funds and privatising it piecemeal, making sure more services are commissioned from private healthcare companies, and more hospitals turned over to them to run. Because they’ve been following the standard line of privatising it by stealth since Maggie Thatcher. Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt were both enthusiasts of private healthcare, as are many of the Tories.
And if you want to know how well private healthcare performs, you only have to see the American system, where 50 million people couldn’t get proper insurance coverage and 30,000 people die ever year because they can’t afford the doctor’s and hospitals’ bills.
And it was very, very much like this in Britain before the Nye Bevan and Clement Atlee set up the NHS.
So if you want more poverty, more starvation, and people dying because healthcare has been privatised, and they can’t afford whatever it is they’re being charged by Unum, Circle Health, Virgin Healthcare and Bupa, then vote Tory.
If, however, you want people to have proper education, proper healthcare and be able to go home at night secure in the knowledge that they’ll have something to feed themselves and their children without relying on charity, then you have only one choice.
Vote Labour.
As for Pienaar and Alagaiah, I’m sick of them. They’re now as bad as Laura Kuensberg. With this disgraceful hatchet job, they’ve shown they’ve thrown away any pretence at objective journalism long ago.
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