The UK’s National Health Service is 75 years old today (July 5, 2023) – and the anniversary is being used by profiteers to demand that it be hollowed-out and turned into a vehicle for the sickness industry.

Today’s attack came from former New Labour prime minister Tony Blair. According to The Guardian,

Blair backs the private sector playing an expanded role, including in the provision of high-volume, low-complexity services, such as dermatology.

More people will resort to private healthcare unless the NHS banishes long treatment delays, Blair predicts.

In fairness, the piece quotes Dr John Puntis, the co-chair of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, who made it clear:

The Blair years demonstrated that with increased investment, NHS performance and patient satisfaction improved. On the other hand, use of the private sector undermined NHS services, and independent sector treatment centres pushed up costs

So the answer is more investment in NHS treatment and less in the private sector, according to expert opinion.

Sadly, current Labour leader Keir Starmer seems to agree with Blair – he wants to put more investment into private healthcare in a betrayal of his own mother, it seems. You can read his Mirror article here, if you really think it will illuminate you. He doesn’t say anything at all about what Labour would do to restore the health service.

But we do know what he would do, because he has let it slip in a TV interview. Blair’s words are an echo of Starmer’s new New Labour policy:

The bright idea is that the politicians – Tory and Labour – defund the NHS so it becomes unable to tackle the ever-increasing waiting list of patients that health-reducing political policies are creating (sewage dumping, anybody?) – and this pushes people towards the private, profit-making sickness industry.

The private companies set their prices for particular treatments low, so patients are surprised at not being asked to pay the fortune they expected. They tell their friends, who also go private, until we reach the point at which the government (Labour or Tory, it doesn’t matter which) can say private treatment is the answer and shut down the NHS altogether.

Then healthcare prices skyrocket.

What would Starmer get out of it?

Well, I don’t know.

I do know he’s getting something from private health right now:

Wow: £12,500. That’s more than some people earn every year.

Ironically, this appeared on my Twitter feed at the same time as the Starmer clip:

How sad that This Writer has to link a tweet about MPs pretending to care about the NHS with the current and former leaders of the political party that brought it into being. What a betrayal of the people of the UK!

Thankfully, there are still some in the Labour Party who support the principles on which the NHS was founded. Sadly, Richard Burgon is being kept far from any position of power by Starmer and his cronies. This may be the reason:

Starmer isn’t the only one with a story about how the NHS changed his life. But members of the commenting public are tying theirs to the decline in investment over the last 13 years of Tory and Tory-led rule:

And then there’s the issue of wasted money – raised by this caller to Nicky Campbell’s Radio 5 Live show:

Former Countdown numbers expert – the respectable one – Carol Vorderman has also spoken out about government decisions to give money that should have helped the NHS to their know-nothing friends (via an illegal ‘fast track’ funding lane):

I notice also a clip from an organisation called European Movement UK, reminding us all that we were told Brexit would make £350 million per week available that could be put into the NHS:

Where is that money?

The answer is obvious: it was fictional.

As is the story of private health businesses being of any benefit at all to the National Health Service.

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