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Labour front bench takes £650k from health privateers – more than Tories

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Starmer and co rake in cash from private health donors – twenty-five percent more than the Tories

Keir Starmer and his front bench MPs have taken almost £650,000 from private health companies, according to a compilation of their declarations of MPs’ interests.

The totals accepted by MPs in Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet between 2020 and 2023 are:

  • Keir Starmer £157,500
  • Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting £193,225
  • Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper £231,817
  • Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves £14,840
  • Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner £50,000
  • Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy £1,640
  • Total £649,022
Figures compiled by David Powell

The total accepted by Labour beats similar donations to the Tories by around twenty-five percent. Starmer and his health spokesman Streeting have vowed to extend the use of private companies for NHS services if Labour gets into government, while promising further austerity and refusing to say they will increase NHS funding to meet need, or increase wages for NHS staff, instead saying – just like Tories – that the NHS must ‘reform’ to be ‘sustainable’.

Both are also fully committed to the ‘Integrated Care’ programme of health rationing and incentivised cuts through withholding care – a direct import from disastrous US healthcare – that is wrecking the NHS even more thoroughly that previous Tory ‘reforms’.

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36 comments

  1. The NHS is our most vital & most cherished public service. Any UK government which finally privatises the NHS will be taking it’s life in it’s hands as never before in UK history. A national campaign to defend our NHS will have a devastating effect on whoever tries privatising our NHS & a galvanising effect on broader campaigns to reverse privatisation across the board.

    Reply

      1. ‘More clinics. Evenings and weekends’

        Where will the specialist staff such as doctors come from in an already understaffed NHS? It’s all very well promising money but even with sufficient pay, and further financial resources, cash won’t solve the problem — there aren’t the trained staff yet available, nor would there be for some years yet.

        My surgery often had 8 doctors available 10 years ago, now down to a handful, if that, with non-urgent appointments usually 4 weeks off – and then possibly only a doctors phone call first to assess you. Urgent appointments are available subject to a triage call later that morning. And my area has a ‘very good’ record for treatment at the moment.

        Private hospitals often have their own nurses but the doctors/surgeons are NHS so where do we get more from? We can’t expect doctors to work more hours than most already are, it just adds more problems through physical exhaustion.

        I had a cataract done at KIMS during lockdown, and the doctor who operated and the consultant present were both from my ophthalmology dept at the NHS hospital. They also both work as consultants at. I’ve had an examination through my membership with Benenden where the wait for the NHS was past 5 weeks. Again NHS consultant.

        Bear in mind, private hospitals also charge extra for NHS referrals, which inevitably soaks up any extra funding. It’s alright promising the Earth but there needs to be joined-up thinking.

        Yes, undoubtedly the Tories have fucked it up. But just keep pointing out that fact and think the private health sector can somehow step up and come to the rescue, as well as weekend working in the NHS, is just a ludicrous assumption without the necessary staff, regardless of pay rates.

        Streeting doesn’t impress me one bit. Besides, his behaviour at times suggests he’s quite a nasty piece of work, with a big chip on his shoulder and, just like his boss, too much ambition; and like him, only been an MP for 8 years — about the time it probably takes for a doctor to have the sort of experience to pass beyond the Junior stage from their original starting point.

        I don’t have the answers but that’s not my job, but if they do get into power, it will most likely be his, unfortunately. And the awful ‘we’ll be tougher on welfare’ Reeves will have her mitts on the purse strings — austerity mark 2 here we come.

      4. The question is which, and more to the point, whose definition of, for example, ‘integrated’ services are we talking about here?

        Integrated how? Integrated in what way? Integrated for what purpose? Integrated for whose benefit?

        For the general good of society and the people which make up society or a few carpetbaggers? For the purpose of health for the many or profit for the few?

        How will it be structured? What will be the process? What time frame are we looking at?

        Such details are not trivial as they determine whether or not what is proposed will or will not have any practicable and workable efficacy for the general public, the citizenry.

        At present all we have is yet further catchy shiny slogans for a political speech which, as usual, is absent of the necessary details and definitions.

        One fact is undeniable; if your contextual starting point is that the only single proper true way to do anything you consider to be ‘credible’ (using your own selective and convenient definition of ‘credible’) is competition rather than co-operation then there is no possible way of creating an integrated, functional service which provides value for money.*

        The system Herr’s Starmer and Streeting are importing from the USA is not fit for purpose. Period. For the reasons identified here:

        https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/31/in-the-eternal-inferno-fiends-torment-ronald-coase-with-the-fate-of-his-ideas/

        When your context is competition based on an internal market structure and processes all you have is a network of contracts and no effective organisation.

        When a problem occurs in this kind of disintegrated system claims are raised by one internal unit against another.

        For example, a hospital might invoke a contractual penalty because an internal contractor department cancelled an operation.

        The unit/sub unit providing operations will claim against the building facilities contracting unit, which itself might counterclaim. Because every unit and sub-unit is running on its own individual budget to maximise its income without any regard for the knock on effects on other parts of the overall operation. The hospital might have guaranteed certain service levels under a total outsourcing arrangement with the operating unit, it too would then try to claim against anyone else it could think of.

        You can see and experience this nonsense in every interaction you have with any and every entity you work for or come into contact with.

        This has important consequences. First of all, the claims-management process is itself costly.

        Second, because the prices of services exchanged between the component units are often determined after the event, through the claims process, they are no longer informative about the marginal costs involved, but rather about the contract-management process.

        As a result, costs overall rise substantially although nobody can put their finger on who is coining it. Or why?

        Thirdly, it is enormously complex. A contract, after all, is executed between parties. The number of pairwise interactions within an organisation rapidly becomes very large – in fact, it increases by the factorial of the size of the organisation.

        This profit orientated approach which relies on disintegrating everything through internal competition does not work anywhere. The US health care system the regime running the LP wish to import is notoriously bureaucratic, expensive and unworkable for the 99%.

        It only works for the few at the top. Which is why bought and paid for grifters like Starmer and Streeting – who make the oldest profession look honourable by comparison – are trying to sell this pig in a poke.

        Goat herders in the Caribbean providing the odd link to a speech to support their cheerleading for this bollocks tell us absolutely zilch.

        All mouth and no trousers. Where’s the beef Billy?

        *the example in the link in the post below demonstrates the point.

    1. Put any figure 1-9 in front of that.

      Has keef opposed ANY toerag policy in the last four years?

      If so, can anyone tell me what it was,cos I’m jiggered if I know!? Every time the slimeball’s on the telly he’s agreeing with and supporting them.

      Reply

  3. How many votes do they think that £650,000 will bring them. Certainly, not mine.

    Reply

  4. Selling-off what you’re promising to protect. Starmer and Streeting’s “INTEGRATED CARE” is a massive Con – or, as Claudia Webbe MP calls it, a “Trojan horse for the Americanisation of the NHS”.

    Charlatans and Reprobates.

    Reply

  5. A policy of economic illiterates:

    https://steelcityscribblings.uk/wp/2024/01/17/the-cost-of-marketising-britains-nhs/

    “imagine how much more it could save if it stopped pretending that so much of the public sector was made up of independent organisations competing with each other rather than cooperating to provide integrated services.

    Take this on the NHS. There are:

    42 integrated care boards, which each have an integrated care partnerships
    229 total number of trusts, including 154 foundation trusts
    50 mental health trusts
    10 ambulance trusts
    124 acute trusts

    Each of these will spend its life:

    Creating duplicated policy
    Accounting furiously to each other, billing like crazy and employing an army of accountants to reconcile the results
    Have its own PR and comms teams
    Spend a fortune on websites, glossy annual reports and more
    Duplicate management structures

    And all for no gain and a lot of cost. Regional strategic health authorities could solve that.

    And then there is education, where in 2022 (I struggled to find more up-to-date information quickly), there were 2,539 multi-academy trusts operating in England, made up of nearly 10,000 schools. That still left 17,500 outside trusts, rather surprisingly, but all these trusts suffer all the problems noted above, and destroy the chance of integrated education provision in any area, which should be the goal.

    What if we got rid of all this nonsense? What would that save?”

    – Richard Murphy.

    ————————————————-

    And yet this total bollocks is sold as the only “credible” way to do anything and suggestions to tackle this nonsense are presented as ‘not credible” by some people.

    Reply

    1. It starts at the top. Richard Murphy’s analysis probably convinces him that it’s not just organisation and methods that cause so much duplication and waste in the NHS, it’s the overtly political leadership. the NHS executive group, a bunch of crooks and scoundrels, some of whom are directly responsible and supportive of things like Integrated Care and the promulgation of the orchestrated NHS coronavirus deception.

      Reply

  6. Unelectable due to conflict of interest….. they will never work for the 99% benefit.

    Reply

      1. The press coverage of his 25 day coronavirus hospitalisation (eg http://web.archive.org/web/20231201185448/https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/coronavirus-i-feel-a-tremendous-sense-of-humility-mp-tony-lloyd-on-how-nhs-saved-his-life) persuaded me that he wasn’t “dedicated to service” as much as a willing-performer in the propaganda game that several politicians partake in (eg Trump and Johnson, both of whom were supposedly hospitalised too). The give-away is that he was supposedly on a ventilator for 10 days: Respiratory viruses like SarsCov2 are not treatable by that type of mechanical ventilation, and ten days’ worth would have killed him if he’d had covid.

        Why are you publicising his death SteveH? It’s actually making me suspicious.

      2. qwertboi – Your comment says far more about you than it does about Tony. 😞

      4. Thanks SeveH, I’da a loved to hear it, but it needs a log-in and I’m picky about which platforms I give my ‘data’ to. Yes, Jeremy had spoken well of him in the past too.

      5. Herr Flick
        JC has integrity and decency, unlike the Fuhrer
        Nearly choked on me Shreddies the other day, when he accused Sunak of not believing in anything
        Thankfully all roads lead to the Hague for the pair of them

      6. SteveH

        Yes, qwertboi’s comment says far more because (correct me if I’m wrong, qwerty) qwertboi’s actually a health professional and so knows far more about what he’s talking about than Tony Lloyd.

        Or you.

      7. timfrom – FFS are you having a laugh, qwertboi is a self proclaimed quack who is into alternative medicine who as well as being a covid denier also believes that mHRA vaccines are part of some bizarre conspiracy.
        Are you a fellow traveller of his?

      8. “qwertboi is a self proclaimed quack who is into alternative medicine…a covid denier also believes that mHRA vaccines are part of some bizarre conspiracy.”

        I’m not particularly “into” alternative medicine, SteveH, but instead slowly became a practitioner of orthomolecular (medical) principles after realising that the area in which I had specialist knowledge (renin/angiotesin/ACE, etc..) and their roles in the twentieth century development of metabolic illnesses, autoimmune diseases and, a particular interest of mine, neurodevolopment i.e. autism, were possibly created or worsened by it. It bothers me intensely that more than 15 and possibly as much as 25 – 30% of all death is directly attributable to the medicine system itself ineffective diagosis, adverse effects/interaction of pharmaceutical ‘medications/over-medication, etc., (Iatrogenic factors).

        Re my alleged conspiracy theorising about covid, many other doctors share this scepticism. https://doctors4covidethics.org/. Your attempt to ridicule and demean a voice of ‘dangerous positions’ tells me all I need to know about your intellect, or rather, how you use it.

        FWIW and re Skwawkies next story, according to the BMA there are more than 30,000 fewer full-time GPs working forthe NHS today than there were at the start of the pandemic. A major reason is the NHS’s imposition of a highly contested Covid narrative and vaccination programme. The BMA itself has said this.

        Lastky, I am not against vaccines, just the experimental and untested use of mRNA technology by them.

  8. Up pops the Deviation Master from the Caribbean.

    I would hate to employ him as a navigator and map reader.

    Reply

  9. Just seen a ten o(or so) second snoopet of the labour PPB on the box

    Keef, stood outside a modest-looking house, and the risible claim of a working-class background.

    Just GTFOOI, greasy, lying fraud.

    Reply

  10. I hope Leanne Mohamad gets rid of Streeting, %30 of the 650000 would be wasted.

    Reply

  11. qwertboi is a self proclaimed quack

    And you’re a self proclaimed political guru. Given the choice between qwert’s medical knowledge and your political (and general) knowledge…

    While I’m reticent (but not altogether dismissive) to buy into qwert’s opinion on vaccines, there is absolutely NO FUCKING WAY you can convince me that keef & co have a single redeeming feature between them.

    You bemoan the criticism of that shower of shite as wholly unwarranted. If he actually does manage to get into #10, a lot of mugs n gobshites are gonna learn the hard way what he’s about.

    Whereas you’ve constantly and wilfully chosen to ignore the irrefutable evidence. There is NO ubiquitous agreement with toerag policy; no continual flip-flopping shithousery from keef that you have not countenanced and exonerated, and you have expected the same on from us each & every occasion

    You are simply unable and incapable of identifying the difference betwixt shit and shinola, and that’s why you’re perpetually ridiculed.

    For someone who dismisses another with formal qualifications(s) you don’t half spout a load of complete shite, trying to bull up the zionist WITHOUT qualification.

    Pipe down, divvy.

    Reply

    1. Toffee
      Genocide without qualification
      The next PM has legal responsibility for prevention of Genocide, there is no defence against doing nothing never mind being complicit in the act
      Methinks
      The Fuhrer is proper fucked

      Reply

      1. There’s more to events than the abomination being carried out by Israel, Doug.

        The MSM don’t – and won’t ever – delve as in-depth on zionist israel as they will domestic affairs. And it won’t take very long before keef’s proved he’s no different to the shower of shite that currently hold the reigns.

        The difference is keef will get scrutinized more intensely and criticized under the false premise that he’s supposedly the socialist they call him now; the result will be to drag the centre ground even further to the right of thatcherism.

        And keef has no other choice but to comply because he hasn’t got a bastard clue what he’s (gonna be) doing.

        …And nor have the public.

  12. And so the decline continues into a collapsing black hole of deadly, dangerous nonsense supported by the so called ‘opposition’ Labour Party:

    https://skwawkbox.org/2024/01/18/government-just-passed-highly-dangerous-new-rules-to-damage-nhs-and-con-patients/

    Another deskilling operation. And once those skills and the experience which comes with them are gone they are gone for good. Replacing skilled GP’s with unskilled cheaper labour to sell to carpetbagger US corporations for a bribe.

    Just like the manufacturing base and its expertise across not only the UK but the entire Collective West which is now incapable of even supplying and operating a functioning military which is being handed its arse not only by the Russians but also by Yemen.

    Nothing works any more as a deliberate objective of policy. Having undermined various functional systems which were operating with at least a reasonable degree of efficacy – manufacturing; education; health; defence; public sector; transport; etc it looks like farming is next in line to get rid of the 99% considered by the elites pushing this nonsense to be deplorables via undermining food production and security in order to starve to death those who survive genuine quacks the Government and Opposition (sic) are employing to pretend to be doctors.

    When TF are people ever going to start getting the pitchforks and guillotines out to stop this nonsense?

    Reply

  13. When TF are people ever going to start getting the pitchforks and guillotines out to stop this nonsense?

    When the next series of strictly x-factor celebrity brother island on ice has finished, I suppose. 🙄

    Reply

    1. …..Meanwhile……

      https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/18/tata-steel-to-shut-down-port-talbot-blast-furnaces-3000-jobs-at-risk

      “The owners of Port Talbot steelworks have rejected a trade union plan designed to keep its blast furnaces running, putting nearly 3,000 jobs at risk and leaving the UK on course to become the only major economy unable to make steel from scratch. In what one union said would be a “crushing blow” to workers and UK steelmaking, Port Talbot’s parent company, the Indian-owned Tata Steel, told workers’ representatives that it could no longer afford to continue production at the loss-making plant in south Wales while it completed a four-year transition plan to greener production. The company, which is getting £500m from the government to help with that plan, broke the news during a summit at the five-star St James’ Court hotel in London, which is owned by the Tata Group.”

      ——————————————

      This makes no sense on any level.

      If you cannot make steel from scratch you cannot make specialist steel for fighter jets and other military hardware. You either close the few specialist steel plants still in operation – like Stocksbridge – and lose the ability to produce anything requiring specialist steel or you add a further economic balance of payments burden to the Country – impoverishing it and its citizens even more – by having to import the raw steel.

      Unless of course you plan to steal the steel from other countries by bombing the shit out of them.

      And again, once the skill and expertise has gone – those jobs and the expertise either disappearing entirely or replaced, as with GP’s, by less skilled and ‘cheaper’ labour offering a far worse service and quality output – they are gone for good.

      The Labour Party are complicit not just in Genocide they are complicit in destroying the Country in supporting such a model.

      In another era they, along with those in actual Government responsible would, and still should, be hung for treason.

      Reply

      1. PS, tell us again Billy no mates from the Caribbean (allegedly), how this is the only ‘credible’ option.

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