Labour have enacted the first piece of anti-LGBT legislation to come from Westminster in 36 years
IN indefinitely extending the ban on puberty blockers for trans young people, Labour have enacted the first piece of anti-LGBT legislation to come from Westminster in 36 years.
And like the ban on teaching of LGBTQ+ identities enacted in 1988, it is grounded in little more than a moral panic that harms young people.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting claims that the decision to extend the Conservative Party’s ban on something which is a reversible and safe means to give young people the time and space to decide what is right for them was taken after receiving expert advice. But the Government’s own consultation process tells another story.
If, as the Government’s proponents are so quick to say, we must take the heat out of the so-called transgender debate, the route to doing so must surely be through expert opinion and by listening to the experiences of young trans people themselves.
Yet skipping through the list of names invited to respond to the Government’s targeted consultation on the indefinite ban, a number of chosen invitees are objectively the last people who should be near such a consultation – anti-trans organisations, conversion therapy advocates and groups with ties to far-right American evangelism.
The list of groups and organisations invited to take part included charity the LGB Alliance, which was labelled by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) as a hate group in 2022.
GPAHE – which was formed by two former members of the respected US Southern Poverty Law Center – highlighted the LGB Alliance among other groups such as the Official Proud Boys Ireland and the Iona Institute as setting out to “demean, harass, and inspire violence against people based on their identity traits”.
The Government also invited the Bayswater Support Group to respond – a favourite go-to of the far right that pushes conversion therapy and advocates abuse toward trans youth “for their own good”.
A support worker stands in a corridor as the first patients are admitted to the NHS Seacole Centre at Headley Court, Surrey, May 2020
EMERGENCY doctors have expressed concern today about a new guide on how to treat patients in corridors, saying it is “normalising the dangerous.”
NHS England recently produced guidance on “providing safe and good quality care in temporary escalation spaces.”
But the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said the “nonsensical” guidance is out of touch and that it is “not possible to provide safe and good quality care” in corridors or cupboards.
The guidance acknowledges corridor care is “not acceptable and should not be considered as standard,” but due to current pressures some hospitals are “using temporary escalation spaces more regularly — and this use is no longer ‘in extremis’.”
It suggests how staff can deliver the “safest, most effective and highest quality care possible” to patients in these circumstances.
In a statement yesterday, the college said: “Advice from arm’s length bodies that appear out of touch with what is happening in our departments was always going to be poorly received.”
The use of corridors will lead to long waits in emergency departments, “associated with measurable harm to patients,” it added.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting arrives in Downing Street, London, for a Cabinet meeting, December 3, 2024
HEALTH Secretary Wes Streeting has been urged to honour the New Deal for Working People after failing to back a Unison NHS strike over a £100 million-plus privatisation plan.
More than 350 facilities workers are on a three-week walkout over East Suffolk and North Essex Foundation Trust (ESNEFT’s) plans to outsource their jobs.
Large NHS contracts such as this need Cabinet Office approval but Mr Streeting has said he will not intervene in the trust’s outsourcing bid despite Labour’s promise for the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation, a union source said.
His stance has attracted criticism from Labour MPs, Unison and NHS campaigners, with ESNEFT’s board of directors expected to rubber-stamp the outsourcing of their soft facilities management contract tomorrow.
Eastern Unison head of health Caroline Hennessy said: “Moving these essential teams out of the NHS is a false economy and goes against government pledges on insourcing.
“The trust has spent months trying to justify its ill-thought-out plans to privatise the jobs of these key staff and has failed to win any of the arguments.”
Health workers and activists ramp up their campaign to oppose surveillance company Palantir’s role in managing NHS data
Health workers and activists in Britain are intensifying their campaign against US-based surveillance and data company Palantir, as Keir Starmer’s government accelerates its push to involve the notorious firm in managing National Health Service (NHS) data.
Palantir first gained a foothold in the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic, securing contracts outside standard procurement processes and enjoying popularity among high-ranking health officials. The company, infamous for its involvement in operations such as the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and migrant persecution under the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), soon expanded its role in Britain. By last year, it had won a £330 million (USD 417 million) contract to implement the Federated Data Platform (FDP), intended to modernize medical data management across England.
Not all NHS institutions are currently able to share data because of differing systems. Both Conservative and Labour governments have identified this as the main reason for bottlenecks in the health system and claimed that resolving the problem would lead to improvements to care. However, organizations like Medact, Just Treatment, and Corporate Watch warn that entrusting this task to Palantir could deepen issues rather than solve them.
Similarly, many health experts have highlighted how the FDP would effectively lock the NHS into dependency on Palantir. The company’s systems are designed in a way to make data extraction difficult and integration with industry-standard analytics costly and complicated, so users are compelled to keep using them. “Palantir’s system pushes people to its own proprietary systems; and switching costs [for the NHS] will be very high,” Doctors’ Association and Foxglove warned in a 2023 report.
The current government is pushing forward with this form of private sector expansion in the NHS despite warnings from trusts and experts that the results will fall far short of expectations. In fact, some NHS organizations being forced to adopt the FDP under Labour’s administration have said that the new platform could result in a loss of functionality compared to the systems they currently rely on.
While there is general agreement among analysts that data sharing and usage within the NHS could be significantly improved, they argue that these improvements can and should be achieved through local and regional initiatives. In contrast to the top-down model ushered in by the FDP, these initiatives would build on existing systems and expertise, avoiding handing over control to a private company with a track record of human rights abuses.
Concerns that the FDP could make the NHS entirely dependent on Palantir are sharpened by fears over how patient data might be used. As one of the world’s largest public healthcare systems, the NHS holds an unique health dataset. While such data has immense potential to strengthen public services, entrusting it to corporate partners poses great risks. For instance, it could be exploited for purposes such as tracking and criminalizing migrants—a practice that has been systematically pursued under Britain’s hostile environment policies.
Palantir takes pride in finding new applications for data, specifically to reinforce Western dominance. Given that the full scope of the FDP remains unclear, there is significant concern that NHS data could also be exploited to boost Palantir’s surveillance tools. These tools are already being deployed in Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Palantir’s leadership has been outspoken in its support for Israel, openly aligning with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government even as it proceeded to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians. The company is actively testing—or rather, showcasing—its artificial intelligence (AI) models through Israel’s attacks in Palestine and Lebanon. This indicates a clear intent to monetize these tools further by marketing them to other states preparing to go on killing sprees.
Handing over NHS medical data to Palantir would deepen the Starmer administration’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes, health justice organizations warn. Such a move risks staining the NHS’s reputation, turning its dataset into a tool for oppression internationally while undermining public trust in the healthcare system at home.
Many had hoped that a change in government in July would mean an end to the FDP. However, “instead of hitting reset, Labour hit accelerate,” Just Treatment remarked during a No Palantir in the NHS meeting in November. This response reflects Labour’s priorities when it comes to the public healthcare provider. “If the government were setting out to implement reforms in the way that our data is held to improve health outcomes and improve the NHS, they would be going about it in a way that maximizes public trust, maximizes public and health service and health worker support for those initiatives,” the organization remarked during the meeting.
Instead, the government appears more interested in using national health data for economic gain. This approach aligns closely with recommendations from neoliberal policy advisors, such as those at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, who have recently called for the use of NHS data as a means to boost Britain’s economic standing.
Although the implementation of the FDP is progressing, activists argue that it is not too late to stop it—especially if local groups escalate their efforts. They emphasize that by increasing pressure, health workers and activists could not only push for the cancellation of Palantir’s FDP contract but also demand the termination of all agreements with companies complicit in Israel’s occupation. While Palantir is currently a key focus, the organizations highlighted that this campaign is just the beginning, serving as a starting point for broader action.
Protest against privatization of the NHS in the UK, February 25, 2023. (Photo: We Own It)
The UK Labour government is considering increasing the role of private healthcare providers, weakening NHS capacities
The Labour Party is considering a major expansion of the private sector’s involvement in the National Health Service (NHS) as it attempts to reduce waiting lists in the United Kingdom. Recently, the Independent Healthcare Providers Network (IHPN) wrote to Keir Starmer’s government, stating that private providers are ready to spend £1 billion to accommodate more NHS patients—if the government guarantees them long-term work.
While the offer has been welcomed by officials from the Department of Health, health activists have raised alarms over the plan. The We Own It campaign warned that a resurgence of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) policy, as essentially proposed by the private sector, would lead to higher debt, staffing shortages, and diminished NHS training capacities.
This wouldn’t be the first time private capital has been welcomed by a Labour administration. When Tony Blair was Prime Minister, PFI entrusted the private sector with financing the construction of hospitals to fill gaps in the NHS network. The NHS would then pay back the costs of building such infrastructure—with interest—over the course of 25 years or more, eventually becoming the owner.
However, earlier reports indicated that while the NHS gained £13 billion in assets through PFI, it also ended up with £80 billion in debt. This meant that until at least 2022, some NHS trusts spent more on servicing debt to the private sector than on medical supplies.
There is no indication that the current government would introduce stronger safeguards when implementing a new phase of the initiative, dubbed PFI 2.0. If anything, the situation might worsen. While the previous round of PFI left some infrastructure for the public sector, PFI 2.0 foresees nothing of the sort. The additional capacities would be entirely private, with the only public involvement being the money paid to them.
“PFI 2.0 would not only drastically expand private provision in the health service, it will also dramatically increase how much is sucked out of the NHS in profits,” We Own It suggested in its analysis. Currently, private companies siphon £10 million weekly from the NHS. Guaranteeing even more private contracts would add to that burden, leaving fewer funds to invest in the NHS’s own capacities.
Labour fails to grasp importance of publicly-owned NHS
According to a recent inquiry, these capacities are in dire need of strengthening, as health activists have claimed for decades. The inquiry indicated that years of austerity have left a deep mark on the NHS, and it was this—not staff inefficiency—that led to the crisis. Unfortunately, the inquiry failed to underline the importance of breaking ties with the private sector and keeping the NHS publicly-owned, according to the group Keep Our NHS Public.
Even if it did, it is highly likely that Health Secretary Wes Streeting would not understand the importance of such a strategy. Speaking at a party conference in September, Streeting expressed enthusiasm about “reform,” a code word used by governments for “anything but public investment in public capacities.”
“Reform or die. We choose reform,” the Health Secretary said. His approach has left activists understandably worried that the government is sticking to a vague health reform agenda instead of making material commitments to protect the NHS.
Rather than pursuing a shift from “analog to digital,” Keep Our NHS Public argued, the government should pledge to move away from underfunding, fragmentation, and outsourcing. As health workers and their trade unions have raised multiple times, a true strategy to protect the NHS must also include a commitment to improving working conditions and ensuring fair salaries.
If the private sector’s role is expanded, this would not be a realistic option. “The private sector does not have its own staff,” We Own It warned. “They steal staff, trained at huge public expense, from the NHS.”
Further involvement of the private sector would also reduce the NHS’s capacity to train new staff, the group stated. The procedures usually handled by the private sector are often critical for the hands-on experience needed by medical trainees. With fewer procedures of this kind being performed in NHS hospitals, these learning opportunities would disappear, condemning new generations of health workers to lower-quality education and undermine patient care.
“If PFI 1.0 was one of the nails in the coffin of the NHS as we know it, PFI 2.0 is the true end of our NHS as a public service that works for patients, not profit,” We Own It warned.
People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by thePeople’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, clickhere.
