LABOUR’S leadership is offering “dangerous false solutions” to the crisis-hit NHS, campaigners warned today after Sir Keir Starmer said the health service must “reform or die.”
Jeremy Corbyn’s successor told the BBC that the NHS should always be free at the point of use, but that there is also a “role for the private sector,” including with help clearing massive waiting lists.
…
The Socialist Health Association, Labour’s affiliated socialist society for healthcare and medical professionals, said Sir Keir is “right that the Tory-damaged NHS is in urgent need of repair.”
But the group stressed that his solutions “are all wrong.
“After over a decade of Conservative austerity, with staff leaving in droves amid real-terms pay cuts of up to 26 per cent since 2010, the NHS is desperately in need of more funding.
“Instead, the Labour leadership is offering bromides and dangerous false solutions. For Keir Starmer to advocate self-referrals for internal bleeding is a recipe for disaster that will waste resources and cost lives.
Yet another promise shredded as Starmer maintains 100% weasel record
Starmer and a starving child
Keir Starmer has broken yet another promise – maintaining his perfect betrayal record – by abandoning his pledge to scrap the hateful and cruel Universal Credit system through which the Tories have inflicted years of misery and poverty on the UK’s lowest earning and most vulnerable.
Starmer’s Work and Pensions spokesman Jon Ashworth, challenged directly whether Starmer – who has already been mocked this week for claiming he will ‘renew’ the UK after thirteen years of Tory cuts without spending more – would honour his promise to scrap the system that has pushed huge numbers into abject poverty, responded that:
We’re going to reform universal credit … it’s a computer system. We’re not going to go back to the six different benefits that I think it brought together but we are going to reform it.
The lumping together of benefits that were previously tailored to the needs and circumstances of different types of claimant is one of the fundamentally damaging aspects of Universal Credit – and Labour had unequivocally promised to get rid of the whole system and ‘replace’ it with something fit for purpose, to show that ‘Labour is on the side of working people’, millions of whom rely on benefits to top up low pay they are forced to accept while employers fatten profits:
Starmer was asked this week by an interviewer what the point is of voting Labour when he will be no different to the Tories. If there is any difference, it’s an even lower level of trustworthiness. A Starmer promise is not fit to wipe your backside with.
LABOUR leader Sir Keir Starmer’s apparent U-turn on a commitment to end NHS outsourcing is “morally wrong and politically self-defeating,” campaigners said today.
The criticism from groups including Keep Our NHS Public and Momentum came after Mr Starmer told Sky News he would seek to use the private sector in the health service more “effectively” if elected prime minister.
The policy breaks a promise Mr Starmer made during his party leadership campaign in spring 2020 to abolish the use of external private providers.
The volte-face follows comments by shadow health secretary Wes Streeting urging Tory ministers to use private hospitals to help clear Covid pandemic-related treatment backlogs.
The Labour election victory in 1997 took place at a moment of great political opportunity. Thatcherism had been rejected by the electorate. But 18 years of Thatcherite rule had radically altered the social, economic and political terrain in British society. There was, therefore, a fundamental choice of direction for the incoming government.
One was to offer an alternative radical strategy to Thatcherism, attuned to the shifts that had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s; with equal social and political depth, but based on radically different principles. What Thatcherism seemed to have ruled out was another bout of Keynesian welfare-state social democracy. More significantly, Thatcherism had evolved a broad hegemonic basis for its authority, deep philosophical foundations, as well as an effective popular strategy. It was grounded in a radical remodelling of state and economy and a new neo-liberal common sense.
This was not likely to be reversed by a mere rotation of the electoral wheel of fortune. The historic opportunities for the left required imaginative thinking and decisive action in the early stages of taking power, signalling a new direction. The other choice was, of course, to adapt to Thatcherite, neo-liberal terrain. There were plenty of indications that this would be New Labour’s preferred direction. And so it turned out. In a profound sense, New Labour has adapted to neo-liberal terrain …
UNITE leader Sharon Graham is absolutely right to demand assurances from Keir Starmer that a Labour government will not mean a continuation of austerity.
On this issue she speaks not just for her union but for the working class as a whole.
Austerity has beggared Britain over the last 13 years, impoverishing the public realm, cutting real wages for millions, and it is at the root of the cost-of-living crisis engulfing the country.
It is the expression of the drive by the capitalist class to make workers pay for the crisis which has unfolded, with pauses but without ending, since the bankers’ crash in 2008.
An end to austerity should therefore be the first and unbreakable commitment of any Labour government, as it was under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
