Tag Archives: NHS

‘Judge us by our record’, says Tory MP. We did – and the verdict is not good!

Laura Trott: does she spend a lot of time with her foot in her mouth?

Conservative Pensions Minister Laura Trott made a bit of a blunder on the morning media round: she asked the public to judge the Conservative Party on its “track record” since 2010.

Here she is, saying it:

Peter Stefanovic took her at her word, and did just that. Here’s the result:

Social mobility is at its worst in more than 50 years.

Untreated sewage dumped in our rivers.

Crumbling schools and hospitals.

Thousands dying every year on NHS waiting lists.

Let’s add a little more to the list, from an article published earlier today (September 18, 2023):

14 million people in the UK are in poverty – that is a little more than one-fifth of the population.

A million adults can’t afford to eat every day.

Nine million, while eating every day, are skipping meals and cutting back on food. There is a consequent effect on the nation’s health that will impact the NHS, of course – with thousands of people being hospitalised with malnutrition. Then the Tories say they don’t understand why the health service can’t cope after they have put so much (ha ha!) extra funding into it.

A record 2.1 million people are now using food banks. Remember David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ policy? This is its only success – forcing more wealthy people to subsidise those who cannot afford to feed themselves, including lower-paid working people and nurses, let’s not forget, with charity.

The number of children in food poverty has doubled in the last year alone.

Seven million households aren’t being heated properly.

Rishi Sunak has also mentioned inequality, claiming – again, falsely – that this is also lower. In fact:

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5 per cent while those for the richest fifth saw a 7.8 per cent increase.

Could that be partly because Sunak has uncapped bankers’ bonuses while imposing real-terms pay cuts on public sector workers?

Sunak reckons 200,000 fewer pensioners are in poverty today – but the number of pensioners in relative poverty has actually increased by more than 200,000. In 2021/22, more than two million pensioners were living in poverty in the UK.

Sunak’s comment about 100,000 new homes needs no response because the House of Lords rightly rejected the arguments in favour of building on land likely to be flooded with water that had been polluted, not only by developers but also by greedy privatised water firms.

Sunak reckons he’s delivered 4,000 prison officers – so why are there fewer now than in 2010? Does it have something to do with the privatisation – and profitisation – of our prisons?

Put it all together and you’d have to be demented to deny the comments in the following ‘X’ post:

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Tory ‘less is more’ lies in action: NHS beds, diagnostic centres, jobs

At breaking point: the UK’s National Health Service.

Following on from This Site’s earlier article on how Suella Braverman has recruited fewer than half the police officers the UK needs, here’s some more Tory ‘less is more’ policy information – on NHS beds, diagnostic centres and jobs:

I repeat:

They cut the numbers of a government-funded resource (in this case, the NHS) far below what is needed to provide an adequate service. Then they increase the numbers – but not by enough. And then they hit us with an outrageous lie that the boost is enormous.

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120000 patients have died waiting for NHS treatment on Rishi Sunak’s watch

Where being a patient gets you: 120000 people have died before getting this far with the NHS that the Tories have starved of resources.

Freedom of Information responses have indicated that 121000 people have died while waiting for treatment by the National Health Service in England – despite UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s promise to get waiting lists down.

The number of deaths is higher even than at the height of the Covid-19 crisis – and double the number of deaths before the pandemic.

According to The Mirror, the Labour Party sent Freedom of Information requests to every trust in England. Although only 35 out of 138 trusts responded, it was possible to extrapolate an overall number of deaths from the figure they provided – 30611. It came in at 120695.

That is more than the 117000 who died during the Covid pandemic in 2021, more than twice the 60000 deaths in 2017-18, and more than three times the 38000 or so recorded in 2012-13.

This is at a time when England has the longest waiting lists in the history of the National Health Service, with 7.6 million people registered as waiting for treatment.

It is important to remember that when Rishi Sunak became prime minister, he promised to cut waiting lists – but there are 600000 more people waiting for treatment now than there were then.

We should also give weight to the words of a health service spokesperson, who suggested that the figure is misleading because the sample size is too small. But no accurate, verified figures have been forthcoming from that source

This in turn suggests that the true figure may in fact be much higher.

The Mirror article quotes Sir Julian Hartley, chief executive at NHS Providers, which represents hospital bosses, who blamed “historic underfunding … a pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, workforce shortages and now industrial action” for piling pressure on the health service.

The historic increases in waiting lists – and deaths while on those lists – have come after successive Conservative governments deprived the NHS of vital funding, gave much of what little there was to private providers who frittered it away in share dividends, and ran underpaid medical staff into the ground.

So we can understand the responses of the pundits on ITV on August 30, when Owen Jones said the evidence suggests a conscious decision by the Tories to prioritise profits for rich businesspeople over the health of the nation…

… and with Labour, under leader Keir Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, saying it will not end privatisation, it seems the agony will continue indefinitely.

Labour’s plan to cut waiting lists is to divert even more money to the private sector, to use their spare capacity. But this is just throwing good money after bad, for the reason described by Saul Staniforth, below:

Private health businesses work by taking medical staff away from the NHS, to work for the profit of corporate shareholders.

If any government – Tory, Labour or whatever – puts money into private firms to carry out treatment, then much of that cash won’t actually go towards making people healthier at all; it will simply boost already bloated shareholder bank accounts.

What’s the solution?

It isn’t hard to see.

For a start, privatisation of healthcare should be reversed, so money that currently enriches those shareholders can be put back where it belongs – making people healthier.

The defunding of the NHS must also be reversed, so that medical staff can be paid what they are worth, and are given a renewed sense of the value of their work. This Writer saw a meme today (September 1) pointing out that doctors and nurses are not 25 per cent less valuable than they were 15 years ago, so they should not have lost that much pay, in real terms.

Above all, UK politicians must accept that privatisation is a failed experiment that has killed thousands of people unnecessarily.

If that lesson doesn’t get through, and needs to be hammered home, then bereaved families now or in the future will always have recourse to one option:

They can put the evidence together, showing how political decisions led to the deaths of their relatives – and they can prosecute the politicians who pushed them through.

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Squirm, Barclay! Health sec skewered over delay in clearing legionella-hit prison barge

The denial machine: puppet Steve Barclay (front) doesn’t have a brain of his own and can only repeat the nonsense he’s been told by Tory HQ, with his boss Rishi Sunak behind him, pulling his strings.

The absolute state of this.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay squirms as the BBC’s Sally Nugent points out that the Home Office was informed on August 7 that the prison barge for asylum-seekers, Bibby Stockholm, was infected with legionella.

People were sent on board the following day. It wasn’t until August 10 that the decision was made to clear the vessel of human inhabitants and decontaminate it.

Don’t you love the nervous tic that gives Barclay away – his repetition of the word “precaution” or “precautionary”. It’s likely to have been part of a speech he’d been told to rehearse beforehand, and when he was pressed on the subject he had nothing else to say.

As Ms Nugent said, he’s the Health Secretary; he should know how dangerous legionella is and how important it is to act urgently if it is discovered.

Ms Nugent has also won praise after she “eviscerated” the Tory Health Secretary for lying about waiting lists:

Metro published the full exchange:

The politician replied: ‘What really matters is patients waiting for treatment. Commitment to getting waiting times down. We’re making big progress on the longest waits. In England we’ve virtually eliminated waits of over 18 months, whereas in Wales for example, there’s over 70,000 waiting more than 18 months.

‘In fact, many of your listeners will be surprised to learn that there’s four times as many patients waiting over a year for treatment in Wales compared to in England, and that’s despite Keir Starmer saying that Wales is the blueprint for what we would do in England.’

However, as the politician was finishing what he was saying, Sally interjected, stressing that the figures comparing waiting times in England and Wales required further context.

‘Can I just stop you there, because actually those… – can I please just stop you there for a moment, because the figures are actually collated in a different way, so that’s not particularly relevant. We also know that long waiting times are falling every month in Wales. They’ve actually more than halved in the last year,’ she stated.

However, the MP disagreed, adding: ‘No, people waiting more than 18 months in Wales is over 70,000 there. There’s over 30,000 waiting more than two years.’

Yet again, Sally pointed out the difference in the statistics’ relevance, telling the programme’s guest and their viewers: ‘They include more referrals in their statistics than England does, so they’re not really comparable figures, are they?’

The news provider also published reactions from the social media, with one person describing the interview as a “metaphorical evisceration” and another saying Ms Nugent “skewered him”.

But you wouldn’t know that from the propaganda clip put out by the Conservatives’ press office, that just regurgitates the lies and cuts out all of Ms Nugent’s contradictions – her only comment in the Tory clip is, “Yes”. Take a look if you can stomach it:

What a rotten liar.

And how sad that there are people who will swallow this pigswill gratefully.

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The rhyming guide to NHS privatisation (from the social media) [VIDEO]


This is terrific:

Of course, if you watch it and just click on to something else – even if you enjoy it, then you’re supporting the destruction of the NHS, the ruination of your health and everybody else’s and ultimately, the early ending of your life.

I’m just mentioning that in passing, to encourage you to share this, at the very least.

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Tory NHS fail: they want to scrap most cancer treatment targets

Steve Barclay: if there is a problem with cancer in the English NHS, he is the tumour that needs to be removed.

How will Rishi Sunak be able to complain about the Welsh NHS now?

And is this just a shabby bid to boost private cancer treatments?

The Tory government reckons it is being advised by clinicians and cancer charities to scrap six out of nine treatment targets – but two such charities have objected to the plan, just in the BBC’s article announcing it!

The head of the Radiotherapy UK charity said she is “deeply worried”.

Pat Price, who is also an oncologist and visiting professor at Imperial College London, said… “the clear and simple truth is that we are not investing enough in cancer treatment capacity”.

Naser Turabi, Cancer Research UK’s director of evidence and implementation, said… “Despite the best efforts of NHS staff, it’s incredibly worrying that cancer waiting times in England are once again amongst the worst on record.”

He blamed the missed targets on “years of underinvestment” by the government and called for more cancer staff and a clear strategy.

“Without bold action, more people will miss out on lifesaving services,” he said.

We have seen recently that restrictions on NHS services – such as those that are likely to be imposed if treatment targets are scrapped – tend to “nudge”* people into taking private treatment, even if they can’t afford it.

Personally, This Writer thinks Barclay is simply putting more patients between a rock and a hard place: what difference is there between waiting for help that may not arrive in time and putting up with a private ‘specialist’ dancing around you, waving his beads and rattles?

*Remember the Tory “nudge unit” that was attached to 10 Downing Street under David Cameron before it was privatised, and recommended ways of… shall we say “persuading”?… people to do things they would not consider in the normal scheme of things? Clearly, making it impossible for patients to get life-saving treatment in time is a way of “persuading” people to fork out extra cash for private treatment that they would not otherwise have considered and should not need.

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The news in tweets: Monday, July 17, 2023

Ruling-class privilege: there’s no ‘class ceiling’ for grotesqueries like Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer – they are laughing at you when they say they can’t do anything to help you. Remember: it is political choice that has dumped the UK in its current crisis.

Backlash against Starmer’s Substitute Tory Party grows as he insists he’ll do nothing for ordinary people

It’s a good question. Jeremy Corbyn promised to provide dentistry on the National Health Service but Keir Stürmer is promising to deny it to more people (although he hasn’t said it in as many words).

He’s also planning to inject much more privatisation into the NHS, probably to complete the transformation of the service into nothing more than a banner under which public money may be passed to private companies that perpetuate illness and refuse to provide cover where it is not profitable, making healthcare a postcode lottery:

More privatisation?

Read this:

There’s the problem with more privatisation in a nutshell. Once these private health bloodsuckers get a monopoly on the provision of care, they’ll push prices through the roof – knowing that you and I will have to pay for it, no matter what.

By supporting increased private involvement in healthcare, Starmer supports this plan to drain the public purse of its funds and effectively put you into debt to grotesquely rich corporate fatcats – forever.

He’s being nicknamed #SirKidStarver because he won’t end the two-child limit on child benefit and is therefore continuing to impose poverty on millions of children, nor will he provide free school meals for everybody who needs them.

Stürmer’s ‘Right-hand Liar’, Yvette Cooper, was pressed to justify the policy that will deliberately keep a quarter of a million children in poverty and 850,000 more in increased poverty, on the morning media round. Judge her failure by this clip:

Labour’s answer to criticism is apparently to say we should vote for the Substitute Tory Party because its members have ancestors who were working class:

It seems Stürmer and all his little stürmtroopers need a lesson on how a Labour Party governs a nation. Here’s one:

The consensus opinion is increasingly that Stürmer is lying:

Thankfully not everyone, even in the Parliamentary Labour Party, supports the wholesale betrayal of Labour Party values that Stürmer is preparing:

And outside the party, some of us are already agitating for direct action:

The article states that Stürmer is actively planning to fail the nation on many levels:

– Climate change
– Renewables
– Transport reform
– The economy
– Public sector pay
– The NHS
– Social care
– Education
– Law and order
– Housing
– Trade unions
– Reversing Tory policy
– Support for local government
– Electoral reform
– Europe
– Interest rates
– Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
– Defence
– Inequality
– Taxing the rich

It calls for us to make Stürmer as uncomfortable as possible, for as long as possible, on all those issues until the pressure on him to reform becomes unsurmountable and he is forced to change.

How to do this?

– Inform yourself
– Join groups
– Talk to people
– Write to MPs, councillors and anyone else
– Phone in to the radio (you are likely to get on)
– Consider peaceful protest
– Join a union if it is appropriate for you
– Write a blog
– Comment here
– Tweet, Thread, use Mastodon, create a YouTube, TikTok or Instagram post.

But just don’t suffer in silence. Starmer has to know he is failing, already. Only then might he change, or be forced to. Things are far too serious to accept the dire policy options as those Starmer is now proposing. We all have to demand better.

And in the short term there is only one option: anyone who understands how bad the situation is at the moment must vote for anybody but Labour or the Conservatives. Who the other party to support may be will only be apparent locally.

The best places to start are at Somerton and Frome, Selby and Ainsty, and Uxbridge and South Ruislip on Thursday (July 20, 2023).

Where is the evidence that the Tories are ‘transforming’ the economy?

It seems that the only evidence of any such action by the Conservatives is a plan to close down what Rishi Sunak calls “rip-off” degrees that don’t guarantee a job to graduates.

It seems a strange demand – that degree courses guarantee a job to the people taking them. By that standard, shouldn’t they all be shut down and a multi-billion pound education industry destroyed overnight?

You see, the point of most degrees isn’t to fit people into a job; it is to teach people how to think. That way, they can work out how to get, for themselves, the job that best suits them. This policy reveals Tory ideology: they don’t want people who can think – they just want livestock who can be slotted into jobs that will make money for their friends and funders:

But it’s hard to tell, because it seems the Tories are doing their utmost to hide what they are doing – probably because the only people they are helping are themselves.

Example:

How about the way government departments under the Tories have been blacklisting media organisations that publish information that is critical of them? Here’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace apologising for such treatment of Declassified UK:

What else do they not want us to know?

Perhaps the fact that yet another Tory MP has been arrested – for sexual impropriety and misconduct in public office?

Perhaps the fact that 2022 was the worst year for real wage growth in nearly half a century since the early 1970s, meaning their fairy story that increases in your wages are fuelling inflation is a lie?

Perhaps the fact that they spent more than one-and-a-half times as much money on duff Covid-related contracts through their illegal “VIP lane” as they have allocated to the building of new NHS hospitals?

People are being stopped from renting homes because they have children. Sign the petition to stop this

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If the NHS is to be transformed, it shouldn’t be into insurance-based trash

The standard technique of privatisation: we’ve had years of defunding (don’t let Steve Barclay’s lies convince you otherwise) and things aren’t working. Now the agitators are trying to make you angry, and you should be – at them.

It had to happen: the NHS turned 75 so the insurance scammers and privatisation propogators have leapt up to demand that it can’t last much longer and needs to change – words that ignore the fact that they wouldn’t be able to say this if 13 years of Tory de-funding and privatisation hadn’t already changed it for the worse.

And they haven’t been subtle about it, which is a good thing because it allows us to see comments like the following:

Let’s have a case study: Kate Andrews, currently of The Spectator but formerly of think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute and Republicans Overseas UK. You can see what these organisations want to do to the NHS here:

She was on the BBC’s Question Time last Thursday (July 6, 2023), because the BBC gives her a lot of hot air time. She’s also on Politics Live whenever she can manage it. You can see what she had to say in the clip below.

But it isn’t just her words that create trouble for the health service; it’s what she enables other people to say – like Bella Wallersteiner here. Phil Gould provides an opposing voice:

(And let’s remember that the model for the NHS is insurance-based: National Insurance.)

Let’s remember, Ms Andrews speak with forked tongue. The following is an imperfect comparison but it makes the point: in 2017 she was peddling what we now know to be snake oil – a claim that Brexit would make the UK richer. We all know, now, that this was patently untrue.

And now she is saying the NHS is not the wonderful creation that UK citizens mythologise it as being:

Maybe it’s not the envy of the world any more – but that is clearly due to the constant Tory tinkering to make it vulnerable to privatisation.

Go back to the Hector Wetherell McNeill tweet above:

There is an interesting summary table of an international comparative performance of health systems produced by the Commonwealth Fund from 2014, on page 44.

This clearly shows the UK’s nationalised NHS to be the world leader on the basis of most criteria.

The US private system comes out as being one of the worst and costing almost 1.45x that of UK.

It is clear that the UK system placed the US system along with the US med corporations and insurance companies in an embarrassing position so there was a need to undermine the UK system to have any chance for their marketing success.

The Conservative government clearly made this their mission by under-funding the service over the last 13 years so as to create the “case” for privatisation.

And then people like Ms Andrews turn up to put that “case” to the public.

Bearing all the above in mind, one is led to agree with Dale Vince, who was also on that edition of Question Time:

(If only it were true that social media gives a voice to everybody. It used to – but then the firms running the main platforms introduced aggressive algorithms to push posts by anybody who could not afford their advertising rates down people’s newsfeeds so they couldn’t be seen. If you’re wondering where Vox Political has been until you saw this article, it hasn’t gone anywhere – you were just denied the chance to read it.)

Rishi Sunak wants you to believe that he has a plan to restore the NHS – but just listen to the analysis of Sunak’s work (and that of the Tory governments since 2010) by Sir Michael Marmot, who has led research groups on health inequalities for nearly 50 years:

Experience tells us that Sir Michael is probably right. After all, this is a Tory government that (we’re told) issued tens of billions of pounds worth of Covid-19-related health contracts to their personal friends who were incapable of honouring those contracts – and then claimed the cost was part of the NHS annual budget.

So tens of billions of pounds was paid out to Tory friends and donors – and absolutely nothing was gained as a result:

The contracts were issued via the so-called “VIP lane” that was later declared illegal:

Why hasn’t all this money been recovered and put to better use?

Carol Vorderman says she could go on, and so could This Writer.

With the record of Sunak’s government laid bare for all to see, it is clear that “sharks” like Kate Andrews are not presenting their case fairly and therefore they should be ignored.

The NHS is not failing because its founding principles don’t work; it is failing because the Tories are deliberately forcing it to fail.

Oh, and they don’t care if your relatives have suffered needlessly or died as a result of their ideologically-motivated selfishness.

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The news in tweets: Friday, July 7, 2023

Is this Keir Starmer’s fastest u-turn yet?

Starmer’s relaxed attitude to keeping promises has been exposed so many times that even mainstream news shows are catching on:

Tory claim about consistent investment in the NHS is a myth

Is Tony Blair’s idea for people to ‘queue jump’ NHS waiting lists by going private merely giving rich people faster access to public services?

Is that a good point?

I think it is – as those providing private health services are very often also working for the NHS.

Getting people to pay for their services encourages them to spend more time on their private practices than on NHS work, thereby disadvantaging the poor. Right?

The UK is NOT ‘running out of money’, no matter what is said on Sky News

Malcolm Reavell is more or less right. The UK government does borrow money from the Bank of England, but as the Bank is wholly owned by the UK government, it is literally borrowing from itself.

This act, in fact, creates money – meaning the UK cannot run out of it. The trouble is that the act of putting more money into the economy is inflationary (or can be). The answer to that, of course, is to set taxation at a level that negates the inflation caused by pumping in the money.

The logical way to balance this taxation would be by weighting it strongly towards the richest people in society; they benefit the most from the UK economy as it currently works. Also, for the economy to work at all, more of the money being pumped in needs to go into the hands of the people with the least, who will have to spend it on goods and services, simply to make ends meet.

That money then travels further – thereby adding more value to the economy – than if it was given to the rich in the first place.

Here’s why teachers are right to demand more pay – and why the ‘inflation’ argument against them is wrong

How would Labour stop profiteering banks? By having a quiet word with them. Will that work?

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The big debates: Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Labour in denial as Starmer and his allies purge the left

Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has accused current Labour leader Keir Starmer and his allies of purging left-wingers from the party.

It’s a claim that is hotly denied by Starmer’s cronies – Jonathan Ashworth on Politics Live once again raised the hoary old banner of anti-Semitism and claimed this was what Starmer was fighting.

But is that really all Starmer is doing? And is it on the level?

Here’s the debate:

And here are some of the other attacks on Labour members Starmer’s mob have been carrying out:

Will the NHS reach its centenary – and how can that happen?

The 75th anniversary of the NHS was marked with not one but two debates on the BBC’s Politics Live – the first on how it can survive in a changing United Kingdom.

Should government prioritise prevention, improving the nation’s health generally, as championed by Lord Bethell? Should it adopt a European-style health insurance model, according to Melanie Phillips? Should it increase the pay, and widen the membership, of its workforce, as Baroness Kennedy claims? Or should social care be expanded to remove some of the pressure, in line with Ella Whelan’s beliefs?

Should private health firms be allowed to do more NHS work?

The second of the two Politics Live debates on the NHS’s 75th anniversary focused on claims that radical change is needed to safeguard its future.

Some of those claims attack the fundamental principle that the health service should be free at the point of use, with Tony Blair saying some NHS patients should go private and pay for procedures if they’re waiting too long.

But wouldn’t this put the UK on a slippery slope towards a privatised – and highly expensive – health service?

SNP’s Mhairi Black shows that Tory and Labour both want more NHS privatisation

On the 75th anniversary of the UK’s National Health Service, SNP deputy leader Mhairi Black demonstrated that it is in danger from both the Conservative and Labour parties.

Reading out two quotations from politicians calling for more privatisation, she asked – well, watch the clip and you’ll see.

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