Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said that “waging a campaign” on behalf of Lucy Letby is “not the right thing to do”. He’s wrong – it’s important to challenge possible or probable unfair trials and convictions as has happened innumerable times in the past. Streeting would say that wouldn’t he? Otherwise there is a recognition that many babies died because of substandard care by the NHS.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/government-and-nhs-boss-rewriting-history-on-disastrous-pfi
BACKING private finance in the NHS should be a red line for any health secretary, campaigners charged today.
NHS England chief Amanda Pritchard told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week that the government should “consider” using private capital to fix the NHS’s crumbling infrastructure.
Today, Health Secretary Wes Streeting faced questions on the same programme about a potential return to failed private-finance initiative (PFI) schemes, in which private firms built hospitals and high-interest repayments were made over the long term.
Mr Streeting said that he does not pretend there are not “enormous challenges” because of NHS capital shortfall, and is “very sympathetic to the argument that we should try and leverage in private finance.”
But he admitted that many of the PFI deals “did lumber the NHS with an enormous cost that it continues to bear.”
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Johnbosco Nwogbo, of campaign group We Own It, said: “Support for more private finance in our NHS should disqualify you from being health secretary.
“Many NHS trusts are still spending more on PFI debts than on medicines for patients.
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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/government-and-nhs-boss-rewriting-history-on-disastrous-pfi
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/they-come-prices-and-vices-–-starmer-and-swiftie-spads This looks like indisputable evidence that the Labour government is privatising the NHS. The Starmer, Swiftie, Spads article is also interesting with many ex-Corporate lobbyist spads employed by Labour also getting bribed worshiped.
WES STREETING appointed Baroness Camilla Cavendish, who previously led David Cameron’s Number 10 Policy Unit, onto the board of the Department for Health this month, saying he wanted to have “cross-party” figures of “different political persuasions” to guide the NHS.
He wants to build a “cross-party consensus” to “reform the NHS.” But what is this consensus? In 2007, when Labour’s Gordon Brown was prime minister Cavendish wrote that “the hungry maw of the NHS is swallowing more and more resources, at the expense of virtually everything else.”
Cavendish denounced the NHS as “Britain’s last big state monopoly,” complaining that “its powerful unions view any slowdown in spending growth as a ‘cut.’ And cut is a deadly word in political terms.”
Cavendish said the NHS badly needs more “innovation,” which is only possible “by introducing competition.” Cavendish said New Labour had not gone far enough down this road. She welcomed Tony Blair’s attempts to “introduce competition” by letting private providers carry out some operations, and the introduction of foundation trusts, but claimed: “Ministers are too easily persuaded that the battle is between public and private provision. They are ashamed to endorse the private.”
She was worried Brown did not believe enough in “market-based reform” of the NHS. She said the health service was “a bloated state” and argued “the writing is on the wall: a tax-funded free healthcare system is looking ever less sustainable.”
The NHS was certainly in better state in 2007 than now. However, while the idea it was bloated, overfunded and needed more privatisation might appeal to Streeting, it doesn’t appeal to Labour voters. Cavendish went on to join Cameron’s No 10 operation in 2015, when the Tory PM did indeed stick with more NHS privatisation and less NHS money.
Cavendish is expected by Streeting to sit with former Labour health minister Alan Milburn on the Department of Health board and build up a consensus for NHS reform. Both seem drawn to Cameron’s approach — accepting and accelerating New Labour’s NHS privatisation, while adding Tory spending reductions.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/they-come-prices-and-vices-–-starmer-and-swiftie-spads This looks like indisputable evidence that the Labour government is privatising the NHS.
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During the general election, I stood on a platform that pledged to defend a fully public, fully funded healthcare system. We knew Labour’s decision to drop its previously held manifesto promise that “the NHS is not for sale” was no accident. We said the future of our NHS was on the line – and we were right.
This week, the government announced that private operators will receive an extra £2.5bn a year in government funding. Under their plans, the role of the private sector in providing outpatient appointments will rise by 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the secretary of state for health, Wes Streeting, refuses to rule out the involvement of the private sector in a reformed care service – a refusal he will no doubt maintain for the next four years until elderly and disabled people are finally allowed to hear his plans.
To the prime minister and health secretary, welcoming privatisation is proof of their commitment to pragmatism. “We will not let ideology… stand in the way.” To anyone who knows the reality of privatisation, their dogmatic refusal to look at the evidence is the very definition of ideology itself.
A privatised health service leads to worse quality care, higher mortality rates and a reduction in staffing. Privatisation has even been linked to higher rates of patient infections, in part because cleaning staff are typically the first to be cut in the name of efficiency. There is only one beneficiary of privatisation: investors and shareholders making money out of people’s ill health.
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TARGETING a 20 per cent increase in the use of the private sector to cut waiting lists risks “permanently embedding the profit-taking parasite” into the health service, campaigners have warned.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer claimed he is “not interested in putting ideology before patients” as he unveiled the NHS’s growing use of private healthcare in a major speech today.
Private operators will receive an extra £2.5 billion a year in government funding under his new elective reform plan to address a waiting list for planned care on which 6.4 million people are waiting for 7.5m treatments.
This amounts to as many as a million extra appointments, scans and operations a year by the for-profit sector, with the official aim of patients no longer having to wait more than 18 weeks for non-urgent hospital care by spring 2029.
During his speech in Surrey, the prime minister acknowledged some people will “not like” expansion of the private sector in the NHS, but said: “To cut waiting times as dramatically as possible, our approach must be totally unburdened by dogma.”
Keep Our NHS Public co-chair Dr Tony O’Sullivan said: “The commitment of Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting to long-term contracts with the private sector threatens to permanently embed the profit-taking parasite in the NHS host, undermining the prospect of NHS recovery as a publicly provided universal service meeting the needs of the population.
“Starmer says he will ‘not let ideology stand in the way’ but it is their ideological choice that will stand in the way of sustainable NHS recovery.
“Safe and prompt community care will only be delivered through an urgent expansion of skilled staff.”
We Own It lead campaigner Johnbosco Nwogbo said: “Using the private sector to cut waiting lists was the centrepiece of the Conservative government’s Elective Recovery Plan in February 2022, but waiting lists kept going up.
“Starmer’s ‘new’ initiative looks suspiciously similar to the Conservatives’ failed plan.
“Hospitals are crumbling while the NHS is haemorrhaging at least £10m a week to private shareholder profits — money which could build a new operating theatre every week.
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Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/starmer-plans-to-embed-profit-seeking-parasites-into-nhs-campaigners-warn
Keir Starmer commits to play the caretaker role for Capitalism through the “hard times”.