I just posted this on Twitter:
That, I think, summarises what Starmer will really be saying today.
He's refusing to provide the new money the NHS requires even though he knows, and will say, the Tories underfunded it.
Then he will claim he has no choice about that - which is completely untrue.
As a result, he is deliberately supporting the Tory plan, which was to collapse the NHS.
Worse, he's supporting the Tory plan because he, like them, is refusing to borrow the funds necessary to update the NHS to meet modern needs so it can provide the healthcare we require when those funds are readily available to be borrowed, whether from the City or people who would like to save with NS&I.
As a consequence, he knows that people who will need help will go untreated.
Worse still, he knows that by doing this, he is hastening the end of the NHS and its replacement by a private medical service - which would seem to be his goal.
And what he must also know - because he says that working people cannot afford to pay more for the NHS - is that the result is that many people will eventually be denied any healthcare at all because they will not be able to afford it.
In other words, what he is saying is that those without money must now accept that the reality is that they might die uncared for. There is no other reasonable interpretation of his words unless he's merely being superficially melodramatic, in which case he is acting wholly inappropriately for a prime minister.
As Noam Chomsky once put it "That's the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
That's what Starmer is doing here. The result is that we would all pay a great deal more, except for those who might not be able to pay anything at all, and they might suffer or even die as a result.
And this is from a supposedly Labour government.
PS A version of the above has now been posted on Twitter.
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Prior to July 4th there were several blogs & much discussion about: de-fund & privatise the NHS – all the indications were there that this would happen. Streeting was(is?) funded by corporate interests that want to see privatisation, Reeves makes sure that TINA with respect to gov money (& its lack thereof) is a reality.
However, I have some good news: the UK DOES have money for Russian oligarchs, it is “only” £250 million, but as they say every little bit counts:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/sep/12/enrc-oligarchs-took-on-serious-fraud-office-and-won
The UK, slowly but surely being eroded to the point where it is unable to operate an effective fraud office – but that, of course, is by design, just as privatisation of the NHS is… by design & the current TINA political system is… by design……..and in the backgound the UK meeja – like a Greek chorus … TINA… by design.
This one is sickening…
And destroying the NHS is a thoroughly anti-democratic act if ever there was one.
There’s a typo ‘ whether from the City OF people who would like to save with NS&I.’. OF should be ‘OR’ I believe.
Corrected
Spot on Richard.
I have only seen the press reports of the Darzi report. To me it seems very much like confirmation bias for Streeting:
1. Blame the Tories for the crisis.
2. Blame the NHS staff from not being productive/efficient despite not having the means to do their jobs.
3.Shift funding and focus to GPs.
4.Blame the Tories for not been then able to fund the NHS properly because of the black hole.
5. Then blame the NHS for not performing ( again). Then guess what? Yes the private sector can do it “better”.
It looks cynical to me.
He knows that those who can afford to go private will go private – as they are doing. Those without children I know are spending money on private healthcare with little prompting. That fear speech will lower demand before winter (he hopes) but he does not seem to think admissions for the frail and elderly with hypothermia and pneumonia will be up.
It would be interesting to see what morons surround him now as advisors. You can imagine them portraying the uptake in private use as a ‘tipping point’ signifying that the populations ‘gets it at last’ and the NHS is dead in the water. Or that house prices are high and housing will be used as collateral for healthcare loans. That there is more money out there than in government.
All they see is the money – usually money ‘saved’, money that our modern politicians are too lazy to argue for or defend. They are blind to anything else.
The market will provide the answer.
Our politicians seem to be nothing but market makers now.
I wrote to him yesterday saying that if he had been pm just after the second world war the NHS would not exist because the country couldn’t afford it by his reasoning(?).
I don’t expect a reply
Curious as to how all the private doctors will be trained once the NHS is killed.
Presumably it will be like the US: only rich kids will be able to afford to study and the doctors will be left with ridiculous debts after the end of training. What a fantastic system.
One of the reasons Private Equity is able to buy up GP practices around the country is that younger GPs are so heavily indebted with student loans, that they cannot afford to buy into GP practices when older GPs retire.
This was all foreseeable from the moment Starmer was elected leader of the opposition. Why Labour members and affiliated unions voted for him, I will never quite fathom.
His constant undermining of Corbyn and the Socialists in the party in the run up to GE 2019 was an obvious red flag.
And now, just as he duped the membership then, he tries to dupe the public now. And worse, is the fact that some members of the general public will continue to falsely blame immigration for the dire state of our public services. Not only will people die because the NHS continues to be underfunded. The door will be left wide open for the far right and fascism.
My mother endured a long wait in A&E the other day, after a series of TIAs. A man was also waiting, with his arm wrapped in a towel, slowly bleeding out. He was there for hours, getting paler and paler. And afterwards, it is almost impossible to get through to her GP surgery. The closest she has gotten, is 45th in a queue before giving up and calling 111 instead.
How long do we need to go on like this, before Labour deliver the ‘Change’ they promised?
The PFI Company profits from 99 NHS contracts set up under New Labour £1.07 billion has been paid in Dividends payments, amounts such as £47.6 million have been paid out by NHS Trusts as part of these Contracts just to Cover Directors Fees.
Hi Kier,
I think that I have cracked how your financial programme is going to promote economic growth.
Make massive cuts to funding all government services. Which sucks money out of the economy, which in turn produces a bad recession.
Ultimately the economy will recover and there is your ” economic growth”.
I am not sure that you will be still PM by the time any recovery appears though.
Labour is also attacking the BMA and doctors for taking industrial action over the funding for GP surgeries.
What a reactionary bunch of red Tories these lot are. Yet at the TUC conference Starmer was given a standing ovation like alot of lemmings waiting at the top of a cliff waiting for the time to jump off. The trade union leaders are a pathetic bunch selling out their members interests as usual.
Sadly, things have to get alot worse before there is a prospect of them getting better. To misquote Marx the masses sometimes need the whip of counter revolution to get them moving into action.
I recently watched the NT production of “Nye”. Would that we had a politician of his calibre now.
That production is brilliant
NT = National Theatre
Available online for about £10 and worth every penny of it
I’d also recommend John Pilger’s The Dirty War on the NHS, now available free on his relaunched website, thanks to his family.
At West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds I am hearing that In the last 3 months, progression funding, infrastructure and staff support funding has already been pulled.
And that is a hospital in urgent need of rebuilding
Starmers comments are clearly not aimed at the NHS, but at the public. There is little point in stating the ‘nhs must reform or die’ and ‘only with reform will come extra funding’, because only his govt has the power to ‘reform’ the NHS, or to link funding to any fictitious ‘efficiency savings’.
No, he’s simply softening up the great unwashed (as he and his fellow Tories see us) for a full on drive to a virtually fully private health provision. Miliband (David), Milburn and of course Gollum and Mandelsssson, with their private health sector pals lining up behind them, have Sweeting fully onside, meaning it’s full steam ahead.
In the past Tory govts have had me loathing them within months of getting in, with Cameron/Osbourne leading the charge, but tbh, I have to give the nod to Starmer. Six weeks in and I despise him and his worthless govt already…
All whilst pulling winter fuel payments for the elderly and putting out an invitation to people already under extreme economic pressure and poverty to try and stay healthy so that they don’t need to use the NHS.
I understand the general scepticism of people who have contributed to this discussion, but I would like to offer a more hopeful alternative if I may, for I don’t think it is merely about more money.
The Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) have not yet been
Operating as they might. Paul Corrigan (a former director of strategy and commissioning for NHS London between 2007 and 2009 who was given a ministerial appointment to the Department of Health and Social Care in July –
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/paul-corrigan-appointed-by-the-government-to-help-shape-health-plans ), explained that hospital beds are being taken by the homeless or those awaiting care homes, for example, because financial flows fragmented the services, between primary and domiciliary care, preventing hospitals admitting patients (https://www.nhsconfed.org/podcast/avoiding-short-termism-nhs). This is very costly as well as being detrimental to waiting times.
Also preventative care is far less costly than hospital care. In his speech to The King’s Fund yesterday, Keir Starmer illustrated this with hospitals removing children’s teeth because of teeth decay (https://www.youtube.com/live/kBkSjPmnrLs?si=9CIIOHKGBuqtQ9r-), which are not been caught because of lack of NHS dentists. Higher costs fall to the hospitals because the fees currently paid to dentists are so low that dentists cannot do the work for the prices (given they have other rising costs such as insurance, lab fees, nursing staff wages, energy costs, etc.). We have already discussed other preventative health conditions relating to ultra-processed “Junk food” – which I read is being addressed in part by the banning advertising announced yesterday, and I hope the October budget will support this.
So yes, I understand the call for more money, and certainly new technology is costly both for new opportunities of treatment and for moving to digitised patient records and introducing patient apps to help us monitor our health (to avoid disasters like the Post Office horizon system) but there are hugh savings to be made through better integration of care before and after hospital stays, by looking at how, where, and by whom money is spent.
Bu without more moneyu for local authorities social cvare will not free up beds and that is not happening