The NHS is a gleaming beacon of human achievement – we must protect it.
By Claudia Webbe MP
With Parliament rising for the belated summer recess, the Conservative government’s final act of term has left a dangerous cloud over those of us who fear for the future of our NHS, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
THE Tories have repeatedly asked the public to simply trust, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, their promise that the NHS is “not for sale” in any future trade deals with the US. During the 2019 General Election, Labour obtained proof that the NHS was ‘on the table’ in secretive talks between Britain’s negotiators and US representatives.
Yet rather than take these worrying claims seriously, much of the media instead chose to allege that Labour was somehow colluding with Russian attempts to interfere with British democracy — an outrageously false distraction that must have left Number 10 spin doctors rubbing their hands in glee.
Last week provided the government with an opportunity to put these fears to bed, as Labour tabled an amendment to its post-Brexit Trade Bill explicitly stating that the NHS would be excluded from any future trade agreements. This was supported by more than 400 doctors and health professionals. Yet, rather than deliver on their promise, not a single Tory MP voted for the amendment — which was defeated by 89 votes.
The government claims, farcically, that it voted against the amendment because it legitimises the concept of NHS privatisation — which, in the realms of hypotheticals and metaphysics, the Tories claim to oppose.
Yet when faced with a concrete opportunity to enshrine in law the safety of our most treasured public institution, the Conservatives sat on their hands. Now our NHS is at the mercy of US negotiators, who are heavily influenced by the multibillion-dollar private healthcare industry which has a vested interest in carving up our health service for corporate gain.
This clearly demonstrates the government’s commitment to ensure that the NHS is ”on the table” during trade negotiations. Yet there is an even clearer reason why we cannot trust the government when it says that the NHS is not for sale; it has been selling it off piece by piece for the best part of a decade.
Since the Conservatives’ disastrous 2012 Health and Social Care Act, NHS outsourcing and privatisation has been incentivised. Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are under pressure to outsource and, in 2015, private firms won 40 per cent of all contracts. In the last five years alone, private companies were handed £15 billion worth of NHS contracts. Eighteen per cent of healthcare bids now go to private providers, including Virgin Care and the Priory Group — an US healthcare company.
So, when senior members of the government such as Chancellor Rishi Sunak claim that “the NHS is not for sale. Never has been, never will be” — they are peddling a blatant mistruth about their own record on privatisation.
It is true that the NHS logo remains, and in some cases is even used by private providers, yet the direction of travel under this government has been towards a fragmented, underfunded and increasingly privatised healthcare system. As Noam Chomsky once said, this is “the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
Even before any potential influence of a brutal US trade deal, the government has squandered billions to service its ideological commitment to privatisation. According to research by We Own It, the government is wasting as much as £10 billion a year on running an internal market in the NHS.
Every penny spent on NHS privatisation and outsourcing is a penny less spent on patient care. The amount we spend on the internal market would be enough to pay for 72,000 nurses and 20,000 doctors.
This follows the same pattern of privatisation which has decimated many of our essential services since Thatcher’s deregulation agenda in the 1980s. Across the transport, energy, water, mail and healthcare sectors — the British public pay more for worse services simply to enrich the pockets of shareholders.
The dangers of sliding towards a US-style private insurance healthcare system cannot be overstated. Research by The Commonwealth Fund in 2018 found that nearly half of working-age US citizens, a staggering 87 million people, were either underinsured or had no coverage at all.
Rather than spending money on doctors, nurses, mental health specialists, dentists, and other professionals who provide services to people and improve their lives, the US wastes hundreds of billions of dollars a year on profiteering, huge executive compensation packages, and outrageous administrative costs. Despite widespread myths regarding the efficiency of the “free” market, the US state spends nearly double what we spend on healthcare for generally worse healthcare results.
It is common sense that, in services essential to human life, profiteering and corporate greed should be off limits. This is reflected in public polling, which shows that 84 per cent of Britons believe the NHS should be in public ownership. Even the Conservatives are aware of the unpopularity of NHS privatisation — that is why they maintain their empty promises to protect its public status at the same time as flogging off sections to the highest bidder.
The NHS is a gleaming beacon of human achievement, the embodiment of socialist, universal principles in which everyone — no matter their position in society — benefits equally. When Labour created the NHS in 1948, the Conservatives opposed it every step of the way — voting against it on 21 occasions.
Now 72 years later, they are shamelessly lying through their teeth as they place our NHS on a silver platter for predatory international private interests. It is up to all of us who value healthcare as a human right to keep up the fight to protect our most treasured public institution.
Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe
