This kind of promise, Starmer keeps – and appoints Blair’s former health sec privatisation advocate to NHS team
On its very first day in office, Keir Starmer’s government offered an NHS contract worth almost thirty-two million pounds to private companies. The contract in the Humber and North Yorkshire ‘Integrated Care Board’, was published last Friday:
In opposition, Starmer and his Health Secretary Wes Streeting spoke glowingly of ‘holding open the door’ of the NHS for private companies. While Starmer never saw a promise of anything good that he wouldn’t break, it seems this kind of promise is something he’ll stick to.
Both Starmer and Streeting have accepted large donations from private health interests.
‘Integrated Care’ is the UK copy of the US ‘Accountable Care Organisation’ (ACO) system. It rewards healthcare providers for not treating people, incentivising them with a share of the ‘savings’ made. NHS campaign analysts consider it a way of cheapening the NHS for greater profits – Starmer’s Labour fully supports this Tory scheme, including the plan to replace many doctors with ‘physician associates’ (PAs) and ‘anaesthetist associates’ (AAs) without proper medical training.
As ‘opposition’ leader, Starmer colluded with the Tories earlier this year to defeat an attempt in Parliament to kill legislation to widen the use of these ‘associate’ roles, which trusts and ‘Integrated Care Boards’ like Humber and North Yorkshire are allowed to use as they see fit, without any national standard.
In another sign of Starmer’s plans for the NHS, he is reported to have appointed Tony Blair’s former Health Secretary Alan Milburn as a ‘non-political’ health minister. Milburn has strong links to private health firms, including controversial GP privatiser Centene:
Milburn was also appointed by private services giant Pricewaterhousecoopers (then PwC) as chair of its ‘Health Industry Oversight Board’, where he wrote of his ambition to drive the firm’s ‘growing presence in the health market’:
He also served under Tory David Cameron’s government and in the 2015 general election, Milburn criticised Labour’s NHS plans, complaining that they would limit private involvement in the NHS.
The old saying to ‘Never trust a Tory with the NHS’ applies to the red version too.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
EASILY predicted.
OBVIOUS to all,
except to those seduced by verminous establishment parasites, JUST BECAUSE they infiltrated the Labour Party, and were gifted the assets which they use and abuse taking no prisoners, as is their HABIT.
WORSE coming, OBVIOUSLY from ‘bad, Bad, BAD news Starmer’, who crawled up and fanged venomously without trace !!!
Think of it. How does anyone, even a tool, drone on so dreadfully, despite reading what’s prepared for him… how does he speak so poorly DESPITE occupying a position which demands speaking well??? … atop Saville Saving DPP, yet allowed to leave with a special self arranged pension-pot???
🤔⁉️❔🤔⁉️❔🤔⁉️❔
“If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you.
I warn you that you will have pain–when healing and relief depend upon payment.
I warn you that you will have ignorance–when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty–when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.
I warn you that you will be cold–when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work–when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.
I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.
I warn you that you will be quiet–when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.
I warn you that you will have defence of a sort–with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.
I warn you that you will be home-bound–when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.
I warn you that you will borrow less–when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday–
– I warn you not to be ordinary
– I warn you not to be young
– I warn you not to fall ill
– I warn you not to get old.
That was 41 years ago. Next to nothing has changed, and certainly not for the better.
Why didn’t the same warning about keef apply last week, kincock?
I’ll see your private health shenanigans and raise you means tested state pensions.
Just wait until their security review kicks in. It’s about 95 days away.
I see that it hasn’t taken long for the supporters of identity cards to rear their ugly heads.
I am still cheered up by the defeat of Khalid Mahmood and Jonathan Ashworth.
Tony, you might be interested in this recent naked capitalism article:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07/will-a-keir-starmer-government-make-digital-identity-a-reality-in-uk.html
“The situation is unlikely to improve under a Starmer government, and could actually get worse. As we reported in May, the former PM Tony Blair and his associates are likely to wield significant influence over a Keir Starmer government, albeit from behind the scenes, and Blair and his modestly named foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, or TBI, see digital surveillance and control technologies as the cure-all to many of the world’s problems:….
…..Starmer, who shared a stage with Blair at the TBI’s Future of Britain conference last summer, has populated his team with Blairites — including the former Blair special adviser Matthew Doyle, now Starmer’s director of communications; the former Blair strategist and speechwriter Peter Hyman, who is a senior adviser; and another former Blair special adviser, Peter Kyle, now the shadow science secretary. In particular Kyle and Wes Streeting, the glossy shadow health secretary, are said to act as Blair’s emissaries around the shadow cabinet table…
…..There is an almost evangelical zeal to Blair’s faith in digital technologies, including biometrics. As the Times article notes, Blair’s prescriptions are, unsurprisingly, technocratic. They include promoting the full gamut of “digital public infrastructure”, or DPI, currently being rolled out in countries across the Global South, often with World Bank loans and financing from billionaire philanthro-capitalists like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar.
Blair has repeatedly called for the development of a digital identity system in the UK, after trying but failing as prime minister to introduce an identity card system in the country. In a speech at the World Economic Forum’s 2020 cyber attack simulation event, “Cyber Polygon”, he told the event’s participants that Digital Identity would form an “inevitable” part of the digital ecosystem being constructed around us, and so government should work with technology companies to regulate their use — as the EU and Australia have already done.”
————————————————————————
What is being pushed is a Global Panopticon. One Ring to Rule them all.
….Until one remembers that the short, fat, bespectacled, ginger gobshite – who was no doubt bullied at school – akehurst (amongst others) shoehorned his way in.
Grim. 😕
That was a reply to Tony, btw.
Meanwhile, the UK has the second largest external debt in dollar terms on the planet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AEJwQKEa9s&ab_channel=CityGlobeTour
Check out the fact on the opening screen showing the 2024 position – before running the sequence – that nine of the top ten are part of the Collective West; whilst only six of the top twenty are from outside the Collective West.
Question is, to whom are those national debts owed? Other countries? Or private bond holders (the Oligarch Class)?
Michael Hudson is spot on. There is no way any populace can ever produce enough growth in productivity – which only grows logarithmically at best – compared to debt interest – which grows exponentially – to meet the insatiable demands of the creditor class.
Neo-liberal ‘economics’ is a Ponzi Scheme. In which the sovereignty of populations is appropriated by a minority who not only want to own everything but also own everyone else and use us as disposable cash cows.
We can be sure that this Government, like the ones before it, will do whatever it takes to ensure that the creditor parasites are literally given every ounce of flesh no matter what the cost to the majority of the populace. That price will not only include the full privatisation of the Health Service but anything and everything left that the rentiers have not already appropriated for themselves.
I had to work hard to really get your post. It was very good, worth the work. Thanks Dave.
Their links to private healthcare stinks to high heavens but, to be honest, I have no problem to the outsourcing of IT on purely ideological grounds. It’s very unlike privatising hospitals when the equipment and overheads cost the same buy the provider keeps a cut for profit, meaning that they either cut on staffing or charge more than it would to keep in house. In the case of IT, it can be less costly and be more efficient if done properly (i.e. fair tender process and choosing an appropriate provider).
Anyway, 3 days into the job, the new government has nothing to do with this kind of decision if those boards have some form of independence.
In the case of IT, it can be less costly and be more efficient if done properly (i.e. fair tender process and choosing an appropriate provider).
Government and IT are just not compatible. Both have to be competent, and neither ever have been, are, or will be.
Last labour govt and the NHS IT.
The rags and UC.
Then there’s keef with that 8200 Israeli beaut who had the membership data compromised.
…And did I mention the post office?
That £31m will soon either have a zero added on the end, or be written off. And nobody will be pulled up on it, despite the shady, behind-closed-doors procurement process(es)
A bit of realism here. My dad worked in IT. He *was* competent and the systems he built worked well. He worked for both the private and public sector. Sweeping generalisations about IT and government are immature and grotesque. The reality is that some IT firms are rubbish and some are great. Same for individuals working for either the public or private sectors.
When it comes to government activity, there is a fundamental difference between building infrastructure and providing the actual service (I.e. building the hospital vs running a hospital). In running the actual service (which we assume should be run for as long as the country exists), outsourcing/privatisation is *always* a net loss, regardless of competence. Even the best run private healthcare provider still need to have a profit margin that can only be achieved by cutting staff pay or charging more than it would is ran publicly.
In building infrastructure, which is usually for a finite amount of time, outsourcing is often the better option. Private companies have, in theory, lots of accumulated experience and the fact that many IT systems can be used by a variety of client with a minimum of modifications can certainly help, in theory, cut costs and increase efficiency. Databases are databases. Where outsourcing could go wrong is if the choosen company is incompetent or bent, or when contracts are given to mates instead of best bidder. Competence here is the key. And sometimes, when it comes to infrastructure, if the needs are very specific, there isn’t any private companies capable of delivering what is needed more efficiently and cheaply than doing it in house.
In short, we need to be pragmatic sometimes. The devil is always in the details.
Firstly, I suspect that what Toffee may be alluding to is that competence also has to operate at the systemic level.
As detailed in this piece from a few years back:
https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/31/in-the-eternal-inferno-fiends-torment-ronald-coase-with-the-fate-of-his-ideas/
As the article in the above link explains; the outsourcing model, operating in a context of economic rentierism which is an endemic built in feature of the neo-liberal paradigm across the Collective West has completely destroyed organisation as an effective process.
Transforming integrated organisations and organisational processes into a plethora of smaller entities that only interact on a contractual basis with penalty clauses between each component firm.
Producing a nullification of efficiencies of scale as a result of the prices of services exchanged between the component firms often being determined after the event, through the claims process. Prices, no longer being informative about the marginal costs involved, but rather about the contract-management process inevitably feeding back into rising costs.
As the examples quoted in the article – among many others which could be cited – these systemically induced inefficiency costs rise as a direct consequence of the administrative overhead of the contracting/outsourcing process; the difficulty in knowing what your costs are in advance; and “the economics of knowledge. If you believe a lot of relevant knowledge in an organisation or market is implicit and tacit, well, that’s by definition the sort of thing you can’t write into a contract. Either the firm has to exist in order to be the vessel of this knowledge, or else we don’t care.”
Toffee cites the examples in Liverpool of inevitable outcomes of this failed model. With Carillion leaving Liverpool ratepayers with the burden of finding the funds from local authority coffers already experiencing central funding cuts year on year to complete part built schools and hospitals outsourced under PFI.
Carillion plc was a pure example of everything that is wrong with the outsourcing model in the key systemic sense.
“In the 1990s, the British government fundamentally changed how it dealt with private suppliers, in this direction. PFI is the icon of this, but the change was much wider and deeper. Essentially anything a government department wanted had to be tested for contracting-out. To a large extent, the contracting process itself was handed to contractors via the prime contractor business model.
Carillion consisted, essentially, of a sales and contract management organisation that hunted public-sector service contracts and then hired subcontractors to carry them out. This is a fairly pure statement of the firm as a network of contracts. You’ll note that the customer-provider relationship has itself been outsourced here – the contractor, not the customer, chooses the provider. Therefore, any relevant information had better be within the contractor, because it’s not anywhere else.”
Secondly, the assumption that “Private companies have, in theory, lots of accumulated experience” is no longer the case. Over the past four or five decades the private sector race to the bottom line ethos – operating across and at every level in what was once the public sector – has resulted in anyone but ‘yes men’ – ie; everyone with any experience and nous – being expunged from the system.
Experienced leaders at management level who knew their arse from a hole in the ground have been replaced by pliable MBA type graduates who flit from role to role destroying all organisational continuity and resulting in a continuous loop of Year Zero management.
Meanwhile, the coalface experience, expertise and knowledge has been similarly managed out of the system. With that experience, expertise and knowledge being offshored and replaced with people recruited from the bus stop like Ukrainian civilians drafted to the front lines off the street with minimal training – which is viewed as an unnecessary cost – on lower terms and conditions than the experience they have replaced.
Leading to an overall drop in competency across the entire UK and Western economies. With what was once the Public Sector and its ethos totally eviscerated by this paradigm along with the private sector.
Sweeping generalisations about IT and government are immature and grotesque
Not when they don’t work, are being proved not to work, and are a total waste of money, as confirmed by audit(s) it isn’t.
Take UC as an example. If memory serves, quite early on in its creation, the PAC (Or was it the NAO?) put the IT system for UC under a ‘red’ notice, essentially condemning the entire system.
The govt bypassed it at the time by essentially writing something like £140m off and relaunching the project – still using code they knew wasn’t functioning properly.
Even as late as about five years ago the NAO and some MPs (including the now dead faux-try frankenfield) panned the rollout and cost.
Where outsourcing could go wrong is if the choosen company is incompetent or bent, or when contracts are given to mates instead of best bidder.
best bidder…. A lovely notion, but of course, were all only too aware of how these ‘procedures’ and ‘processes’ work
It’s a bottomless pit when it’s the taxpayer footing the bill. When was the last time you heard of a company (of ANY description) actually paying a penalty clause for shoddy work or tardy delivery, or both?
Nope. Doesn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happens and they’re given more moolah to finish the job. A few nicker on political funding, or a freebie here & there, and you’re in like Flynn.
And failing that, the companies are allowed to go bust (carillon & Royal Liverpool hospital) and the taxpayer has to shell out even more to get the job completed, while the directors keep their bunce and laugh all the way to the (swiss) bank.
WOW. Informative and well-reasoned arguments btl. I’m loving it. It feels like the sort of place where details are investigated and where democratic socialists are fed, fashioned, shaped and made.
Thanks SW, thanks everybody BTL.