On May 12th 1994 the Labour Party leader John Smith died of a massive heart attack at the age of 55. At the time Labour had a 23 point lead over the Conservative government in the opinion polls, and Smith was seen as an honest and organised alternative to the outright lies and absolute chaos of the John Major administration.
Smith wasn't just a good leader who unified the Labour Party, he was also a very intelligent man and an engaging public speaker too.
These days practically every speech a politician makes ends up on Youtube, Facebook or Twitter, but Smith died before the Internet age, meaning that many of his speeches haven't even been transcribed onto the Internet, let alone posted onto social media.
The main part of this article will include quotes from a John Smith speech entitled "Reclaiming the ground" that he read at the R.H. Tawney memorial lecture in March 1993.
None of these fantastic quotes have appeared on the Internet to date.
The concluding part of this article will explain why John Smith's untimely death was a tragedy for the Labour Party, and a tragedy for the United Kingdom as a whole.
Quotes from "Reclaiming the ground"
"Let us not deny the tide of opinion, which I believe is beginning to flow towards a recognition of the value of society and away from the destructive individualism of so much of modem Conservatism ... Arid at a time when the moral values of our society are coming under
increasing strain, we could be taking the first steps in a social revolution by encouraging, through conviction and example, a return to the standards of integrity and honour our society deserves."
"We must never be afraid of saying that we will adopt a policy because it is, quite simply, the right thing to do."
"Despite the considerable electoral disappointments that many parties of the Left have experienced in Western democratic societies throughout the 1980s, there remains strong public acceptance for many of the principles and achievements of democratic socialism. I am thinking in particular about the National Health Service in Britain and the framework of social and employment rights that are widely supported in most countries in Western Europe."
"Real freedom depends on the interdependence of the individual and society, and why this idea - which has long remained at the centre of democratic socialist thinking - retains Its intellectual force and its capacity for popular appeal."
"The flaws in the doctrines of the radical right are becoming more widely appreciated and more easily exposed than ever before. Their vision of humanity consists of individuals as decision-making units concerned exclusively with their own self-interest, making transactions in a marketplace. It is a theory that makes very ambitious moral and economic claims, for example, that it alone preserves freedom and promotes prosperity. I believe however that it is a doctrine based on an absurd caricature of human behaviour, which grossly misunderstands the nature of freedom, and seriously ignores the value of society - even to the extent of denying its very existence."
"The fundamental flaw in the individualism of the classical writers, and their modem counterparts in today's Conservative Party, is, I believe, their assumption that human beings conduct their lives on the basis of self-interested decisions taken in radical isolation from others. This thesis grotesquely ignores the intrinsically social nature of human beings and fails to recognize the capabilities that all people have to act in response to commitments and beliefs that clearly transcend any narrow calculation of personal advantage."
"Providing perhaps unexpected support for this line of argument is none other than Adam Smith who, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, wrote: 'How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness to be necessary to him'. The fact that this insight of Smith's Is difficult to reconcile with his later and more famous study of economics has caused many of his recent followers to overlook his earlier work. Just as they also tend to ignore his support for public investment in infrastructure, in education and the arts, which are hidden gems of intervention that can be found alongside his thesis of the invisible hand in the Wealth of Nations."
"Markets do not enjoy the total supremacy that is envisaged for them by neo-classical economics. Market systems, whilst remaining an effective and useful means of enabling choice and distribution of myriad goods and services, exist alongside and are embedded in other social and political institutions which also contribute to human welfare, and which themselves shape and modify the way markets actually work."
"What R.H. Tawney realised was that meaningful freedom depended on real ability. That for millions of people citizenship was empty and valueless if squalor and deprivation were the reality of a society only theoretically free. What was needed was positive liberty - the freedom
to achieve that is gained through education, health care, housing, and employment. An infrastructure of freedom that would require collective provision of basic needs through an enabling State. It is this richer conception of freedom for the individual in society that is the moral basis of democratic socialism."
"The undermining of local government (which is part of the deliberate down-grading of all alternative power systems to the central State) means that communities are being weakened by having no means to advance their own ambitions and to tackle their own problems in their own way."
I urge a renaissance of local government in the context of a more pluralistic and diverse society. It is why I believe that devolving
power from an over-centralised Westminster and Whitehall to Scotland, Wales and the regions of England is a necessary part of the refurbishment of our democracy. Democracy has to be a vital and constantly refreshing element on our socialism."
"There is no good reason why Britain should not have emulated the achievements of the Scandinavian countries which, profoundly influenced by their social democratic tradition, have set standards which in recent years our country has fallen well below."
"There is so much of good that can be done if we seize the opportunities which the modem world makes available.
Instead of carrying the miserable burden of mass unemployment, we could be investing In new technology and in new skills.
Instead of witnessing the crumbling of our education system and the fracturing of our health service, we could be building high-quality public services which provide security and opportunity for every family in the land.
Instead of allowing our society to become diminished by the violence and dishonesty of crime, we could be building strong communities which provide protection for every citizen.
Instead of savagely increasing unfair taxes which will further damage so many lives, we could be investing in people, investing in infrastructure, investing in manufacturing Industry.
There is so much we could do. There is so much that needs to be done."
Why John Smith's death was such a tragedy
As you can see from the quotes above, Smith was an intelligent and articulate man who cared deeply about the whole of society. Had he lived to lead the Labour Party to triumph at the 1997 general election he could have decisively rejected the hard-right economic agenda of the Tories and set the United Kingdom on a radically different course towards a more democratic, and more equal society, where the wealth of the nation was harnessed to provide opportunities for all to success, rather than being siphoned off to further enrich a tiny super-rich minority as it is now.
The great tragedy is that this man of such principle and integrity was succeeded by the self-serving opportunist Tony Blair, who did follow through on some of Smith's favoured policies (such as devolution, investment in education and the health service, and combating poverty) but who also made an agreement with the right-wing propagandist Rupert Murdoch that he would not reverse the hard-right privatisations and financial sector deregulations of the Tories in return for support from the Murdoch propaganda empire (The S*n, News of the World, Times, Sky TV).
There's absolutely no way that John Smith would have supported the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq, and there's no way that he would have supported a Labour government adopting the right-wing economic madness of PFI alchemy schemes (bribing private companies to build public infrastructure, then paying them 5x, 10x, 20x the construction cost in order to rent it for the next couple of decades).
Had John Smith lived to win the general election in 1997, he would have begun properly reversing the worst aspects of Thatcherism. Instead of inheriting Thatcher's throne and occupying it for his own benefit like Blair did, Smith would have restructured society in order to re-empower individuals and local communities.
Putting the catastrophe of the Iraq war aside, it's undeniable that Tony Blair achieved some significant things - like saving the NHS from the ideological ruin the Tories had been steering it towards, significantly reducing child poverty, introducing the minimum wage, the Irish peace process, and devolution for Scotland and Wales.
The problem was that he didn't steer the country away from the radical hard-right economic dogma of the Conservatives and prove that there was a better way.
In fact he sat idly by as the country drifted towards the social and economic ruination of the bankers' crisis that blew up in Gordon Brown's face and handed the Tory rabble an unexpected route back into power to continue the fanatical hard-right economic agenda that should have been killed stone dead in 1997.
Had Smith reversed the flow instead of simply going along with it like Tony Blair did, the Tories would have been forced to reappraise their hard-right fanaticism and develop a more socially responsible form of conservatism (like the 19th Century one-nation Conservatives, or the Christian Democratic Union in Germany).
The reason the UK is now facing the horror of an economically and socially ruinous hard Brexit led by the most savagely right-wing authoritarian Prime Minister in living memory is that John Smith never had the opportunity to decisively prove integrity and democratic socialism to be superior to opportunism and hard-right economic dogma.
Sadly John Smith died at the age of 55 and then his successor Tory Blair went on to completely destroy the idea of integrity in high office with his self-serving behaviour and the outrageous deceptions he used to con the nation into going along with his plan to invade and occupy Iraq.
Instead of reversing the hard-right neoclassical dogma, Blair simply softened the edges of it and then kept the seat of power warm for the Tories.
That's why Margaret Thatcher once quipped that Tony Blair and the New Labour project were her greatest achievement in politics, because unlike an awful lot of wishful thinkers on the left, she saw Tony Blair as the ideologically indifferent self-serving placeholder he was.
She would never have seen John Smith that way.
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It's undeniable that Owen Smith has been imitating Jeremy Corbyn's policies on a number of issues. Ending ideological austerity, an investment fund for infrastructure, opposition to exploitative Zero Hours Contracts, bans on exclusive recruitment abroad for jobs in the UK, wealth taxes and now even the highly specific policy of introducing a Ministry of Labour, loads of Owen Smith's policies are indistinguishable from Jeremy Corbyn's.
Misleading propaganda
Given that the Blairite faction of the Labour Party and the mainstream media have conducted an intensive propaganda war to try to portray Jeremy Corbyn as some kind of dangerously radical extremist, how on earth are they allowing Owen Smith to pillage Corbyn's policies without whining that he's an extremist too?
How is it possible that one guy is supposedly a "dangerous fanatic", but the guy imitating most of the supposedly dangerous and fanatical policies is a "moderate" and the only hope of saving Labour?
The constant pillaging of Jeremy Corbyn's policies by his Blairite backed rival exposes just how inaccurate most of the anti-Corbyn propaganda has been over the last year. If he really was as bad as they kept claiming, they wouldn't be copying most of his policies, they wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
The Blairite U-turn on austerity vs investment
In 2015 the Blairite former interim shadow chancellor Chris Leslie's savagely attacked Corbyn's policy of using quantitative easing cash to invest directly in infrastructure and services (rather than just handing it to the private banks and naively hoping that they invest in useful things rather than the inflation of asset and housing bubbles as was done last time). Leslie wasn't the only one either. Yvette Cooper (the wife of the guy who came up with Ed Miliband's hopelessly uninspiring and election-losing austerity-lite strategy for the 2015 General Election) also bitterly criticised the Corbyn/McDonnell plan to boost the economy by directly investing in infrastructure and services.
Owen Smith has been promising a £200 billion investment in infrastructure and services as one of his flagship policies. Are Chris Leslie and Yvette Cooper apoplectic with rage about this plan? Of course they're not. They're supporting Owen Smith.
There are only a few explanations for this radical shift from phlegm specked condemnation from the Blairites in 2015 to active support for a guy pushing investment rather than austerity economics in 2016.
- Over the past year the likes of Leslie and Cooper have come over to Corbyn's strategic investment position because the Tory "let's cut our way to growth" agenda is falling out of fashion (thanks to some actual opposition to it from the opposition party after 5 years of feeble hand-wringing from Miliband's team). This would imply that Corbyn is actually a very good communicator who even managed to convince people who absolutely detest him to change their economic views.
- The likes of Leslie and Cooper always knew that Corbyn was right about austerity being a load of ideologically driven rubbish, but they were prepared to attack him for his anti-austerity position because back in 2015 the opinion polls said that austerity was still believed in by the Tory voters they want Labour to appeal to.
- They still secretly agree with Tory austerity but they're pretending to like Smith's Corbynite investment plans because they know that the only way to beat Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Leadership election is to imitate his policies in order to nick his supporters. If this is the case I guess they're confident that Smith will ditch his investment plans after the leadership election is over, and go back to promoting the kind of right-wing Tory style economic policies the Blairite faction is keen on.
Blame the symptoms, not the cause
Owen Smith's policy of restructuring the DWP as the Ministry of Labour is such a blatant steal it's ridiculous. Corbyn promoted that policy back in August 2015 and the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell committed to the IER recommendations to introduce a Ministry of Labour in June 2016.
Several Anyone But Corbyn supporters have claimed that it's a sign of Corbyn's poor communication that they hadn't heard of the policies that Owen Smith is now copying, but it's hard to spread the message about your policies when only 11% of all newspaper articles bother to accurately report what your policies are.
Blaming Corbyn for the lack of fair coverage he gets in the corporate mainstream media is almost as crackers as blaming him for the catastrophic Labour slump in the polls since the inept Anyone But Corbyn coup was launched (imagine suffering such tunnel vision that you couldn't spot the link between an ill-timed, ineptly conducted and highly damaging internal party coup attempt and a subsequent slump in the poll numbers).
Cyber-squatting
One thing that it is worth noting is that Owen Smith's pilfering of Corbyn's policies means that if you now conduct Internet searches for some of Corbyn's policies, the results are completely dominated about articles about Owen Smith's reiterations of Corbyn's policies.
Here are a couple of examples:
Given the staggering ineptitude of the Anyone But Corbyn coup, it's hard to imagine that this cyber-squatting in Jeremy Corbyn's search engine results is deliberate, but it's now a definite factor that people searching for detail of Corbyn's policies end up being confronted by reams of mainstream media articles about Owen Smith's versions of the same policies.
Ideological flexibility
My last (and probably most important) point is that Owen Smith is a political chameleon who will do and say whatever he thinks is necessary in order to serve his own political interests.
Today he's pretending to be a radical progressive socialist because he knows that's exactly what he needs to do in order to have even the remotest chance of ousting Jeremy Corbyn in a vote amongst Labour members. But before he was playing this "radical leftie" character he was a full-bore Blairite who in 2006 expressed support for right-wing policies like PFI and the privatisation of the state education system couldn't even bring himself to criticise the failings of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
If Smith can switch from being a loyal Blairite parroting apologia for right-wing policies like PFI and privatisation of the education system to being a radical leftie pushing left-wing Corbynite policies, how on earth could anyone trust him to not switch back to right-wing Blairism again once he's duped people into voting for him, especially given that his leadership bid is backed by every Blairite in the Labour Party?
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The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has proven to be a disastrous policy for pretty much everyone apart from the profiteering corporate beneficiaries and the consultancy firms that rake in cash by helping them draw up their rip-off one-sided deals to extract vast sums of money from the taxpayer.
The idea of PFI is that instead of the government funding infrastructure projects directly (using their access to very cheap finance) they get the private sector to borrow the money at much higher market rates, then rent the infrastructure off the private sector on long-term contracts that end up costing many multiples of what the thing would have actually cost to build.
PFI is like the government turning to those parasitical Hire Purchase companies to buy things slowly at five times the price, rather than getting a low interest loan to pay a realistic upfront cost for what they're buying.
In 2011 The Parliamentary Treasury Select Committee finally got around to admitting that PFI is as an "extremely inefficient method of financing [public infrastructure] projects", yet one government after another has continued using them because, although they are a rip-off, they provide a means of hiding public spending off the public balance sheet by loading current infrastructure investment costs onto future generations.
The Tories began introducing rip-off PFI deals in the early 1990s and New Labour continued rolling them out because it helped them hide chunks of public spending off the public balance sheet in order to stick to Gordon Brown's absurd and arbitrary "Golden Rule" that public borrowing shouldn't exceed 40% of GDP (a rule the was quickly forgotten about when they found £1.5 trillion to bail out the banks that had gambled themselves into insolvency).
One of the recurring themes with PFI is that the opposition parties criticise it, then as soon as they're in power they begin using it to their own advantage. When the Tories introduced it in the early 1990s Labour politicians like Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling condemned it as a form of stealth-privatisation that burdens future generations with the costs of current investment. When New Labour took power these concerns were instantly forgotten about. Towards the end of New Labour, when they were signing up to one rip-off PFI contract after another, the shadow chancellor George Osborne began whinging on about PFI being a rip-off. When George Osborne and the Tories were enabled into power by the Lib-Dems, he simply re-branded PFI as PF2 and continued using the same kind of rip-off financing deals to load current infrastructure costs onto the shoulders of future generations.
Another recurring theme with PFI is the procession of disastrous projects. From NHS trusts crippled under the financial burden of servicing their PFI debts to local councils being forced to pay £millions in rent and service charges on completely empty PFI schools, PFI keeps proving to be a disaster to everyone but the corporate profiteers.
The latest in this long line of monumental PFI cock-ups is the closure of 17 PFI built schools in Edinburgh over safety concerns, which has left some 9,000 students stranded. The decision to indefinitely shut the schools came after the PFI consortium that operates the schools admitted that they couldn't ensure the structural safety of the buildings after serious structural issues were uncovered during repair work to Oxgangs Primary School where a huge section of wall collapsed in January 2016.
The Edinburgh Schools Partnership consortium (Amey, Miller Construction & Bank of Scotland) who are responsible for this fiasco released a public statement that made it sound like they were doing the public a favour by investing why the schools they built are so structurally unsound that they have a tendency to collapse! They shouldn't just be accepting "full financial responsibility for investigating and resolving these issues", they should be accepting full financial responsibility for the alternative childcare arrangements made by the parents of the 9,000 kids who can't go to school because the profiteers who built and operate their school buildings have no idea if they're going to fall down or not.
It's easy to blame New Labour for this situation in Edinburgh because all of those buildings were built on their watch as part of a £360 million PFI, but it's important to note that the SNP government in Scotland has done their own huge splurge of PFI spending too:
● The Aberdeen western peripheral route: Capital cost £469m, cost of PFI payments £1.45bn
● City of Glasgow College campus: Capital cost £193m, cost of PFI payments £604m
● Scottish Blood Transfusion Service HQ: Capital cost £33.3m, cost of PFI payments £100m
● Anderson high school, Shetland: Capital cost £41m, cost of PFI payments £102m
The Tories invented PFI; New Labour created far more PFI debt legacies than any other party during their 13 years in power; the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power and helped them continue using PFIs; and the SNP have signed up to all kinds of rip-off PFI deals since they came to power in Scotland too.
It turns out that the Green Party are the biggest political party in Scotland to actually oppose these appalling rip-off PFI deals. The Green candidate for Lothian Andy Wightman is calling for a full review of all PFI contracts in Scotland. Here's what he said:
"The Edinburgh school fiasco opens up a massive can of worms as to what the true legacy is of years of private financing of core public services. That is why Green MSPs, in the new parliament, will be demanding a root and branch review of all PPP/PFI contracts."
The SNP look set to win a landslide victory in the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections, so it looks like PFI will be there to stay. Given their pro-PFI histories it seems very unlikely that the Tories, Labour or the Lib-Dems would be able to effectively hold the SNP government to account on PFI, so if I was a Scottish resident I'd definitely be looking into who my local Scottish Green candidate is at the very least.
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It's not often that I find myself agreeing with anything Peter Hitchens says, so I was taken aback when I stumbled across an old article of his in the Daily Mail calling for the renationalisation of British Rail, in which he described rail privatisation as "a huge con that left us with delays, antique trains and a vast bill", admitted that he'd stopped believing in free-trade and asked "What on earth is the point of the Labour Party if it cannot even oppose the mad disaster of railway privatisation?"
Once I got over the shock of agreeing with something this right-wing blowhard had said (by telling myself that even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day), I got to thinking about the answer to the question: What is the point of the Labour Party?
I know what the point of the Labour Party used to be before Blair and Brown took over in 1994 and replaced the principle ideologies of the party with a Rupert Murdoch approved version of neoliberalism-lite (Thatcherite economic policy with a sprinkling of pseudo-socialist window dressing). The point of the Old Labour party was to maintain a social democratic system in which the public are provided with a social safety net and enough opportunities in life to stop them from rising up and overthrowing the establishment.
In my view the achievements of the post-war Labour Party were the great political legacy of the 20th Century. The NHS, full employment, decent housing, and a more equitable share of the wealth for the bottom 90% of society. The truly incredible thing is that as all of this was being built and maintained, the national debt fell from 238% of GDP in 1947 to just 43% of GDP in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher tore up the post-war consensus in favour of ideologically driven right-wing neoliberalism, since when the national debt has skyrocketed back up again (especially if you include the deliberately hidden costs of PFI debt legacies and the bankers' bailouts).The privatisation of British Rail has been the most visible failure all of the crony capitalist privatisations enforced by the 1979-97 Tory government. As a result of this ludicrous ideologically driven sell-off, Network Rail (the bit that runs the actual railway lines) has amassed a staggering £34 billion worth of public debt; the UK rail engineering and manufacturing sectors have been annihilated; ticket prices have risen above inflation year, after year, after year; overcrowding has got ridiculous and extremely dangerous on many commuter lines; and the private rail operators and rolling stock companies have got rich on £billions worth of taxpayer funded subsidies.
The subsidies handed out to private rail companies amount to far more than the entire cost of British Rail before it was carved up for privatisation, and where we were once global leaders in advanced rail technology, we now buy our tilting trains from Italy!
After Labour came to power in 1997 they had 13 years to do something about the incredible shambles the Tories had created out of our rail network, but they did nothing. In fact they were busy with their own madcap privatisation scams to rival the incompetence of Tory rail privatisation fiasco.
PFI was introduced by the Tory party in the early 1990s, but Gordon Brown oversaw a huge expansion in these ridiculous one-sided contracts, that have been described by the Treasury Select Committee as "an extremely inefficient method of funding [public infrastructure] projects". The debt legacies from these absurd economic alchemy schemes have already driven numerous NHS Trusts into severe financial difficulties, and will remain an enormous burden on future generations of taxpayers.
Hundreds of billions in outstanding PFI debt legacies may be the most expensive privatisation burden left by New Labour, but the most ludicrous of all must be the Mapeley Steps deal to privatise the Inland Revenue property portfolio. Anyone suffering under the delusion that New Labour was a socialist government, should think long and hard about how on earth privatising our tax collection offices into the hands of a company basing themselves in Bermuda for the purposes of avoiding tax, is in any way compatible with socialism (an economic system based on social ownership).
Labour's track record in office is proof that the party ceased to be any kind of socialist party when it was usurped by Blair and Brown in 1994. Of course there are still good people within the Labour party (John McDonnell, Dennis Skinner, Michael Meacher, Ian Mearns, Stella Creasy, Austin Mitchell, Jeremy Corbyn, Grahame Morris ...), and a significant percentage of Labour supporters still identify as socialists. However it is absolutely clear that Labour will never go back to promoting social democracy, as long as adherents of the right-wing economic orthodoxy like Ed Balls retain key positions within the party.
The current Labour party energy policy is a perfect illustration that the party is intent on remaining a neoliberal party, but disguising the fact with a dollop of pseudo-socialist tinkering. The vast majority of the UK public want to see the energy companies renationalised, but all "Red Ed" is prepared to offer is the continuation of private ownership of our vital energy infrastructure, just with a short-term energy price freeze as a bribe to the electorate.
Another indicator that Labour offer no real alternative to the Tories is the ludicrous pledge to stick to George Osborne's spending plans, despite the fact that George Osborne's economic plans have been a collossal failure so far. In 2010 he pledged to completely eliminate the budget deficit by 2014-15, but we're on track to borrow an extra £100 billion this year. In fact George Osborne has borrowed more in four years than New Labour did in thirteen. If George Osborne's economic plans have been such an appalling failure so far, why on earth are Labour pledging to stick to them if they win power in 2015?
Another indicator of the fact that the Labour party are more concerned with grabbing political power by whatever means is the way they focus their attacks on the Green Party and the SNP, rather than focusing their efforts on overthrowing the Tory led coalition. The fact that Caroline Lucas' Brighton Pavillion constituency is one of their top target seats for the 2015 General Election tells us everything we need to know. Labour are more concerned with rubbing out parties that promote the social democratic policies they discarded in the 1990s, than they are with actually fighting the Tories.
Labour fear the growth of a viable left-wing alternative party just as much as the Tories fear UKIP.The Labour leadership seem to think that attacking genuine left-wing parties and offering the electorate nothing more than "not quite as bad as the Tories" will be enough convince the public to vote them back into power in 2015. Even though they've experienced an opinion poll boost on the rare occasions they have offered anything even remotely radical, they're still intent on pushing a Thatcherism-lite agenda in the vain hope that the Tabloid press will take it easy on them. They haven't reailed that the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail will attack Labour whatever they offer, and that by attempting to suck up to the right-wing press, they're simply driving more and more left-wing people away from the Labour Party in exasperation.
So in answer to the question of what the Labour Party is for?The Labour Party has become nothing more than an empty power structure, so far divorced from its founding principles that it exists only to seek and maintain political power. The party leadership isn't driven by any objective other than the pursuit of power for its own sake. The Labour party strategists imagine that the only path to achieve this political power is through eschewing any kind of radical, progressive or left-wing policies, in favour of promoting a Thatcherism-lite agenda designed to appease the right-wing press, and by conning the public into voting for them with a few lame bits of pseudo-socialist window dressing.
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.
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.
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