Howl for the NHS

I saw the best minds of my generation howling in protest for the NHS, though fortunately they had not been destroyed by madness but were just howling mad at our governments plans to dismantle and privatise our National Health Service. The privateer’s latest ploy is the ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plans‘ (STPs) which were due to be signed off that day in all 44 areas of the country.

According to some of the placards, STP stands for ‘Slash Trash and Plunder‘ and many see it as a continuation of plans to move our NHS away from the public sector and into the hands of healthcare companies.

In 2005 Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was one of the authors of a Conservative Party policy pamphlet that called for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance market system delivered by the private sector and in 2014 was one of 70 Conservative and Lib-Dem MPs listed by the Daily Mirror as having links with healthcare companies.

Many of those at the protest were health workers, and others were those who rely heavily on its service; all support the three basic priciples laid down by Aneurin Bevan back in 1948:

  • that it meet the needs of everyone
  • that it be free at the point of delivery
  • that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay

Nye Bevan was very much in evidence at the protest, his face on posters and t-shirts with his message “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.” Though he expressed similar feelings, apparently Bevan never actually said this, but it was said by his character in a TV play.

But one thing he did say:

“The eyes of the world are turning to Great Britain. We now have the moral leadership of the world, and before many years are over we shall have people coming here as to a modern Mecca, learning from us in the twentieth century as they learned from us in the seventeenth century.”

Instead what we see is Tory politicians and theorists going to the USA and getting ideas from a medical system that is at least three times as expensive and totally fails to provide for the need of the large numbers of the less wealthy to bring back here and destroy a system that still in many respects is the envy of the world. It makes sense only to those crazy for greed.

More about Howls of protest for death of the NHS on My London Diary.


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