Do I have to talk about Wes Streeting this morning? It seems that I do because the government's resident smug boy is out and about talking about his plans for the NHS, and as usual, just about everything he says is nonsense.
Firstly, he's starting a ‘consultation' on how to reform the NHS. It is insulting to call it anything of the sort, because we know that anything that contradicts the findings that Streeting wants it to reach will be ignored.
Secondly, he is talking about establishing a 'neighbourhood health service' where all GPs, district nurses, care workers, physiotherapists, health visitors and mental health specialists will be located under the same roof. In other words, he is trying to establish the so-called Darzi centres that were a disaster under New Labour and were wisely and very quickly abandoned. The worst thing about them was they were not in the neighbourhood at all, but had to be located away from where people lived to find suitable premises. They are, however, ripe for privatisation, and that suits Wes Streeting's plans very well indeed.
There is also another problem with such a concentration of services in neighbourhoods. You can be quite sure that the richest neighbourhoods will get the best concentration of services. Not only are these centres designed to be privatisation ready, but they are also designed to undermine the national in National Health Service.
Meanwhile, creating those wholly unnecessary new hubs will be very costly, with no gain to healthcare and a lot of cost to those who will not be able to get to them, who will - of course - be the most vulnerable in society.
Third, Streeting is talking about creating digital NHS passports for people, with all data stored in one place. The security risks are high, but Wes won't worry about that. The whole purpose of this is to sell all that data to life science companies who can then sell the NHS all the drugs that the person needs to be on to supposedly prevent diseases.
There are two issues. First, there is the massive risk of over-medicalisation of healthcare at enormous cost to us all. That cost will be physical; about one in eight hospital admissions in those over retirement age is because they have drug-related conflicts in their over-medication.
The other reason is that over-medication does not prevent disease. Over-medication is a massively expensive way to treat symptoms and not causes.
The cause of our massive decline in medical well-being over the last 40 years or so is the enormous rise in the consumption of ultra-processed food that results in the massive excess intake of sugar in our diets, and most especially fructose. It is, in that case, really easy to tackle the cause of our ill-health. Simply stop the production of these foods that are designed to encourage excess food consumption by creating sugar addiction, which they are incredibly successful at doing.
Obesity would go away.
Diabetes would cease to be anything like the problem it is.
Heart disease rates would decline significantly.
Rates of people suffering from dementia would almost certainly fall.
All are excess sugar-related. And we don't need drugs to prevent these things from happening; we need to eliminate excess sugar from diets.
But that would hit corporate profits and Wes Streeting won't do that, which is precisely why his NHS consultation is a sham and his stated intention of improving health outcomes is bogus. He intends nothing of the sort.
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Dusting off my PhD in the bleeding obvious.
The NHS is in crisis.
In order to improve things as rapidly as possible that means making the best use of existing resources
New buildings, reorganisation etc takes time which we dont have
Simples………
Medication with drugs is the result of a failed nutrition policy. It is designed to make pharmaceutical companies £billions. It also means that Big Food can make £billion from high-profit junk food. You couldn’t make it up.
Watch: First Do No Pharm
https://nopharmfilm.com/
Meanwhile privatisation is going ahead.
https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2024/10/17/nhs-services-wiltshire/
The idea that a Private Equity firm should be allowed any where near care services is utter madness.
The Integrated Care Boards were / are also a clear step into readying the NHS for privatisation, mirroring American Health Maintenance Organisations. NOTE that a member of the Community Service Provider will sit on the Integrated Care Board !
Thank you, Ali.
With regard to the provider sitting on the oversight board, at events with the shadow Treasury and Business teams this and last year, the City delegations I formed part of were told that Labour sees the role of government as ensuring all the levers of government pull in the same direction and would like the private sector to deliver infrastructure and services, oversee such delivery and second staff to all levels of government and providers.
Private equity is already involved with fostering and respite care and takes the lion’s share of fees, not carers. Local government employees are under orders to pay fees without querying anything that causes concern. Mum recruited some auditors with City experience to oversee such outsourced activities. It’s not just extortionate and misplaced, but corrupt, too.
Do we have enough trained people to staff the new clinics without downgrading other services? Are we simply going to see the cannibalisation and centralisation of real neighbourhood services into more remote and less accessible supersized polyclinics on a scale of small hospitals with a limited range of services? (And splitting up of some services from large regions centres to smaller, less supervised and less capable units.) Perhaps this can work in London, but how is this going to work in rural areas?
Good questions
This is going to fail
When I was a GP, the District nurses, and Midwives worked with us out of our surgery and down the road in the clinic. The health visitor worked in our surgery too one day a week, and the social workers often popped in for a chat and tea/coffee.
Perhaps what Wes needs to do is invest in GP facilities again, like before the 1990 reforms, that made co-operation illegal.
The system also then aimed to achieve equity in distribution of human resources & the funds with some adjustment for need.
The market ignored need and placed demand on a higher level, thus more resources are now aimed at well to do areas, with both poor and well heeled areas suffering as a result one my not getting care. The other getting unrequired care
Thanks
The co-operation is illegal. That probably passed most of us by!! I did not vote for that it is obviously absurd with all the problems relating to an aging population.
The data?
Palantir – Palantir – Palantir
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56183785
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies
Now, who in Parliament, has a financial link to Palantir?
Sadly inevitable.
And achieved for ridiculously little cost.
Thank you and well said, Shelagh.
It is odd how cheap Labour is. I don’t think this is mitigation.
Thank you, Robert.
That’s a good question. 🙂
Further to Palantir, one of its co-founders, Peter Thiel, like many oligarchs, has a bolt hole in New Zealand. Others have them in Patagonia. It’s quite amazing how these people think they won’t fry like the rest of us. Neither the planet nor its people can afford the wealthy.
“Now, who in Parliament, has a financial link to Palantir? ”
Isn’t that a Peter Cook/ Dudley Moore Question as in “Not only… but also”?
Streeting might not even have shares in Palantir, but he’s not not in favour of the NHS outsourcing its data-management to them/, or finding ways of transferring said data to Palantir free-of-charge when nobody’s looking.
No word more funding or staffing. Ignores what everybody tells him. NHS is to be “Neighbourhood” Health Service, so no use if you’re not in the neighbourhood. Insists NHS must change but it was working well until recently. Needs more, better paid, staff & property funding, which he’s refusing.
Spot on
Couldn’t agree more. But I think Streeting is aware that proper funding is required and that is what he is using to force privatisation by saying the country can’t afford to provide it but private sources can. It’s a con.
Sugar is a case in point of multiple preventable risk factors, including breathing in pollutants and sedentary work. Also, most of us are forcibly divested of the power we might presume to have as living beings – in many ways, the societies we live in prevent us from making and acting upon our own choices, about how we live and the activities of our daily lives. Instead we are regulated and controlled (I’m excluding here the freedom people have to choose amongst consumer lifestyle goods and services). This has enormous implications: it alienates people from their own agency, it leads to high levels of anxiety since actions are often monitored closely (in work places) and “errors” can lead disproportionately to catastrophe. To not be able to freely and spontaneously be with the people we would prefer is deeply harmful and creates loneliness, isolation, and these all have physical effects on the body, adding to I’ll health, not least the mental anguish that millions are already taking tablets to ease. I agree that how we make decisions needs to change. For instance, an entire nation of people leaving decisions about the entire health system down to one person, at this point Wes Streeting, is egregiously bizarre, but barely registers, so familiar are we with the idea that of course these things are done this way. Few seem satisfied with this arrangement, not least the many voices here, sharing much better knowledge, understanding and ideas, than Streeting. As good as these ideas are, however, they cannot form part of the decision-making process, the best they can hope for is some form of influence, which is not the same same as active involvement in the decision itself. Wes Streeting here is being weasely, because there has been a national debate about the NHS ongoing for many years, and petition after petition and opinion poll after opinion poll tells government that the overwhelming majority want a fully funded publicly owned and delivered health service, free for this using it. No further consultation is needed. Also, the ethics of foreign profit healthcare are repulsive, so even from a value perspective public funding and ownership is the right thing to do. Were many people rather than one involved in the decision (not just feeling involved, or some other placatory gesture), that is what we would have.
It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand. Starmer/Streeting sympathising with Sir Chris Hoy. while at the same time cutting the health care services that he, and many others, will require.
“Firstly, he’s starting a ‘consultation’ on how to reform the NHS. It is insulting to call it anything of the sort,” Quite
Step 1: select questions to get the answers you want.
Step 2: keep the time period short
Step 3: ignore the stuff you don’t like.
In short: “Firstly. he’s starting an “insultation” on NHS reform – he knows what answers he wants and thus what is happening is a combo of “insult” and con – sultation”.
Streeting, part of a long line of lying, coniving politicos who are all, always, on-the-make. The insultation is part of that, the best thing citizens could do is boycott it – not that will help – LINO shills will doubtless make up the numbers.
Much to agree with
Mike is spot on.
‘Consultation’ usually takes place after a decision has been made and is used to gauge reaction so that PR tactics and ‘messaging’ can be adjusted. I saw a lot of this in social housing and became very disillusioned.
These proposals will come with some sort of ‘local representation’ just for show but there will be little training and loads of naive consciousness (‘critical consciousness’ is not allowed because that is Marxist cultural indoctrination and too left wing for an acolyte of one Peter Mandelson).
I find Streeting quite repulsive. Everything about him is unprincipled. He looks like a wide-eyed toddler let loose in a sweet shop, happy to put anything in his mouth. He is – to put it bluntly – eminently corruptible.
Thank you and well said, PSR.
Streeting’s record goes back to Cambridge and student politics, including mobilisation of zionist support against opponents. He’s been associated with Mandelson and Patricia Hewitt from those days.
Cambridge has previous with regard to students being spotted, Soviet and other agents, Thatcherites and, now, Blairites.
I strongly agree with most of what you’re saying here Mike but I don’t agree that the best thing is to boycott the insultation (nicely chosen portmanteau word). There are (admittedly limited) ways to make it clear in one’s response that we know what they’re up to. Don’t forget that it won’t be Starmer or Streeter who will read what we write but rather the poor bloody infantry who have to process the responses, and it will perhaps give a little bit of satisfaction to some of them to realise that they’re not alone in their inevitable contempt for our masters.
I suspect I will submit
‘Smug boy’ – good charactersation Richard, … making clear at the outset that the ‘consultation’ has to support new polyclinics etc.
I have long advocated regional multi-disciplinary diagnostic centres where people can get accurate cancer diagnosis in a day or two instead of the ‘serial’ system where many of us have seen people waiting months for each of a series of different specialst appointments – so that the diagnosis when it came was months or years too late.
But these would be for a small minority of patients – and it should save the system money as well as saving more lives.
One of the reasons politicians cant resist ‘reforming’ the system – time and time again (is Streeting going to be more disastrous than Lansley?) must be the pressure from special interests – pharma, private healthcare – for what they see as potentially rich pickings from the stream of public money .
If Streeting were to say – yes we are consulting – but we are taking immediate action now – injecting £bn to boostg GP practices – so that those looking for jobs get placed, boost social care earnings, getting more beds (temporary if necessary) nurses and doctors into hospitals – and get the waiting list down from nearly 8 million to 6 million in a years time….
And all the things you suggest Richard – boosting prevention by banning junk food and advertising, getting public helalth back on track – covid vaccinations, clean air at school and work etc.
Thats what people on the front line want – ‘action now’ but Streeting/ Starmer /Kinnock as usual are not listening.
Thanks
But doesn’t LINO need money to see all these plans through and they don’t have any, according to Reeves, etc.
That’s why, they tell us, they’re having to keep the 2-child benefit cap and removing the winter fuel allowance killing thousands of our elderly from hypothermia and malnutrition this winter.
Streeting is such a slimy, lying little squirt. He just can’t wait to become a millionaire at the public’s expense, can he?
I totally agree with the logical points that Richard and others have made, but perhaps Streeting has inadvertently provided us with a tool to hasten his own demise just as Camaron did with the Brexit referendum. What if a massive number of people replied to this fake ‘Consultation’ by entering simple wording in bold block capitals:
1.) “REVERSE DESTRUCTIVE LANSBURY REFORMS”;
2.) “REMOVE ALL PRIVATIZATION AND PFI CONTRACTS FROM THE NHS”;
3.) “IMPLEMENT A COMPREHENSIVE NHS RENATIONALIZATION PROGRAM”;
4.) “PHASE OUT ALL OUTSOURCED SERVICES FOR CLEANING, CATERING, SECURITY, ETC”;
5) “RESTORE PAY AND BENEFIT LEVELS FOR ALL NHS STAFF”;
6.) “REPAIR AND REBUILD CRUMBLING NHS INFRASTRUCTURE”;
7.) “INCORPORATE SOCIAL CARE INTO OUR RESTORED NHS”
Other wording might be more appropriate. These so called consultation forms are cleverly designed to manipulate the public into providing approval for a predesigned evisceration of public services. If a large enough number of the public ignored the trick questions of the Consultation form and instead made these basic demands while making their input widely known via a huge publicity campaign, then we could seriously embarrass Wes Streeting and this Neoliberal Government. Can we save our NHS? I spent two decades living in the US, the final 8 years working within their for profit healthcare system that discards the most vulnerable. We must fight tooth and nail to reverse the destruction of our NHS by demanding reversal of this sabotage for toxic privatization.
Put them on their web site https://change.nhs.uk/en-GB/
From a Scottish perspective the use of the http://change.nhs.uk/ website moniker is worrying. Health matters are currently reserved to the devolved nations, so my concern is that whatever Streeting and his financiers are planning for England might be foisted on the NHS of the devolved nations using the usual Westminster sovereignty arguments. Even if Streeting’s proposal for NHS England isn’t forced on Scotland, Wales and N Ireland it’s likely that there will be implications for block grant financing and recent experience suggests that these are negative more often than not
I think that concern entirely appropriate Ken
Excellent idea
I’ve just filled in the so-called ‘consultation’ form – and ‘so-called’ it well and truly is.
Fortunately each section does have a the bottom a box marked ‘Other’, where it is possible to make appropriate comments. It only took a few minutes.
Thanks Kim for the suggestion.
Perhaps a petition along the lines of your “7 demands”, with the inclusion of an eighth “An end to time-wasting sham ‘consultation’ exercises” would serve to put this sickening farago in the public domain?
Have I missed this. Where did you get the ‘consultation form’?
http://change.nhs.uk/
All of this is extremely sinister and the readying of the system for wholesale privatisation is patent. Howevr, perhaps the worst feature is the “Patient Passports”.
This is not just because of the data risks or the obvious – indeed even unblushingly stated – availability of their allegedly anonymised contents to big pharma. This is clearly – because of the choice of language – a first step towards individual ‘personal healthcare budgets’, long sought by the main Tory enemies of the NHS, as trailed many years ago by Liam Fox.
Why “Passport”? Why the implication that this gives personal access? – something which all citizens should have in any and every case. Even if he hadn’t been the recipient of massive funding from private healthcare providers, Wes Streeting’s pitch shreeks of bad faith. All this is on top of his pushing of weight reduction drugs as a means of ‘helping’ – a truly foul piece of double-talk – sick/disabled people ‘back into work’, a proposal which alone marks him as someone who should never be allowed near control of the NHS.
Isn’t our ‘passport’ our CHI (Community Health Index) number, at least, in Scotland? It’s a unique 10-digit number so that patients can be correctly identified.
Doesn’t NHS England have a similar system? Having never lived there, I don’t know how each patient is distinguished one from the other to ensure no mix-ups.
We do
No wisdom from me but a video from the website of Alyson Pollock seven minutes in support of Richard’s post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb0COrH_gxI&t=435s
Thanks
Pure white and deadly
Dr John Rudkins book is a must read about Sugar
Roy Lilley in his post today says that neighbour health service hubs were tried in the 1990s and failed. There is nothing new to suggest that they will work again.
The labour government appears to believe that the NHS is totally inefficient and only the private sector should provide health care.
The result a two tier health system probably similar to the USA:
1. the wealthy will be able to buy full care say 10/15% of the UK population.
2. the rest will be given very basic care and struggle to get that. Why? Because we do not have the money to pay.
The NHS has worked since 1948. It’s not perfect but it works.
What’s wrong with a properly funded National Health Service for all?
I am happy for my health data to be used for research. But I do not want it given free to US companies owned by US male billionaires who will make zillions and then sell the drugs back to the NHS. The NHS must keep the intellectual property rights and get the drugs for free. Of course the data is already given out free so actually getting a proper result is not going to happen.
As for AI in medicine. At the moment the programmes have bias based on white males written into them. Which can have serious consequences if you are female and a person of colour.
The US science community is doing a lot of work highlighting this. But the US fin tech companies attitude is we will do what we like and to hell with the consequences.
Why not just ban the rubbish food that is produced? We know the answer to that. It’s personal choice. The artificial sweetners that are used trigger a reaction in the part of the brain controlling appetite that stops the sense of being full up. The result? Obesity.
Regrettably the future of the NHS does not feel assured.
When pronouncing consultation, the emphasis is on the first syllable.
I’m not convinced of the fructose claims. Systematic reviews of the science appear to say otherwise – e.g. PMID 22351714. What do you think the best evidence is of the culpability of fructose?
Read Robert Lustig
“If it has a label, consider it a warning label. Because real food doesn’t need a label.” Robert Lustig
I’m aware of Lustig but he has a tendency to misrepresent things. E.g. on the fairly recent Andrew Huberman podcast, he misrepresents PMID 22205311 which is an intervention study using 4 groups carried out in Denmark comparing sucrose-sweetened cola, semi-skimmed milk, diet cola and water.
The conclusion is (as you can easily find) “No significant differences in the changes in body weight or total fat mass (determined by DXA) were found between the 4 groups during the intervention”.
Lustig claims at about 2:29 in the podcast that those on the sucrose-sweetened cola gained 10kg.
I am not able to comment
However, I have mo clue who you are and I do know who he is and I believe him
I do love it when right wing politicians use the word ‘consultation’. Never, in fact has a word been so abused. As far back as the Thatcher era, all its meant is, ‘we’ll get together a load of business bods, right wing talking heads, and lobbyists who agree with whatever it is we’re proposing’. Or as with Mr Goves horrific education policies, ‘we’ll invite a large number of stakeholders in education (2,000) and ignore every single last one of them’.
Change said Starmer, but only the sign over the door. Kendall has ordered a, ‘consultation’, over benefits for the disabled. Not one single disabled person or group representing them has been invited. Exactly the same as Stride, Coffey, and that evil man Duncan-Smith
As for ‘wide boy’ Streeting, his stupidity is matched only by his smugness. A classic New Labour man..
What you write here is a horrifying indictment against centralised power. When a tiny number has such power the results can be disastrous. Were disabled people the ones who decided for themselves the outcome wouldn’t be excess deaths (social murder according to the UN, blood on govt hands), similarly the two child benefit cap would be gone (in all likelihood it would be unnecessary, since everyone is a parent or a child and connected to other parents and children, collectively we wouldn’t invite this upon ourselves), and ditto with the WFA, we all have direct connections to someone affected, are affected ourselves, or will be at some point. To give one corrupted group the power to decide which lives are worth living, the harm that results is really quite staggering. That it doesn’t lead us to take to the streets is a testament to how we can accommodate such horror and how disempowered we collectively have become. There has to be a better way of doing this than what happens in Westminster. I trust the people (us) – the petitions of 38 degrees and so on, the opinion polls about water, utilities, health, social care, education, the voluntary work people do, the wish to help, care for and support others that I routinely see in my work, paints a very different picture than the “mob” held at bay by a ruling elite.
You are dead right on the vile usage of glucose_Fructose syrup front. It’s worse forvus than sugar but sadly cheaper. I have also recently become aware of her hidden bombshell of all the seed oils now used by the food industry, in copious amounts. Sunflower oil in particular as well as the even more prolifically used Rapeseed oil. On reading food labels it us quite alarmingly the amounts of the stuff we are eating in everyday products. Stick to natural fats, like olive oil, butter and even lard. You’ll be the healthier for it.
Rape seed oil and Sunflower seed oil are natural…….
They are both profoundly ultra processed by the time we get to use them
They really do need to be avoided
“.. regular vegetable oil [..] As those oils are heated, you’re creating toxic oxidative breakdown products,” he said. “One of those products is a compound called an aldehyde, which interferes with DNA. Another is formaldehyde, which is extremely toxic.””
Source: The Big Fat Surprise: why butter, meat, and cheese belong in a healthy diet (2015) by Nina Teicholz (Author)
Chapter 9 “Exit Trans Fats, Enter Something Worse?”, Section: Toxic Heated Oils
https://amzn.eu/d/4c2LHo8
Yes to all that about sugar but… remove sugar from food and it’ll have no taste. The cheapest way to make it tasty again is to add fats (sugar only started being added to food to replace fats when saturated fat started getting a bad rap – thanks for nothing, Ancel Keys). Seed oil would be the obvious choice being cheap and available in quantity but it’s as bad for us as sugar if not worse so that’s out. We need natural food then and lots of it, and that needs an environment to grow and is expensive as a consequence. Once again, we see the need for social security to be rewritten and living wages to be adjusted so people can afford proper nutrition when it becomes widely available. This would be expensive but we have the money available as we know. Savings, for those concerned, would come in the form of there being far fewer sick people around, so less need for the NHS in general, and medication in particular.
And consideration of that last point reveals why this approach isn’t adopted – the likes of Streeting and his psychopathic corporate owners wouldn’t make anywhere near as much money out of it as they do now.
If we didn’t have to pay for the illnesses crap food create we could afford decent food for everyone.
And for the record, low sugar foods tsate just fine.
In this video from a recent General Election meeting by prospective MP candidate Craig Murray, veteran NHS campaigner Mary Whitby explains in simple terms the cynical destruction of NHS England for the benefit of Private Investors.
“they are systematically dismantling the NHS to open up opportunities for the private sector.”
From 6:24 to about 20:48 so a 14 minute talk.
“Craig Murray, Dr Bob Gill and Mary Whitby and the gutting of the NHS”
https://rumble.com/v54jnml-craig-murray-dr-bob-gill-and-mary-whitby-and-the-gutting-of-the-nhs.html?start=384
Very informative.
Thanks
My only question is, do we really think Wes Streeting is intelligent enough to have planned such a devious, long term strategy? He always strikes me as someone who has learned his lines on the bus coming in.
It is not a question of intelligence.
Please!
It is a question of character, morality, ethics, principles, – a lack of – and ideology .
Intelligence can be misused, misapplied. Evil still intelligence to be done properly.
Streeting has come from nowhere because he has been promoted by Blue/New Labour – he is their man.
This is because essentially he is a value free zone, a human blank canvas offering himself to those who have made him and will make him.
He is no more than a blob of Plasticine, being moulded by his paymasters.
I found the NHS consultation website and decided to comment. I started the process, gave my email and waited for the verification code. Never turned up. Asked for it to be resent, having checked every letter of my details. Never turned up. Should I feel got at?
Probably not
But that really does invalidate what they are doing
Same happened to me so I tried again with the same e mail and password and it said I was already registered ! Have another go……………bizarre
Weird
[…] But this is exactly what we should expect, according to Richard Murphy of Funding the Future. In a recent article about the consultation, he told us […]
Completed it, and in every ‘obstruction’ box I wrote ‘contracting to a private company’.
I have said this before PFAS forever chemicals impact on our health , there is a lot of research data out now that is shocking