The Starmer-Streeting NHS ‘plan’ is a direct extension of the Tory assault on the NHS
The ‘ten-year plan’ for the NHS announced today by Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting is a continuation and indeed escalation of the Tories’ fourteen-year scam to disguise their assault on the NHS – and entirely in line with the ‘Integrated Care Systems’ (ICS) push to ration care and close hospitals that the Tories began, but which Streeting has already said he supports and wants to perpetuate. Even a cursory examination of the buzz-phrases they have used for today’s scam makes this more than clear.
Streeting and his boss have already made clear that their ‘new’ NHS prioritises profit and economic exploitation above the needs and interests of British people. Their plan to force the unemployed and sick to take a dangerous slimming drug and their choice of Eli Lilly – a firm with lawsuits, mis-selling and cover-ups littering its wake – as the beneficiary of the billions this plan would generate in profits showed that quite clearly.
So too did ‘Labour’s decision to keep poor children in poverty when it would be cheaper to end the two-child benefit cap that keeps them poor and hungry than to keep it – and their decision to cut the Winter Fuel Allowance even though they know the cut will kill thousands of pensioners every year.
The Darzi report on which the Starmer-Streeting ‘plan’ is based, as an excellent analysis by former independent MP Claudia Webbe recently showed, prioritises profit – framed as ‘cost-effectiveness’ and ‘finances’ – above care, foresees the closure of more hospitals to push what remains of care out away from them, and prescribes a continuation of the policies that created the NHS crisis as the solution to them. As Webbe wrote, the Darzi report looks insane – but only if you believe that the government’s intention is actually to make the NHS better for patients instead of corporations:
It seems clear that the new Labour government intends to start where the Tories left off and bleed even more services out of hospitals. The old adage about insanity involving doing the same thing and expecting different results would apply, but only if we assume that the intent is actually to make things better rather than to enhance profitability.
Claudia Webbe
Darzi’s report furnishes Starmer’s government with the excuses it needs in order to do this, and this bodes extremely ill for those who rely on the services of the classic NHS that was rightly considered one of the world’s best and most efficient healthcare services.
An examination of the reality behind Starmer’s three ‘Big Shifts’ makes this even clearer:
From hospital to community services no hospital
Based on all the available evidence and what the Labour government has done in its first three months, Starmer’s and Streeting’s buzz-phrases about pushing care ‘closer to home’ are nothing more than cover for Darzi’s ‘provide less for more profit’ plan to close as many hospitals as possible and break up what is left into fragments that can be run for profit by corporate providers.
From analogue face-to-face care to digital computer says no
Similarly, the ‘analogue’ that Starmer and his ‘health’ secretary say they want to get rid of is face-to-face, confidential care. The ‘digital’ they want to replace it with means online advice at best and a string of ‘wearables’ that will put the onus on patients to prevent themselves getting ill – and provide a continuous stream of health information in real time to companies whose track record generates serious concern about what they will do with it, like Israel-linked spy-tech firm Palantir, which was awarded a huge NHS patient data contract last November despite its support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Patient groups have also raised serious concerns that corporate access to patient data will ultimately mean government and insurance firms snooping on patients’ health and lifestyles and using the data either to deny treatment or cover, or to hike costs, especially if – as has been predicted – US-style ‘co-pay’ is introduced as a bridge to abolishing the NHS’s fundamental principle of universal treatment free at the point of need. This feeds directly into the next item on Starmer’s list.
From treating sickness you when you’re ill to preventing it blaming you when you’re not
In his attempts to defend his dangerous ‘jabs for jobs’ and ‘jabs for the NHS’ plan, Streeting admitted that his aim was to keep people away from NHS treatment or, as he put it, to ‘reduce the burden on the NHS’. This can only mean coercion, or at the very least pressure on patients to submit to supposed ‘preventatives’ or else be denied treatment and access to trained doctors.
This ties in with the massively dangerous push, started by the Tories and fully supported by Labour, who helped the Tories get it through Parliament even though they are fully aware it is highly dangerous for patients, to replace fully-trained doctors with ‘associates’ that have a fraction of the training at a fraction of the cost – and this is being done with minimal transparency and oversight, and with no set national standard for how NHS trusts, themselves a product of the fragmentation in which the ICS programme is set, on when, how and to what extent they use these pseudo-doctors. Patients have already died after being wrongly treated by people they thought were doctors but were not.
Tied in with the use of ‘wearables’ and other tech to monitor whether people are doing ‘enough’ to stay healthy, this poses a clear and present danger of patients being forced, before they can get to a hospital doctor, to get past multiple barriers designed to prevent them getting anywhere near a hospital – and to keep corporate profits high.
And all this will be badged as a ‘reformed’ NHS when it is in fact a corporate, profit-driven reality masquerading behind an NHS ‘brand’, as has been seen from the Blair government, through the past fourteen years of Tory predation, to the ‘new’ red-Tory ‘reform or die’ posture. This has led to widespread use of the NHS logo as mere branding or some kind of misleading ‘kite mark’ while providers cut services and strip out profits.
And the idea, already delusional, that Starmer’s Labour would be any different is shredded by the government’s award of a huge £1.3bn ‘NHS’ contract, under ICS, to a profit-making company owned by private equity investors – when an NHS conglomerate had made a bid that would have meant every penny going toward patient care and none taken in profits.
The Starmer-Streeting ‘ten-year plan’ is in fact a scam to disguise Labour’s slash-and-burn plan to close hospitals, accelerate the privatisation of services and ration and deny treatment while coercing patients to accept blame, treat themselves, surrender their data and go along with every ill-thought government scheme designed to enrich corporations no matter how poor and dishonest their record and how dark their other activities and links.
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I just tried to share this and Zuckerberg told me “It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.” Grrrrr…..
“The original press release from the Department of Health and Social Care made clear that the money would be coming from Lilly, not the government. It stated: “The UK’s world-leading life sciences sector will receive a £279 million boost to tackle significant health challenges, with an intent expressed by Lilly, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, to invest in the UK as part of a collaborative partnership with UK government.”
The Department of Health and Social Care also confirmed to Full Fact that the £279 million will be funded “entirely by Lilly”.
A spokesperson confirmed: “No taxpayer money will be given to the company as part of the announced collaboration.”
https://fullfact.org/health/nhs-weight-loss-injection-trial-lilly/
Off topic (for now, I’ll come back to this later)
But it should come as NO surprise, that once AGAIN a plod walks after shooting dead an unarmed (black) man.
And on top of all that we have the reintroduction of the failed and costly PFI concept…
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10/as-uks-nhs-drowns-in-pfi-debt-private-healthcare-providers-offer-to-lend-a-helping-hand-sarc.html
….”Streeting has received £175,000 from donors linked to private health firms. Collectively, the Labour government’s cabinet ministers have raked in more than £500,000 in donations from firms with links to the sector, including lobbies representing some of the largest private healthcare corporations in the US. This sort of information often gets overlooked in mainstream media articles about the Labour government’s plans for the NHS.
Given who their backers include, it should hardly come as a surprise that Streeting and his cabinet colleagues are reportedly “very interested” in the private sector’s proposals. Streeting has repeatedly pledged to outdo Tony Blair, his mentor and idol, in deploying the private sector in the provision of NHS care. “If you want to understand my appetite for reform, think New Labour on steroids,” he said in a speech in May. And he seems to be keeping to his word.
Labour just sold £1.3bn of NHS services to private equity.
Pay-off for political donations.
Private equity =profiteering, asset stripping, low investment, staff exploitation, poor care.
30%-40% money vanishes in profits – people get less for more moneyhttps://t.co/TzPGgXfU40
— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) October 17, 2024″
As the article further notes:
“In 2018, PFI was finally scrapped after the collapse of one of its biggest beneficiaries, the construction and facilities management services firm Carillion. In total, some 700 PFI contracts with a capital value of £57bn were signed between the mid-90s and 2018, mainly by Labour governments. Around £140 bn has been paid for their use and maintenance and another £160bn is still owed, according to the Kings Trust, a public health think tank….
….PFI is being resuscitated — this time in the form of the £7.3 billion National Wealth Fund which aims to finance big infrastructure projects like ports (Special Economic Zones?), gigafactories, green hydrogen and carbon capture by generating £3 of private sector investment for every £1 it invests while providing government guarantees of returns to investors. As Lord Prem Sikka, a Labour peer, explained in a recent speech to the House of Lords, the resemblance to PFI is uncanny:
Govt revives the disastrous Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
PFI ran 1992-2018. Govts got £60bn private investment, repayment £306bn.
Now £1 of public investment to be matched by £3 of private, will repay £15-£18, guaranteeing corporate profits
There are sensible alternatives pic.twitter.com/gq1qjRyKdc
— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) July 28, 2024”
The Country, like the entire Collective Worst, is being run by gangsters.
“Serious Fraud Office probe £112m Unite union hotel
The Serious Fraud Office is investigating the construction of a hotel and conference centre owned by one of the UK’s biggest trade unions, the BBC can reveal.
Unite the Union spent a total of £112m of its members’ money on the project in Birmingham.
The building has since been valued at just £29m, suggesting £83m has been wasted.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5z54236wgo
And yet, whilst it is possible to find information of the SFO investigating this particular gap of £83 MILLION, information on the SFO investigating the difference between PFI contracts worth £57 BILLION and the £300 BILLION (£140 BILLION already paid out + £160 BILLION still ‘owing’) – along with the link to the amounts received by politicians making these decisions from the beneficiaries, via their lobbyists, of this public largess – is proving somewhat difficult to locate.
To use the Biblical parable, focusing attention on the mote whilst ignoring the far larger beam reveals a great deal about those who indulge in such obvious distractions.
“The building has since been valued at just £29m, suggesting £83m has been wasted.”
Not at all SteveH. Simply remove right-wing Labour control of Birmingham CC and the entire West Midlands will instantly flourish and prosper. Property prices will recover and Len’s spend will (B’s near-insolvency aside, my municipal area needs to remove its largish Labour presence more than BCC. Right wing retards should not be tolerated on Labour councils anymore, esp not Leeds where they’ve been digging up roads since the start of the Lockdowns and double yellowing everything they can. They remind me of the wretched warmonger who serves as KC3’s puppet-in-chief, Skeir Rodney, future Lord of the White Phosphorous.
Precisely, qwertboi.
Nobody is buying such very obvious and desperately pathetic attempts at slapping a dead cat on the table to distract attention from the real issue.
What on earth has a fraud investigation into a union’s affairs over the alleged mis-spending of funds in the construction of a building got to do with the long-term economic consequences for the nation of PFI and the stupidity of its likely reincarnation under this government with fools like Streeting and his ‘boss’ Milburn in charge?
It was Milburn who enthusiastically took up where Major’s government had left off and went full-bore into PFI and the consequences we (in this country NOT the Caribbean) now have to contend with, together with the very strong likelihood of more to come.
And this is your response? Just because there’s a connection to buildings is utterly irrelevant, and quite pathetic.
Dead cat indeed.