Why do people who like the NHS vote Tory?

There are an awful lot of Tory politicians who hate the NHS with a burning ideological passion. Their hatred is driven by the fact that the NHS is a glowing and extremely popular example of state socialism.

The problem for the Tories is that people (including a huge majority of their own voters) really like the NHS. They can't just abolish it because there would be public outrage about it. That's why they've chosen to subject it to death by a thousand cuts rather than just outright abolish it as they'd actually like to.

The 2012 Health and Social Care Act was clearly designed to carve the NHS open for privatisation. Meanwhile a number of other Tory policies such as budget cuts, the forced closure of dozens of A&E units and maternity wards,  driving young people away from studying towards careers in the health service by scrapping bursaries and conducting an ideological war with junior doctors and deporting non-EU NHS workers for the "crime" of not earning above £35,000 per year all look designed to put the service under such severe strain that they can offer up privatisation and American style health insurance as the solution.

It's not just some idle crackpot conspiracy theory to claim that the Tories hate the socialist NHS and are intent on damaging and underfunding it as much as possible in order to offer up privatisation and private health insurance as the solution, just take a look at these quotes from Tory politicians. 

•  "They did not believe they could win an election if they told you what they were going to do [carve the NHS open for privatisation] because people are so wedded to the NHS." - Michael Portillo [source]

• "A 60 year mistake" - Tory MEP Daneil Hannan's description of the NHS.

• "[The NHS] would not be out of place in Stalinist Russia" - Tory MP Peter Bone [source].

• "It would be political suicide for a party to introduce [charging for NHS services]. They could only really do it if there was a feeling in the country that health services were falling apart." - Paul Charlson Chair of Conservative Health [source]

• In 2005 Jeremy Hunt co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be "denationalised" and replaced with a private insurance based system. In 2012 David Cameron saw fit to put Hunt in charge of the NHS. [source]

Opposition to privatisation of the NHS is one of the most strongly held public opinions in the UK. A 2013 YouGov poll found that 84% of people believed that the NHS should be run as a not-for-profit public service, while only 7% favoured privatisation. This means that for every one person who supports what the Tories have been doing to the NHS since 2010, there are 12 who oppose it.

This leaves us with the big question of why so many people who actually like the NHS would vote for a political party that has such a passionate ideological opposition to its very existence.

There are obviously many potential answers because Tory voters are not just one homogenous blob. However one of the most likely answers is ignorance.

• Tory voters could be ignorant of the fact that the NHS is an example of state socialism in action, and that the Tory party is ideologically opposed to anything socialist.

• Tory voters could be so naive that they actually believed David Cameron's lies when he promised "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS", and remain ignorant of the fact that as soon as the Lib-Dems enabled him into power in 2010 his party set in motion the biggest top-down reorganisation in the entire history of the NHS.

• Tory voters could be ignorant of the fact that the Tories have been busy carving the NHS up into little pieces to be distributed to their private sector mates (leaving the taxpayer to foot the bill when companies like Circle Health bail out of their contracts). 

• Tory voters could be ignorant of the fact that the Tory party is heavily funded by the private health industry, and that there are dozens of Tory MPs and unelected lords with interests in the private health sector.

Aside from ignorance, another possible reason that people who like the NHS voted for a party that is ideologically opposed to it and is intent on running it into the ground is that they're indifferent. If they're not ignorant of the facts outlined above, then they obviously thought that they would be getting some other payoff from voting Tory that justified putting the existence of the NHS at risk. 

Perhaps they're extremely well off and were looking forward to more Tory tax cuts for the rich paid for through impoverishment of the disabled and the working poor? Perhaps they were property owners looking forward to benefiting from more of George Osborne's economically insane house price inflation schemes? Perhaps they're not well off but were suffering from temporarily embarrassed millionaire syndrome? Perhaps they knew a bit about the risk to the NHS, but are so economically naive that they actually believed in the Tory austerity con?

Whatever the case, somehow 24% of the electorate voted for the Tories, which under our outdated and bizarrely unrepresentative system was enough for them to get a majority government. So the Tories are back in power and more determined than ever to run the NHS into the ground and privatise as much of it as they can get away with, even though only 7% of the population support such policies.

The problem is that the Tories have spent six years getting away with their ideological assaults on the NHS, not because they have any popular support for such policies but because not enough people seem to care enough to do anything about it. The public apathy towards the ongoing ideological attacks on the NHS are a disaster because as Nye Bevan (the founder of the NHS) once said; "the NHS will last as long as there are folk with faith left to fight for it".

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The Tory blueprint for wrecking our public services

I don't often frequent the political cesspit that is the Conservative Home Blog, but I was pointed in the direction of an article entitled "How a government can beat the BMA" written by the site's deputy editor Henry Hill.

Before I get to explaining the Tory blueprint for tearing apart our public services, I'm first going to look at what this blog post tells us about the rotten Tory mentality of the author.

Class war politics

Before we even get to the contents of the article, it's clear from the title alone that the author is of the stunted Tory class war mentality, where workers and trade unions are the enemy, and any kind of compromise or co-operation between employers and workers is political weakness. This rotten and destructive class war mentality completely dominates Tory politics because they consider their ideological assault upon the trade unions in the 1980s to be one of their greatest victories. It doesn't matter a jot to these people that the UK keeps lagging further and further behind Germany, where trade unions and employers generally co-operate for the best of their industries rather than retrenching into destructive ideological class war at the first opportunity.

As far as most Tories are concerned, trade unions and ordinary workers are always the enemy and if disputes don't come about naturally they can always be deliberately provoked (as with the junior doctors contract and the force privatisation of every school in England) in order to bring back the ideological class war struggle they crave for.

The miners' strike

The class war mentality of the author was clear from the title, but the actual contents reveal the sheer scale of his absurd class war obsession. The article is peppered with references to the Miners Strike in the 1980s. The author tries to imagine Jeremy Hunt as a victorious Thatcher figure destroying the power of the British Medical Association (and presumably condemning their industry to destruction in the process, as was the case with the coal miners), he draws tortured parallels between the Junior Doctors' strike and the Miners' strike and concludes chillingly that "one day the BMA will have their 1984".

Comparisons between the Miners' Strike and the dispute over the Junior Doctors contract are obviously utterly facile.

• The Miners' Strike came about as a response to the existential threat against the mining industry. At the time right-wing people sneered at the idea that the objective of the dispute was to kill the mining industry in order to destroy the power of the NUM trade union. By December 2015 the very last deep coal mine in the UK at Kellingley was closed down and the once powerful NUM had shrunk from 170,000 members to fewer than 100. The idea that a similar fate can be imposed on the medical profession is utterly laughable.

• The Miners' Strike concerned pretty much the entire coal mining industry, the Junior Doctors dispute only concerns a small fraction of the total NHS staff.

• The Miners' Strike was a full scale strike that crippled the industry and lasted almost an entire year. The Junior Doctor's strikes have been a series of short strikes with cover provided by other medical professionals to ensure patient safety.

• Margaret Thatcher used the police as her own personal militia in order to attack the mining communities of the UK. The idea of David Cameron sending the police in to violently oppress a bunch of doctors is clearly ludicrous.

• There is a strong global demand for medical professionals. If the Tories do successfully manage to crush the BMA and destroy the working conditions of NHS workers, unlike the striking miners, medical professionals have many more opportunities to move somewhere like Canada or Australia where they would be treated with a little less contempt by their government. 

Anyone drawing parallels between these two staggeringly different examples of industrial action is clearly living in cloud cuckoo land.

Forcing people to live longer

Before I get to outlining the details of the Tory strategy to privatise the NHS, I'm just going to detail one more thing that highlights the rotten mentality of the author. Henry Hill has a big whinge about the NHS saving people's lives as if preventing people from dying is not only some kind of economic crime, but an act of cruelty against the individual who has been saved from death!

"Anybody who the NHS 'saves' from a tobacco or food-related deaths will die of something and the NHS will pay for it. If that person is forced to live a long life, they will likely end up costing the NHS more than they would had they died younger."

The idea that the NHS is somehow forcing people against their will to live longer is utterly absurd and an insult to anyone unfortunate enough to read such drivel. Of course people are likely to continue using the NHS if they're not shovelled into an early grave, but it's not beyond the bounds of reason that they will continue working, contributing to their family life or to their local community in some way too is it?

Reducing people's lives down to a balance sheet consisting of nothing more than their costs to the health service is a perfect example of the Tory "price of everything and the value of nothing" mentality.

The strategy

There are four main prongs to the strategy Henry Hill details in his blog post. Diluting the workforce with unqualified staff, removing the right to take industrial action, breaking up the service into many separate employers and drip-feeding the destruction of the NHS slowly so that the public are less likely to notice.

Diluting the workforce with unqualified staff
The author suggests that most of the work doctors do is easy and could be done "by a physicians' assistant with a fraction of the training or wages". He then goes on to fantasise about a health service filled out with well-meaning volunteers based on the Territorial Army model. A health service increasingly staffed by low-skill, low-paid workers and well-meaning volunteers doesn't seem to be a recipe for efficiency to me, but then it just depends how efficiency is defined doesn't it? If quality of service isn't included as a measure of efficiency at all, then the lower the staff costs the more efficient the service.

Removing the right to industrial action
The author wants to see medical professionals stripped of the right to take industrial action like soldiers and the police. If that proves unpopular, then destruction of the right to strike can be achieved in other ways. One is to attack the right to strike at source by introducing a Trade Union Bill designed to make trade union democracy completely unworkable by rendering an abstention as a stronger vote against strike action than an explicit vote against strike action. Another method is the third prong of the Tory attack.

Breaking the service into many separate employers
Breaking the NHS up into many separate employers would remove the power of collective bargaining and render attempts at cross-NHS strikes "sympathy strikes", which were outlawed when the Tories introduced the harshest anti-worker trade union rules in western Europe back in the 1980s. Other benefits to the Tories (and the private health investors who bankroll them) is that smaller chunks of NHS services are not only easier to privatise, it also makes it much easier for private corporations to cherry-pick all the profitable pieces for themselves, whilst leaving the unprofitable bits for the taxpayer to run.

Drip-feeding the destruction of the NHS in doses the public won't notice
The 2012 Health and Social Care Act was a masterclass in the privatisation by stealth strategy. The former Tory party leadership candidate Michael Portillo once explained why this plan to carve the NHS open for mass privatisation wasn't even mentioned in the 2010 Tory manifesto. He said it was because "they did not believe they could win an election if they told you what they were going to do". Even now there are still an awful lot of people out there who are so misinformed that they scoff at the idea that the NHS is being steadily privatised and NHS facilities turned over to the treatment of private patients. Through their policy of deliberately under-reporting the Health and Social Care act and the subsequent waves of privatisations, the mainstream media have been complicit in fostering this all-too-common public mentality that the ongoing privatisation of the NHS is some kind of insane lefty fantasy rather than observable reality.

The education system

There are several parallels between the Tory plot to carve up and privatise the English NHS against the will of medical professionals and public, and the Tory plot to carve up and privatise the entire English education system against the will of the teaching profession and the public alike.

Tory academies and free schools are allowed to employ completely unqualified teachers. The carve up of the education system into the control of numerous private sector academy chains (many owned and operated by major Tory party donors) allows wages and working conditions to be undermined and will eventually be used by the Tories to rule out coordinated industrial action by teachers.

The only difference seems to be that George Osborne and Nicky Morgan are so full of hubris that they were unwilling to continue with their slow and steady approach that has already seen 5,000+ schools handed over to shady unaccountable private sector operators and chose to announce the forced privatisation of every school in England by 2022 as part of George Osborne's 2016 budget of failure.

Conclusion

The Tories are usually very reticent about explaining their true intentions, but occasionally one of them lets it slip.

One example is the vice-chair of the Conservative Health group Paul Charlson explained that abandoning universal NHS healthcare for a fee based system "would be political suicide" unless "there was a feeling in the country that the health service was falling apart" which explains the constant barrage of right-wing propaganda about how crap the NHS is. 

This "How a government can beat the BMA" blog post from Henry Hill is in a different league. It doesn't just accidentally let a piece of Tory ideology slip out, it clearly explains the Tory blueprint for tearing apart our public services, repressing workers' rights and wages and diluting the workforce with unqualified labour, as well as openly displaying the disgusting class war mentality and utter contempt for working people that is so rife within the Tory party.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

Let's ensure Nick Clegg isn't the kingmaker in May 2015

The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has rubbished projections that the Liberal Democrats will lose half of their MPs in the May 2015 General Election, and stated that he expects to be the kingmaker who gets to decide whether to form a government with Labour, or with the Tories.

After the treachery of 2010, where Clegg gleefully shafted several core Lib-Dem demographics (anti-Tory tactical voters, students, social liberals, the anti-war vote ...) in order to prop up David Cameron and a grotesque bunch of malicious and incompetent Tory ministers, the idea of the only certainty in 2015 being a return to government for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats is an utterly revolting one.

I'm pretty sure that the majority of people are hoping that the Liberal Democrats get a hammering in the General Election, and that Nick Clegg suffers what has become known as a "Portillo moment", by becoming the most high profile political figure to lose their seat in the election.

In order to prevent Nick Clegg from being the kingmaker who gets to pick who to form a government with, the public need to use their heads and vote in particular ways. People in Scotland and Sheffield have more power to damage Clegg's kingmaker ambitions than the rest of us, but we can all chip in to make sure Clegg doesn't get to decide whether to make kings of the red establishment party or the blue one.
  

What we can do

Scotland

Recent poll results have predicted absolute landslide victories for the SNP in Scotland, which would be good for preventing Nick Clegg from being kingmaker for two big reasons.

Firstly it looks like the SNP are set to unseat at least ten of, if not all eleven of the Lib-Dem MPs in Scotland. The loss of this many Lib-Dem MPs equates to a 20% reduction in the total number of Lib-Dems in Westminster. Combine this carnage in Scotland with the predicted losses across the rest of the UK and it does look extremely likely that the Lib-Dems will lose around half of their MPs.

The second reason that a huge SNP triumph in Scotland would damage the Lib-Dems' chances of sneaking back into power is that if the SNP win the 40+ seats they're predicted to, they'll usurp the Lib-Dems as the 3rd largest party in the House of Commons, and would naturally assume the role of Kingmakers for themselves. An added bonus to this scenario is that the SNP would never form a coalition government with the Tories, and were they to form a confidence and supply arrangement with the Labour Party, they'd drag them back towards the left where they belong.

Sheffield

Nick Clegg is in severe danger of losing his parliamentary seat in Sheffield Hallam. Rival campaigners have said that they've never witnessed such hostility towards an incumbent MP before, especially such a high profile one.

Unfortunately the Green Party have not made very much headway in the constituency, and barring an unprecedented late surge in support for them, the only serious rival to Nick Clegg seems to be the Labour candidate Oliver Coppard.

I've often stated my objection to what the Labour Party has become, but in this case I'm prepared to make an exception and suggest that people in Sheffield Hallam seriously consider holding their noses and voting for the young Labour candidate in order to hand Nick Clegg the "Portillo moment" he so richly deserves.

If you live elsewhere in Sheffield or South Yorkshire, you can always assist the campaign to unseat Nick Clegg in Sheffield Hallam by actively joining the campaign, or by talking to people in the Sheffield Hallam constituency about why Nick Clegg needs to go.

The rest of us

Even though the people of Scotland and Sheffield have the most important roles in ensuring Nick Clegg gets the comeuppance he deserves, the rest of us have a role to play too.

The most obvious thing we can do to avoid the scenario where the Lib-Dems get to decide which party they are going to enable into power in May is to avoid voting Liberal Democrat (considering the majority of polls put them below 10% of the vote, there aren't actually that many people left who need convincing not to vote Lib-Dem!).

Another thing we can do to block Nick Clegg's kingmaker ambitions is to vote against all three of the Westminster establishment parties, and to convince as many other people as possible to vote alternative too (especially habitual non-voters). If enough of us do this, we'll be able to push the UK towards multi-party politics, and add to the increasing pressure to replace out outdated and disproportionate voting system with one that gives fairer representation of the way people actually voted.

If the combined total for all of the other parties rises to well above 30% (which seems possible given recent poll results), yet they end up with fewer than 5% of the seats between them, the demand for proper electoral reform will become irresistible.

Once proper electoral reform is achieved, people will get to vote for the candidate they actually want, rather than voting tactically against the candidate they hate, which would be the first important step in ending the duopoly on political power held by Labour and the Tories for the last 100 years, and it would also put paid to incredibly unpopular self-appointed kingmakers like Nick Clegg.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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12 things you should know about the Tory NHS "reforms"

In this article I'm going to explain twelve things that you should know about the Tories and the NHS.

I have also uploaded a version of this article to Buzzfeed, which contains more pictures but fewer words. You can see that here.

David Cameron Lied about the NHS

Before the 2010 general election David Cameron promised "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS", then within months of coming to power his Health secretary Andrew Lansley launched the biggest top-down reorganisation in the history of the NHS (the Health and Social Care Act). Cameron also made the pre-election promise that the Tories would "cut the deficit, not the NHS", before launching £20 billion worth of NHS cuts.

Michael Portillo admitted the truth

In 2011 the former Tory leadership candidate Michael Portillo admitted that David Cameron and the Tories had lied to the public about their intentions towards the NHS before the 2010 General Election: "They did not believe they could win an election if they told you what they were going to do because people are so wedded to the NHS."

Portillo was right, the privatisation of the NHS is a very unpopular idea

According to a 2013 YouGov poll, 84% of the public would prefer to see the NHS run as a not-for-profit public service, whilst just 7% favour privatisation. [source]

Even though they were facing a Labour party led by an incredibly unpopular and blunder prone leader in Gordon Brown, and in the wake of the biggest economic meltdown in generations, the Tories were still incapable of even winning a majority government. Had they admitted their intentions to carve up the NHS and hand out the pieces to their corporate mates, this would surely have cost them hundreds of thousands of votes, and potentially left Labour to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats.

Loads of Tory politicians have vested interests in the privatisation of the NHS

Dozens and dozens of the Tory MPs and Lords who voted in favour of the privatisation of the NHS had clear vested financial interests in private health corporations. Here is a detailed list of some of those politicians who look set to benefit from the NHS privatisation bill they voted for.

One of the most notable examples is Lazy Lord Coe, who barely ever turns up to vote in the House of Lords (he voted in just 7.9% of debates between 2000 and 2013). However when the opportunity to benefit his numerous private health interests (PruHealth, AMT Sybex, Chime Communications) presented itself, he was amongst many Tory lords with financial interests in the private health sector to make rare appearances in the House of Lords and vote in favour of greater NHS privatisation.

The Tories have been carving up the NHS and giving away the pieces to their donors
Circle Health, which is 29.2% owned by a hedge fund run by major Tory party donor Paul Ruddock has been handed over £1.3 billion in NHS contracts. Other Tory party donors with major investments in Circle Health include Martyn Arbib, Crispin Odey and Michael Platt.

 Care UK has received over £100 million in NHS contracts. Their chairman is John Nash who has made £247,250 worth of donations to the Tory party. Aside from his company picking up huge NHS contract as a result of Tory party legislation, he has also been handed a seat in the unelected House of Lords.

 [source]

The NHS is one of the best health services in the world

A recent study by the Washington based Commonwealth Fund has shown that the NHS is one of the best, cheapest and most efficient health services in the world, whilst the private sector dominated US health system is the worst, most expensive and least efficient of the eleven different health care systems that they looked at. The NHS reforms introduced by the Tory party are designed to make the NHS much more like the US system by bringing in ever more private health corporations to take over NHS services. The Tory mantra about bringing in the private sector to "make the NHS more efficient" is just a smokescreen. The real reason for bringing in the private sector is to soak as much profit out of the system as possible, with no regards for the quality or efficiency of the service.

Jeremy Hunt

In 2009 the Tory MP Jeremy Hunt co-authored a book which called for the NHS to be dismantled and called it "no longer relevant". In 2012 David Cameron appointed Jeremy Hunt as Health Secretary, meaning that the man who is now responsible for the NHS is a man who has called for it to be completely abolished.

The fact that David Cameron would appoint a Health Secretary who is on record saying that the NHS should be abolished illustrates exactly how gullible he imagined the general public to be when he made the pre-election promise that "the NHS will be safe in my hands".

No Confidence

Medical professionals have voted time and again against the Tory NHS reforms. The British Medical Association have also passed motions of no-confidence against the current Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and his predecessor Andrew Lansley. Virtually the entire medical profession is opposed to the Tories and their plot to privatise the NHS. It is quite impossible to make the NHS "more efficient" when the people in charge of it are conducting an ideological war against the people who actually run the service. What is needed is people in charge who want to work with the doctors and other medical professionals, rather than against them.

The myth of private sector efficiency

The facts that the private sector dominated US health system is hugely expensive and inefficient, whilst the public sector dominated NHS is rated as one of the most efficient in the world should be enough to convince most people that it is a complete myth that the private sector is somehow inherently more efficient than the public sector.

When it comes to health care provision it is quite easy to understand why greater private sector involvement causes inefficiencies in the system. If the NHS signs a 30 year PFI contract for a new hospital, or outsources the provision of health care services to a private health company on a 25 year contract, these contracts can only be escaped from at enormous cost in compensation. Even modifying the contracts to take account of changing needs is extraordinarily expensive. When such long term contracts are signed, the NHS is legally obliged to continue paying for them, no matter what the changing health care requirements of the community.

These obligations build inflexibility and inefficiency into the system. When the health system operates under a single umbrella, services can be modified with relative ease, but when contracts with hedge funds, private equity groups and multinational healthcare companies have been signed, any modifications incur large financial costs.

Forced hospital closures

The Princess Regent University Hospital (which cost £118 million to construct) was built in South London, but under the terms of the PFI contract, the amount repayable over the decades will be £2.5 billion, returning a handsome 70.6% profit to the PFI consortium.

The extraordinary costs of paying off this PFI debt crippled the South London Healthcare Trust, forcing them to look for savings. The proposal they came up with was a plan to shut down the Accident and Emergency department and the maternity ward at Lewisham Hospital, and to sell off the land and buildings in order to raise £17 million towards paying their PFI debts. This plan would have left Lewisham (population 750,000) without an A&E or maternity ward, and sparked large public protests and a legal challenge against the decision to shut down most of the hospital and sell off the land.

The legal challenge against the closure of Lewisham A&E was successful, but this victory for people power was a short lived one. The response of the Tory party was to pass new legislation to allow the Health Secretary the power to shut down any NHS run hospital, no matter how efficiently the services is run, in just 40 days. As a result, next time a local health authority gets into financial difficulties as a result of their PFI debts, the Tories can simply shut down a load of local NHS run services in order to protect the profits of rip-off PFI consortia, no matter how efficient the NHS services are, or how strong the public opposition.

More Tory lies

Here's one undeniable example of lies from the Tory party manifesto. 2010
"We will stop the forced closure of A&E and maternity wards, so that people have better access to local services, and give mothers a real choice over where to have their baby, with NHS funding following their decisions." 
2010 Conservative Party Manifesto, page 47

2012 
The Tories attempt to force the closure of the A&E and maternity ward at Lewisham Hospital, but were defeated in the courts.

2014 
The Tories pass new legislation to make it much easier for the Health Secretary force the closure of NHS hospitals and services.

And here's another example.

2010
"We will make patients’ choices meaningful by putting patients in charge of making decisions about their care, including control of their health records."
2010 Conservative Party Manifesto, page 47

2014
The Tories table new legislation aimed at allowing private health corporations to buy access to people's private health records without their consent. After a huge public outcry against this plan the Tories were forced to postpone their plan to sell off our medical data. However within a week of them shelving their data sharing plans it was revealed that 47 million private medical records had already been sold off to a private insurance company.

The Tories and the NHS eventually admitted that the records shouldn't have been sold off without anyone's consent, so I suppose that's alright then!
   
Privatising the profits, socialising the losses

The most recent example of privatising the profits and socialising the losses can be seen in the botched eye operations carried out at the NHS Musgrove Park hospital in Taunton by the private sector contractor Vanguard Health. 30 of the 60 operations carried out by the private company led to complications, including complete blindness in one case. After just four days the NHS Hospital terminated the contract with Vanguard, but it seems that the NHS hospital will be held liable for compensations to the victims of these botched eye operations carried out on NHS premises by a private company. Another example of the taxpayer having to pay out for the failings of private health companies can be in the case of the Lister Surgicentre in Stevenage, which was run by the private company Clinicenta until the contract was terminated early in 2013 due to poor standards of care. In order to terminate the contract, the taxpayer had to fork out £53 million in compensation to Clinicenta.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

More articles from
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The NHS is not safe in their hands
          
The Tory ideological mission
                  
Tories sell NHS blood supply to vampire capitalists

   
What do Tory donors get for their cash?
                    
The Tory "War on Justice"

          
A "minor" amendment to privatise the NHS
          

The JP Morgan plan for Europe
         
The "unpatriotic left" fallacy

Lazy Lord Coe and the Tory NHS sell-off
               
Does UKIP want to privatise the NHS?
        
Paul Nuttal's disappearing NHS comments
               
     The ongoing destruction of the NHS
           

The destruction of the NHS

I realise that because of my tendency to present lots of facts and conduct rigorous analysis on them, my articles are usually extremely long. Today I am going to try very hard to write a short and concise article about what is happening to the NHS.

Before the Tory party were enabled back into power by the Liberal Democrats, the NHS was one of the most efficient and popular health services in the world. In fact, public satisfaction with the service reached an all-time high immediately before the Tories got their hands on it.

Before the election David Cameron lied, and, lied, and lied about his intentions towards the NHS.

• David Cameron said he wouldn't cut the NHS - then launched a £20 billion programme of cuts.

• David Cameron  said "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS" - then launched the biggest top-down reorganisation in the entire history of the institution.

• David Cameron promised that he wouldn't privatise the NHS - then proceeded to carve it up into little pieces and sell them off to the private sector.

• David Cameron said that the NHS would be safe in his hands - then set about deliberately dismantling it from within.

The true Tory intentions towards the NHS should have been obvious. The Tory party has an ideological hatred of the public sector and consider the NHS an abomination. They know that more than 80% of the public support the NHS, so they very rarely admit their desire to dismantle it, but sometimes the truth slips out.

• In 2004 Tory MP Oliver Letwin reportedly bragged to a private meeting that the Tories would destroy the NHS "within five years" of getting back into power. [source]

• In 2009 Tory MEP Daniel Hannan described the NHS as a "60 year mistake" and rubbished the service on Fox News. [source]

• In 2009 three Tory MPs (Michael Gove, Greg Clark and Jeremy Hunt) called for the NHS to be dismantled. [source] Incredibly Jeremy Hunt is now the government health secretary, meaning that he is in charge of an organisation that he has openly stated that he wants to dismantle.

• In 2011 the former Tory leadership candidate Michael Portillo admitted that Cameron and the Tories had lied to the public about their intentions towards the NHS: "They did not believe they could win an election if they told you what they were going to do because people are so wedded to the NHS." [source]

Since the Tories and Lib-Dems voted through their Health and Social Care Backdoor Privatisation of the NHS Bill, £1.5 billion worth of NHS services have been sold off to Tory party donors.

It is incontestable that the NHS is currently being dismantled from within. The government had absolutely no mandate to do this because they didn't mention it in their manifesto (and in fact they repeatedly lied that they wouldn't do it). It is also incontestable that many of the biggest financial beneficiaries of this sell-off are direct donors to the Tory party.

The Tories are trying to convert the NHS from the public service model to the profit driven US model (even though studies have found the US system to be less efficient than the UK system, despite being the most expensive in the world). They are hoping that if they just keep the NHS signs on the outside of the hospitals, nobody will notice that everything inside has been sold off, or given away to the private sector.

Not only are health outcomes much poorer in the US, prices are much higher too. The Washington Post found that countless drugs, treatments and services were vastly more expensive in the US than they were in the NHS. Privatisation represents extremely poor value for the taxpayer, but then the Tories are not interested in value for the taxpayer in the slightest, what they are interested in is allowing their corporate chums to extract as much profit from every aspect of human existence as possible.

One other factor which is very rarely considered is the inflexibility that privatisation builds into the system. If the NHS signs a 30 year PFI contract for a hospital, or hands out a 25 year contract for some private health company to provide an NHS service, these contracts can only be escaped from at enormous cost in compensation. Even modifying the contracts to take account of changing needs is extraordinarily expensive. This private sector inflexibility is precisely the reason that in March 2014 Jeremy Hunt awarded himself the power to shut down any NHS hospital, no matter how good it is, in just 40 days. If a neighbouring PFI hospital or private service is losing loads of money and providing terrible services, the Tories can now quickly shut down a neighbouring NHS run hospital to cut costs, no matter how efficiently it is run, nor how high the quality of service.

On the whole, the mainstream media oligopoly have no interest in explaining the truth about the dismantling of the NHS, they're more interested in spreading Tory anti-NHS propaganda and recycling the absurd narrative that privatising NHS services to make it more like the American system will make it more "efficient".

This failure of the press to accurately explain what is going on means it is increasingly down to the public themselves to spread the truth about what is happening. You can help to spread the word by sharing this article and/or sharing the picture to the right.

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