Wes Streeting

‘OUR FRIEND’: HOW THE ISRAEL LOBBY SPENT £30,000 ON WES STREETING

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https://www.declassifieduk.org/our-friend-how-the-israel-lobby-spent-30000-on-wes-streeting/

Wes Streeting faces a backlash over his support for Israel. (Photo: Imageplotter / Alamy)

Labour’s shadow health secretary has a long history of supporting Israel going back to his days at the National Union of Students—and has been rewarded handsomely for it.

  • Streeting was Keir Starmer’s first shadow minister to visit Israel
  • His visit in 2022 was paid for by Labour Friends of Israel, which “works really closely” with Israeli embassy in London
  • He has taken over £20,000 from Israel lobbyists Sir Trevor Chinn, Lord Mendelsohn and David Menton, with donations as recently as April
  • Pro-Israel newspaper said Streeting’s “track-record on Israel is clear” and called him “our friend at the NUS”
  • Streeting is being challenged by British-Palestinian independent Leanne Mohamad

Wes Streeting has received nearly £30,000 from Britain’s powerful pro-Israel lobby, Declassified has found. 

Two years ago, Streeting became the first member of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet to visit Israel, in a move designed to signal a break with Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-Palestine position. 

The trip was paid for by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and cost £4,700. LFI also paid for Sarah Harrison, one of Streeting’s staffers, to visit Israel with him.

Another Streeting staffer, Anna Wilson, was paid an undisclosed amount to visit Israel last July. 

Her trip was funded by the European Leadership Network, a group whose UK branch is run by Joan Ryan, former chair of LFI. 

LFI is a secretive organisation that does not disclose its funders, although undercover reporting revealed Ryan, then a Labour MP, discussing a £1 million payment from Israel with Shai Masot, an Israeli diplomat, in 2016. 

In another covertly filmed conversation outside a London pub, LFI’s Michael Rubin said that he and Masot “work really closely together…but a lot of it is behind the scenes”. 

Masot was eventually forced to quit his job at the Israeli embassy and return home after he was caught on camera plotting to “take down” British MPs.

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Israel is a serial violator of international law, and is judged to be practising apartheid against the Palestinians by both the US and UK’s top human rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Leading Israeli group B’Tselem has also reached the same conclusion.

It is currently being investigated by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for genocide, while the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Karim Khan is seeking arrest warrants for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes in Gaza.

Streeting described the ICJ case as a “distraction”.

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https://www.declassifieduk.org/our-friend-how-the-israel-lobby-spent-30000-on-wes-streeting/

Continue Reading‘OUR FRIEND’: HOW THE ISRAEL LOBBY SPENT £30,000 ON WES STREETING

Labour has ‘historic opportunity’ to reverse NHS privatisation, says campaigners

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/06/labour-has-historic-opportunity-to-reverse-nhs-privatisation-research-finds/

Labour called on to pledge to take outsourced NHS services in-house during first term

Labour has been told it will have a ‘historic opportunity’ to reverse NHS outsourcing in its first term, if the party wins the general election. 

Assuming Labour takes office on July 5, campaign group We Own It has laid out a plan for Labour not to renew private NHS contracts which are set to expire in the first term of the next government, as analysis has found a huge majority of contracts will need renewing over the next four years.  

Based on an analysis of NHS contracts, data has shown that the next government will inherit 7,452 contracts, worth a total of £29.1bn, between for-profit private companies and local, regional and national NHS entities in England. 

The public ownership campaign group found that 93.7% of these contracts are scheduled to expire before July 2029, worth £19.7bn, leaving the next government with the choice of whether to bring these services back into the NHS.  

Over £1bn is the estimated profits private companies stand to make from all NHS outsourcing contracts the next government will inherit, according to public sector procurement specialists Tussell. This money could help hire over 27,000 NHS nurses, or cover the cost of knee replacement surgeries for over 71,000 NHS patients, We Own It argued.

Professor of Accounting at the University of Edinburgh, Christine Cooper, said: “The evidence suggests that measures to bring back outsourced contracts would enable better public services at lower cost. 

“Whether to outsource to the private sector is no longer a question of ideology, it is a question of economic interest and empirical evidence.”

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/06/labour-has-historic-opportunity-to-reverse-nhs-privatisation-research-finds/

Continue ReadingLabour has ‘historic opportunity’ to reverse NHS privatisation, says campaigners

Morning Star: The Tories have wrecked the NHS – but that doesn’t mean Labour will rescue it

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-have-wrecked-nhs-doesnt-mean-labour-will-rescue-it

The NHS overtook the economy as voters’ biggest concern in February, according to polling by Ipsos. Small wonder when waiting lists have hit 7.5 million: there can hardly be a person in the country who doesn’t have a friend or relative who has been affected.

And the Conservatives bear a heavy responsibility.

In the decade up to the pandemic, real-terms healthcare spending per head rose on average by just 0.4 per cent a year — in four years it actually fell, despite rising pressures on the service.

That compares very poorly to the record of the last Labour government, which raised spending by 5.7 per cent a year on average from 1997-2010. It even compares badly to that of the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments, which averaged a 2.1 per cent annual increase.

But we should be more cautious than Poulter about endorsing Keir Starmer’s solution.

Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting have pointedly refused to offer the increases in NHS budgets that the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments delivered. Streeting is emphatic that he will not “pour money into a 20th-century model,” instead demanding reforms which, in increasing reliance on the private sector, both mimic existing Conservative policy and are unlikely to make a difference to waiting lists (because private healthcare in Britain recruits from the NHS, so overall capacity will not grow).

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Britain’s public services are collapsing under the strain of decades of neoliberal policy. In the NHS, hospitals have been undermined through outsourcing services to the private sector as well as by the cost of PFI debt — both issues with their origins in the Blair years.

To restore our NHS to health, we need a reversal of privatisation and outsourcing and a forced end to all PFI contracts, as well as a significant increase in overall funding to bring us closer to healthcare spending levels in France or Germany.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-have-wrecked-nhs-doesnt-mean-labour-will-rescue-it

Continue ReadingMorning Star: The Tories have wrecked the NHS – but that doesn’t mean Labour will rescue it

Reaction to Wes Streeting comments on NHS reform and private sector involvement

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Image of the Green Party's Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.

Responding to comments by the Shadow Heath Secretary saying that under a Labour government investment in the NHS would be dependent on reform and that there would be an increased role for the private sector, co-leader of the Green Party, Carla Denyer, said: 

“Wes Streeting says that if the NHS doesn’t change, it will die. But it is inadequate funding that has left our NHS in a poor state of health, not lack of reform.  

“Between 2010 and 2019 the UK had a lower level of capital investment in health care and 18% lower average health spending than 14 EU countries. 

“So to say that the public is paying a heavy price for failure is an insult to hard-working NHS staff, who are doing their level best despite being overworked and underpaid. It is the failure to invest adequately and pay staff properly that is at the root of dissatisfaction with the NHS. 

“The public agrees. They don’t want endless reforms; neither do they share the Conservative or Labour appetite for creeping privatisation. They want the current model to work and to see the NHS available to everyone free of charge and primarily funded through taxes. A tax on the super-rich billionaires and multi-millionaires can provide the funds needed to fix our cherished NHS.    

“The Green Party has never had any truck with the profit motive in health care and will continue to push for a fully publicly funded NHS.” 

Continue ReadingReaction to Wes Streeting comments on NHS reform and private sector involvement

Morning Star: The public want a better funded NHS – it’s politicians who stand in the way

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-public-want-better-funded-nhs-its-politicians-who-stand-way

BRITAIN is worried about the NHS. The latest Social Attitudes Survey shows less than a quarter of the population are satisfied with the health service. That represents a drop of 29 per cent in just three years — the fastest fall ever.

That’s hardly surprising. Waiting lists at over seven million represent months of pain for people waiting on procedures. Seeing a GP in a hurry is all but impossible in many areas. Waiting times in A&E are breaching targets wherever you look.

This suits private healthcare interests down to the ground.

The number of privatised medical procedures hit a record last year. People who can afford it are going private: people who can’t afford it, the vast majority, are suffering.

The degradation of the NHS, and the consequent pressure for “reform” in the form of ever-greater dependence on for-profit provision, follows a familiar playbook. US academic Noam Chomsky summed it up: “That’s the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”

People are angry about the state of the NHS, but there is certainly no public enthusiasm, or even consent, to increasing the role of private capital.

The NHS’s founder Nye Bevan famously said the NHS would last as long as people had the faith to fight for it.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-public-want-better-funded-nhs-its-politicians-who-stand-way

Continue ReadingMorning Star: The public want a better funded NHS – it’s politicians who stand in the way