LONDON (Labour Buzz) - Two days to save our NHS. That was the email I received this morning from the Labour Future and hyperbole aside that’s what’s at stake in this election.

The picture of four-year-old Jack Williment Barr lying on a coat on the floor in A&E is more than just a by-product of Conservative mismanagement. It’s the result of a concerted campaign which is reaching its end game with this election. Despite all the denials, the Tories want to destroy the NHS and they are happy to cause as much pain and suffering as they need to get their way.

The big sell off

Of course, they wouldn’t want you to think that. They know how well the NHS has worked and how much people love it, which was why Matt Hancock was putting on his well-practiced ‘caring face’ when confronted with the image that he helped to make happen.

Boris Johnson struggled a little more. He doesn’t do empathy or even recognise its existence, so when a reporter showed him the image he panicked, blustered and grabbed the phone and stuck him in his pocket.

The line that the NHS is safe under the Tories is well practiced. Unfortunately, the facts tell a different story. From the moment they entered office, the Tories have been bankrolled by private healthcare companies looking for a slice of NHS pie; they’ve promoted ministers who have argued for the privatisation of the NHS and taken donations from people who want to destroy it.

Secret negotiations

Now, thanks to leaked documents unveiled by Jeremy Corbyn, we know that if they win a majority, they will happily sell it off to Donald Trump and his friends.

The evidence is damning. As the transcripts show, the US wants action against food standards, worker rights and data privacy. It shows them sizing up public services and, as much as both sides try to deny, it this definitely includes the NHS.

They are helped by a press which has all the perception and reliability of VAR (Video assistant referee found in football). Despite clear evidence within the leaked documents that the NHS is at stake in a US trade deal, many such as Robert Peston, Laura Kuensberg and Andrew Neil couldn’t find anything incriminating... If they had to worked really hard, they may have done better, because the signs of the pending NHS privatisation are there throughout the document.

They are there implicitly such as this line from one UK official saying they “wouldn’t want to discuss particular healthcare entities at this time, you’ll be aware of certain statements saying we need to protect our needs; this would be something to discuss further down the line...”

In other words, ‘we can’t talk about the NHS right now, we’ll save the carve up for later.’

It’s there when they talk about every aspect of trade being on the table. “[This] approach makes total market access the baseline assumption of the trade negotiations and requires countries to identify exclusions, not the other way around.”

It’s also there explicitly when it talks about drug prices:

“The US said there is a lot of conversation on drug prices and looking at what other countries pay and this is causing angst,” says the document. “There are worries that the US is not getting a good deal in pharmaceutical industries.”

And it’s definitely there when the UK promises to be a ‘liberalising influence’, another nod and a wink; a promise to do business further down the line once the election has been won and the press are looking the other way.

Even without the UK actively agreeing to the privatisation, the leaked documents show the weak hand they are dealing with and the tough stance US negotiators are taking. Access to public services is a fundamental one of their key goals. Without it, there is unlikely to be any trade deal of any kind.

The UK has put itself into an incredibly weak position. Having walked away from the EU, it is out on its own desperately begging for scraps from the world’s biggest economic superpower.

Johnson has made getting a trade deal with the US vital to his post Brexit strategy. By hook or by crook he has to secure a deal and if that means selling off the NHS, so be it.

The charge towards privatisation

Rather than think about what the Tories say we should look at what they do. In October, they voted against a Labour motion protecting the NHS from any trade deal with the US.

Of course, there is nothing new in this. The Conservatives have been trying to destroy the NHS ever since it was first brought into being. It’s a war in which government ministers have been key players.

Dominic Raab was one of five authors of a pamphlet arguing for more NHS privatisation. Michael Gove has said he wants to privatise the NHS, Boris Johnson has written that people should be charged for using it and Iain Duncan Smith favours an insurance based system.

Matt Hancock has received donations from the Chair of a think tank who wants the NHS abolished. Since his election he’s received a steady trickle of donations from Neil Record, chair of the Institute for Economic affairs which wants to destroy the NHS.

Under their watch, privatisation is already happening. £15bn of NHS services have been privatised in the past five years. Contracts awarded to private firms almost doubled from £1.6bn to £3.6bn last year according to research carried out on behalf of the GMB Union.

The most contracts were awarded to private healthcare provider CareUK which has refocused its entire business model on the rich pickings on offer from the government’s big healthcare sell off.

It’s why the firm’s former CEO John Nash used his wife to donate £21,000 to David Cameron’s campaign in 2010. These firms look at the NHS as their own magic money tree and they see the Conservative as their path to make as much money as they can. As sure as night follows day, it was revealed in 2014 that CareUK and other companies with links to Tory party donors had been handed NHS contracts worth £1.5bn.

The cancer of privatisation

The British Government has worked hard to give private companies a greater day over our public services. The 2012 Health and Social Care act gives private companies the power to sue the government if they are denied the chance to tender for profitable contracts. Richard Branson did just that when he threatened to sue the NHS after it lost out on an £82million contract to provide children’s services.

Time and time again these privatisations follow a familiar narrative. Take the example of the NHS blood supplier. Back in 1975 David Owen, as health secretary, took blood plasma collection into public ownership, but Jeremy Hunt decided to sell it off to an American private equity firm with a reputation for asset stripping.

Bain Capital, which was co-founded by former Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, promised to develop the company as a life sciences champion. The Government retained a 20% stake in the company but, in 2016 Bain sold it off for a healthy profit to a Chinese company. The government lost control of its own blood plasma supply with barely a whimper of protest.

Designed to fail

This is the template for privatisation: make promises, assure the public and then, by the time the scam is revealed, claim it’s too late. It’s privatisation by stealth.

The approach is too fold. First, they under fund the organisation. From the moment the Conservatives grabbed the keys to Number 10, they have been cutting back on the NHS. They have slashed the income of mental health trusts. They’ve left it with a £22bn funding black hole; they’ve cut back on nurses bursaries and watched on as professionals leave in their droves.

Next, they look at the disaster they’ve produced and call it a failure of the state. What we need is the private sector to rescue us. The NHS is branded inefficient and outdated; they make bold promises for the future, and pipe corporate spun lines and untruths into the receptive ears of a compliant media.

We already have the template for how this works with the NHS. Back then they promised rail travel would be better, cheaper and less of a drain on the public purse. Instead ticket prices rose, government subsidies, and the UK’s rail passengers are among the least satisfied in Europe. By its own measures it’s been an abject failure.

The human cost

The strategy is as insidious as it’s effect on people like Jack Williment Barr and his family as well as the thousands of people thought to have died as a result of austerity decisions taken by the NHS. Far from being an unfortunate consequence of privatisations, they are the intended result of government policy.

The Conservatives are setting up the NHS to fail. They were warned in advance but made cuts anyway. Every patient given poor service, every accident and every death are the unintended outcome of this draconian government policy. It is the political killing of the NHS, with one goal in mind: to justify a fully privatised health service, pumping profits into the pockets of their largest donors. Perhaps we will see former ministers taking up positions in major health insurance companies in the future; a reward for their “service”.

The nightmare future

To see the direction they want to take us, we only have to look at the USA. It’s a world in which a quarter of cancer patients cannot afford the treatments which could save their lives; or where even some Americans with insurance can’t afford healthcare.

If you get sick and can’t provide the drug companies with the profits they demand, the system simply hopes you’ll have the decency to die quietly with minimal complaint. That’s what the Tories want because the people who will suffer are not the kind of people they care about. They are the ‘chavs, and the losers’, as Boris Johnson likes to call them; the single mothers with their hordes of illegitimate children.

The NHS is our most precious institution. It means that everyone, no matter what their background, gets access to world class healthcare. It’s a triumph of socialism and shows how the state can make the lives of ordinary people better. No wonder the Tories hate it so much.

(Written by Tom Cropper, edited by Michael O'Sullivan)

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