The NHS and its workers have saved countless lives since its creation by Nye Bevan in 1948, and continues to save lives to this day. But both the Tory and Labour party have been mistreating the NHS, and our current government seeks to integrate it private contracts, which can only bring inefficiency as we have seen by countless other formerly public services, and only serves to make the rich even richer. Sir Keir Starmer needs to take a lesson from Keir Hardie – a founder of the Labour Party – and remember which party he’s meant to be running.
The NHS, my imaginary twin
I just had my flu and Covid jabs. The process was free, painless and over in five minutes. The practice nurse dashed about her tiny room, cheerily rattling out her script about left arms, right arms, names of vaccines and what to do if… etc, etc.
“We get five minutes for each patient,” she said after I asked, and then she laughed. “I have had a break, though. Don’t worry!” She was three-quarters through her eight-hour shift, and there was another nurse in a nearby room working just as fast. Between them, they and the NHS were protecting nearly 200 people from potentially fatal illnesses every day.
The NHS means a lot to me. We were both born in the same year: 1948. I’m 77 and feeling my age, and despicably, so is my imaginary twin. The NHS is far from well.
Speaking of siblings, I was lucky. My mother gave birth to two children before me and neither survived. I don’t know why they died or whether they could have been saved, but I’m certain my parents couldn’t afford any medicine more expensive than Junior Aspirin. Maybe I owe my lifetime to Nye Bevan and the 1945 Labour government’s total commitment to a healthcare service that was free at point of use and paid for by fair taxation.
In recent times, my imaginary twin has suffered at the hands of its Tory foster parents and, in even more recent times, its Labour parents have been speaking to it in far from kind tones. The Health Foundation, a respected independent charity, reports that over the last ten years, investments in the public health grant has been cut by 26% per person . If you know any NHS workers, you will have seen the effects in their body language even if they don’t openly complain.
Anyone got Keir Hardie’s cap?
The Labour Party now intends to make its elderly offspring grow up and stand on its own two feet by “contracting out” more health services to private firms. Those who have elderly relatives in “contracted-out” social care homes know only too well how that will end: costlier care or worse care.
It’s simple maths. Private healthcare firms keep roughly around 20% of their income as profit (this varies depending on the sector: an estimated 10% leaks out of the care home industry as profit, and an average profit margin of 32% exists for the outsourcing NHS eye care. The NHS doesn’t keep any of its income as profit, nor does it pay any shareholders “dividends” (handouts just for taking an interest).
Let’s keep it simple. Imagine you are Sir Keir Starmer and you decide to spend £100 on healthcare. Under the NHS, you get the full £100-worth of care. Under “contracting-out”, you get £80-worth of care, and much of that missing £20 has gone into multinational health companies’ coffers or straight to millionaire shareholders’ offshore tax havens, not back into the UK economy.
And if you try to tell me private firms do a better job because they are more efficient, I will reply: trains, buses, water, electricity, and gas. All of them more efficient and going well, are they? Their shareholders have certainly got fatter.
The painless solution to achieving a better health deal for the people would be crystal-clear to the Prime Minister if he was wearing Keir Hardie’s cap as well as just his name. Sir Keir, don’t worry about those bond markets that you worship. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Instead, rake back a few billions from people made obscenely wealthy because of those 20% profit margins. It’s the Labour Party you run, remember? Tax the rich!
