Cameron’s NHS hubris
12 Feb 2012 1 Comment
Lansley
We are being told that Cameron is going to push ahead with his NHS reforms even in the face of outright public and professional hostility. It’s too late to turn back now, and the PM doesn’t want to lose face or be forced into a damaging u-turn.
Of course he does. Political credibility is the important issue. Not the future of an NHS that doesn’t need these ‘reforms’.
The politics of this episode make my skin crawl. The government’s contempt for democracy operates on so many levels.
Firstly they have no mandate for these changes. There was nothing about it in the Tories 2010 election manifesto, and certainly not the Lib Dems’. In fact, Cameron explicitly promised ‘no more top down reorganisations of the NHS’ and then proceeded to allow his Health Secretary to draft a bill that was probably the greatest top-down reorganisation imaginable. So the PM is a liar.
Secondly, we are told that it is too late to turn back as the reforms have already been implemented. Before the Bill has been passed in Parliament. So thats how it works. Even if the elected (and unelected) representatives of the people voted it down it wouldn’t matter as the reforms have already started. PCTs are being wound down and GP consortia (CCGs) are emerging in most areas of England. The changes are becoming a fait accompli regardless of what happens in Parliament. Recent events in Gloucestershire are highly illustrative of the direction of travel.
What happened to the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty that Tory MPs are supposedly so concerned about? When it comes to the any progressive legislation emanating from the EU, we can’t possibly tolerate Parliament being circumvented. But when it comes to backdoor privatisation of the NHS, democratic principles seemingly get forgotten by the Tory right.
The NHS Bill is the product of a government and political class mesmerised by free market ideology and captured by corporate interests that think there is a lot of money to be made from healthcare. This has been brilliantly exposed in this Mail on Sunday article, of all places. Lansley and his team’s relationship with private healthcare is well documented and private companies are already benefiting from the outsourcing of services (although they are merely accelerating a process begun under New Labour, led chiefly by the nauseating ex-Trotskyist Alan Milburn who some Tories have been mooting as a possible successor to the politically toxic Andrew Lansley)
One can only hope that the many predictions of electoral disaster that will certainly result from Cameron forcing this through will end with him backing down or the Tories being replaced by a government committed to reversing these changes, or the NHS that is quite rightly an enormously popular and vital national institution will cease to exist in any meaningful form.
Feb 12, 2012 @ 20:07:20
Despite an education that included Latin and very probably Greek, he has not got a clue about hubris. As you so rightly state, it is all about political ideology and has nothing to do with improvements. In the Mail on Sunday comment section that you link to – one of the supporters asks what sort of healthcare insurance could you afford for £250 per month? This is based on the fact that the NHS cost every taxpayer £3,000pa. If they completely privatised the NHS tomorrow I would absolutely not get an additional £3,000 less tax paid per annum. It wouldn’t work like that. I would still pay the same in tax BUT I would also have to pay some American corporate AS WELL. The problem goes on – what about those with long term health issues such as Downs Syndrome, Phenylketonuria, chronic conditions such as artherosclerosis. The NHS is expensive but it is incredibly comprehensive and covers those who could not cover themselves; the less able, the mentally incapable, children, the elderly. Most of all – it is MINE, and YOURS. We paid for it, good or bad, and it is absolutely not the Tory party’s to sell off.
Your point that it was not on their manifesto, he promised that there would be no top down changes, is well made. Why isn’t Ed Miliband and the rest of the Labour Party screaming blue murder at this? What is the Labout Party for if it isn’t going to fight this?