As David Cameron continues to cling to his health secretary Andrew Lansley’s widely criticised healthcare reforms, which are generally — and accurately — regarded by defenders of our universal healthcare service as an attempt to destroy the NHS through enforced privatisation, the New Statesman has weighed with an editorial calling on the Prime Minister to scrap the bill. Styled as a letter to David Cameron, the editorial criticises him for imposing £20 billion in cuts while “implement[ing] the biggest organisational change” in the history of the NHS, “a reform that rips up established structures for managing resources and fundamentally changes the service’s founding ethos.”

The editorial states, “You must realise that this is a huge error,” but there is no evidence that this is the case, as Cameron’s entire drive is towards privatisation, and savagely cutting the state, and he has demonstrated, time and again, that, despite claiming to care about the health service, he was lying disgracefully when he promised no “top-down reorganisations” of the NHS, and also promised that the NHS budget would rise every year.

The editorial also notes that, although Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill “was originally styled as a liberalising reform,” and there is “a case for reforming NHS commissioning, with more GP involvement, and for slimming down PCTs [Primary Care Trusts],” all of this reform “could have been done without legislation.” The editors add, pointedly, “The real purpose of this reform is to transform the NHS from a system where care is mostly provided by the state to one where it is largely provided by private companies,” and, in words addressed specifically to David Cameron, state, “You say that this is not the ‘privatisation’ of the health service. There is no better word” — to which I would only add that there is, in fact, no other word for what is planned, and what, to an alarming degree, is already taking place. Read the rest of this entry »

I wouldn’t be alive without the NHS, and nor would my wife, and nor would my son, so it’s a cause that’s very, very dear to my heart. Less selfishly, it’s also dear to my heart because it’s paid for by general taxation, and is free to anyone at the point of entry, and at the point of exit, and is therefore a service for everyone, regardless of their income. However, while I recognise that certain types of cost-cutting reforms may be required, I cannot trust the Tory-led government to do so responsibly. Despite David Cameron promising to protect the NHS from “top-down reorganisation,” and promising to protect frontline services from the coalition government’s swingeing nationwide programme of cuts, he and the Tories have lied.

Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill proposes exactly the sort of “top-down organisation” that David Cameron said wouldn’t happen on his watch, and is a monstrosity, as almost everyone involved in the health service recognises (see  here, here, here and here for examples).

However, despite colossal opposition, the government has refused to scrap it, and is now trying to push it through the House of Lords. See here for information about the proposed privatisation that the government doesn’t want to you to see, and see here for information about Lansley’s ties to private companies eager to make money out of the NHS. And for information about how the government’s cuts are already undermining frontline services, see this report in yesterday’s Guardian.

I have covered this saga since it began, and will continue to do so, but for now I’d like merely to ask you, if you haven’t yet signed the 38 Degrees petition to save the NHS from the Tories’ juggernaut of privatisation, to PLEASE do so now, and then to forward it to everyone you know. You can share it via Facebook here, and via Twitter here. Read the rest of this entry »

When I think back to the already forgotten scandal of how David Cameron cosied up to Rupert Murdoch, seeking to allow him an unacceptable media monopoly via the planned BSkyB buyout, and when I now hear about Liam Fox’s dirty dealings with his buddy Adam Werritty, pretending to be an official representative of Her Majesty’s Government in MoD-related meetings around the world, I can only reflect on how the same kind of dodgy meetings and corrupt business deals have been incessantly taking place regarding the Tory-led coalition government’s planned privatisation of the NHS, with consultants like McKinsey and KPMG, and how the sordid realities of political life mean that the government cannot be trusted when it promises that it is trying to save the NHS rather than destroy it.

The Tory-led coalition and its deeply untrustworthy ministers — up to and including the PM — are not the only politicians compromised by their business dealings, because the Labour government was, essentially, no different. But although, in a general sense, almost the entire political establishment is thoroughly discredited through the knowledge that money talks more than principles do, and that we the people (except the richest ten percent) are irrelevant to politicians’ plans (except every four or five years when they want us to vote for them), I find it difficult to sit idly by while the government pushes ahead with its monstrous plans to destroy the NHS in England as a universal healthcare provider. Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow, Sunday October 9, UK Uncut, the British activists opposed to the Tory-led government’s ideologically driven austerity cuts, have organised a mass protest in London — “Block the Bridge, Block the Bill” — against the government’s plans to privatise the National Health Service (NHS), which I have been writing about extensively over the last year (see here, here, here, here and here), and my experiences of the NHS this year, after I became ill, can be found here.

UK Uncut’s activities, involving street theatre, the creative occupation of banks and tax-avoiding retail outlets, and its simple, focused message — tax the banks, stop corporate tax evasion — has been an inspiration over the last year, not only reviving a rich seam of creative dissent in the UK, but also, evidently, helping to provide inspiration for movement elsewhere — and specifically the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that has seized the imagination of Americans across the country, inspiring hundreds of similar occupations.

UK Uncut’s “Block the Bridge, Block the Bill” action will involve thousands of people occupying Westminster Bridge — dressing up as doctors, nurses and patients, playing dead, performing fake operations — to send a message of collective defiance to Parliament, where the House of Lords will begin debating the government’s Health and Social Care Bill on October 11. Read the rest of this entry »

When the history of Britain’s first modern coalition government is written, it is fair to say that two events in particular will mark the turning point in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats, when swathes of the population came to regard them as hypocritical and untrustworthy. The first of these was, of course, the vote last December to raise university tuition fees from £3,290 a year to £9,000 a year, and to withdraw all funding from arts, humanities and social sciences, when, as I reported at the time, 27 Lib Dem MPs voted for the rise in tuition fees (including 15 ministers), while 21 voted against, five abstained, and three were out of the country. Crucially, as I also explained, “The vote was won by 323-302, so just 11 more dissenters were needed for the vote to have been lost.”

Given that the Lib Dems had actively campaigned against any kind of rise in tuition fees, and that this was a major manifesto promise, with the party as a whole going so far as to pledge the abolition of fees, and thereby gaining a large number of young voters, this capitulation was a death sentence for the party’s credibility, and one from which it may never recover.

On Andrew Lansley’s wretched Health and Social Care Bill, otherwise known as the NHS Privatisation Bill, to those of us who think that privatisation, where intended, should be exposed for what it is, the Lib Dems were not faced with such a stark manifestation of hypocrisy and capitulation in voting for the bill on its third reading. This was because they had not made a specific manifesto promise to protect the NHS from the Tories, although they did promise to “protect frontline services such as cancer, mental health and maternity despite a squeeze on the NHS budget,” as the BBC explained prior to the General Election last year. Read the rest of this entry »

So David Cameron was out schmoozing on Monday, telling nurses in Ealing that he loves the NHS, but that reform is needed to save it, and claiming that he doesn’t know who Mark Britnell is.

A former director of commissioning for the NHS, who is now head of health at the accountancy giant KPMG, Britnell’s unguarded comments to a conference in New York last October, first revealed on the Internet (see these articles on Spinwatch and Political Scrapbook), and then exposed on the front page of the Observer on Sunday, have blown a hole in claims by Cameron and his health minister Andrew Lansley that their NHS reforms are not privatisation by stealth.

At the conference, as the Observer explained, Britnell said, “GPs will have to aggregate purchasing power and there will be a big opportunity for those companies that can facilitate this process … In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider, not a state deliverer.” He added, “The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.” Read the rest of this entry »