Last week, Michael Gove denied Jeremy Corbyn’s claims that the public don’t trust the Tories with Britain’s public health service. “The NHS has been kept safe and well funded for most of its life by Conservative Governments,” he said, while Corbyn had been undermining the “wealth creators” who funded public services. “So please stow it.” But what if we don’t ‘stow it?’ In recent years, Conservative governments have overseen a massive increase in NHS privatisation, with billions of pounds of contracts handed out to private providers. Meanwhile, waiting times in NHS hospitals are now at their worst level since records began – earlier this year numbers showed tens of thousands of patients waited more than four hours for a bed. That’s quite a distance from the party’s pledge that the NHS would be “safe in our hands.” This shouldn’t be a surprise – Tory resentment for the NHS has been there from the beginning. When Labour minister (and Tribune editor) Aneurin Bevan founded the NHS in the 1940s, Winston Churchill condemned him as a “squalid nuisance.” Churchill’s Conservative Party voted against the NHS’ creation twenty-two times, including at Second and Third Reading, alleging that the legislation “undermines the freedom and independence of the medical profession to the detriment of the nation.” The Tories will argue that they supported a national health service, just not Labour’s NHS. But their objections to Bevan’s bill were telling. The Conservative Party preferred a health service that wasn’t centralised, in which doctors, nurses and staff weren’t employed, which continued to rely on charity-run hospitals and in which free provision was scarce. In other words, they opposed all those parts of the NHS that made it so popular. To this day, the Tories resent the NHS. They don’t like that it is big, efficient and popular: it undermines their arguments that market methods are preferable to public service. They have tended to both underfund the NHS and to try break up state provision by handing as much of the NHS as possible to private firms. And if this wasn’t bad enough – top Tories have repeatedly tried to profit from privatisation of NHS services.

Early Opposition For thirty years after the foundation of the NHS in 1948, its popularity largely protected it from Tory reform attempts. But that consensus was broken by Margaret Thatcher’s free market politics. In 1982 Thatcher presented her Cabinet with a plan from her internal government think tank, the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS). The CPRS plan would dismantle the welfare state, scrapping free universal healthcare, forcing people to take out private insurance and charging for education. The CPRS report said “for the majority the change would represent the abolition of the NHS.” Thatcher’s Cabinet rebelled and rejected the idea. Thatcher claimed she too objected to the CPRS plan – after it was leaked. But, in fact, she encouraged her ministers to keep considering ending the NHS. In 1982 Thatcher pressed her Chancellor to look at the Omega Report, drawn up by the Adam Smith Institute, arguing for charging for NHS services and replacing them with insurance schemes. Geoffrey Howe resisted, but Thatcher revived the plan in 1987. Health Secretary John Moore might be forgotten now – but he was once widely seen as Thatcher’s favoured successor. Moore launched plans to replace the NHS with insurance schemes, but was met with a protest movement. In early 1988 the Tories faced a scrappy, grassroots-driven nurses strike over pay. It shook the government – ‘Thatcher Frightened of Meeting the Nurses’ ran one Times headline. Fighting the strikes while trying to increase NHS privatisation and cut NHS spending was politically impossible, and John Moore’s star soon faded. Unable to launch a full-frontal assault on the NHS, Thatcher and her successors ‘salami-sliced’ public healthcare. And here, the plan to enrich their friends as part of NHS privatisation came into play.

Making a Killing Tory Lord Ashcroft is one of the party’s biggest donors to this day. He’s given millions over the years, including £600,000 since 2017, and even owns Tory website ConservativeHome. Back in the 1980s Ashcroft’s main business was heavily involved in contract cleaning. Behind the scenes, he lobbied for privatisation of cleaning NHS hospitals and schools. Ashcroft gave around £500,000 to a group called PULSE (the Public and Local Service Efficiency campaign), set up in 1985 to promote the privatisation of cleaning services. The campaign’s advisory council involved a handful of right-wing Tory MPs, including Gerald Howarth, Neil Hamilton and Michael Portillo. Thatcher’s government were happily persuaded and began the privatisation. Peter Clarke, the man who ran the PULSE campaign told the Scotsman newspaper that “nothing unlawful nor improper took place,” but that the venture “was very successful political engineering.” Ashcroft’s companies “prospered in the new market created by PULSE’s lobbying,” he said, “PULSE appeared to be a popular campaign but in truth it was a money-making venture for Mr Ashcroft.” After privatisation the number of hospital cleaners dropped massively. Their wages and conditions were cut. Ashcroft also landed a big chunk of NHS catering services – before cashing in, selling most of his firms and becoming a billionaire financier. He does keep a small stake, however: one of Aschroft’s companies, Impellam, runs temp agencies, including those supplying nurses and locum doctors to the NHS, profiting from shortages of health staff and the NHS reliance on private agencies.

Major Problems After the salami-slicing of cleaning and catering services, Thatcher’s successor John Major continued the drive to privatise under the cover of his grey dullness. He introduced two key measures: first, the ‘internal market’ of 1990, which introduced a for-profit structure to the NHS. The reform itself has proven inefficient and wasteful, but has allowed private sector suppliers to be easily slotted in through tendering processes. Major also launched the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), where the NHS sold its hospitals and used the money to rent back new privately-run hospital buildings. PFI, which was also a favourite of New Labour under Tony Blair, wasted billion of NHS money on high charges, and handed yet more NHS cleaning, catering and maintenance staff to private firms like Carillion. But there remained significant differences between even the most right-wing Labour governments and the Tories when it came to the NHS. Then as now, Tory governments led to longer waiting lists, staff shortages and shabby buildings. New Labour governments after 1997 repaired some of that damage by boosting NHS spending and recruiting more staff. After New Labour was replaced by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, the drive to break apart the NHS as a public, universal and free service continued. The 2012 Lansley reforms fragmented the NHS, deepened the internal market and made handing out private contracts even easier. The result: privatisation has more than doubled since 2010.

Healthcare Profiteering The pattern of senior Tories profiting from NHS privatisation has continued throughout the last decade, too. Winchester MP Steve Brine was a Tory Health Minister from June 2017 to March 2019. In September he took an extra job, on top of his MP work, as a strategic partner for Remedium, a private agency supplying overseas doctors to NHS trusts struggling with staff shortages. Brine will get £19,200 per year for 16 hours work each month – or £100 per hour. Remedium says it offers a better deal for the NHS because it supplies permanent staff from overseas, which would be cheaper than paying hourly rates to locum doctors. This may well be true, but a better supply and retention of UK NHS doctors would be cheaper still. Steve Brine served as a Minister when Department of Health policies – including rising student debt, rising workloads, poor morale and capped NHS pay – reduced the supply of UK doctors. Now he makes money from a company profiting from doctor shortages. But the most notorious example of recent years relates to investor Ali Parsa’s health business, Circle Health. The Cameron government gave Circle Health a contract to run a whole NHS hospital, Hinchingbrooke, in 2011. At the same time Circle employed a Tory MP, Mark Simmonds, as a £50,000 per year strategic advisor. Circle’s management of the NHS Hinchingbrooke hospital was a much-criticised failure, with the contract ending early. Roll forward a few years and Ali Parsa has a new business, Babylon, which tries to run NHS and private GP services over smartphones. Health Secretary Matt Hancock has relentlessly promoted Babylon. At the same time Babylon have gone into a controversial sponsorship deal with the Evening Standard, paying them an estimated £500,000 in return for favourable coverage. The Standard is edited by former Tory treasurer George Osborne – who gave Hancock his start in politics as a special advisor. Sure enough, Babylon’s sponsored series in the Standard included an interview with Hancock as Health Secretary lavishly praising their products. The privatisation of the NHS is a web of these kind of relationships between Tory politicians and their business friends.