Labour’s dangerous plans for NHS Scotland
Speymouth
The Holyrood elections are just eight weeks away. This will be a critical election for Scotland’s future and it is more important than ever that Scotland returns a pro-independence majority, ideally an SNP majority to the Scottish Parliament. It’s not just the future of hopes for independence which is at stake. This election is also about defeating the far right and halting the rise of Nigel Farage. Additionally, and very importantly, it’s also about safeguarding NHS Scotland, keeping it publicly owned, free to use, and ensuring it is protected from the depredations of private healthcare companies.
Labour’s Scottish branch manager Anas Sarwar – that guy whose bosses have told him to keep his nose out of British politics – talks a lot about the NHS, scarcely a day goes by without him chasing some ambulance and seeking to weaponise a family’s tragedy for his own political benefit. He is ably assisted in this vampirism by BBC Scotland, which sees its role as being to promote the politician upon whom it has bestowed the title Saviour of the Union.
Sarwar has sought to make the NHS his main issue for some time. He paints a picture of a health service on the verge of collapse and puts all the blame on the Scottish Government.
What you’ll never hear from Sarwar or his enablers from BBC Scotland is that on most metrics, NHS Scotland performs better than the NHS in England or the NHS in Wales or Northern Ireland. Neither will you hear from Sarwar or BBC Scotland the obvious truth that if the NHS is having problems due to the culminative effect of underfunding in England and in all three devolved nations in the UK then not all issues affecting NHS Scotland are necessarily the fault of the Scottish Government. This is further compounded by the fact that the portion of the funding provided in the block grants to the devolved governments which is nominally earmarked for the NHS is determined by a formula which takes as its starting point the amount which the Westminster government chooses to spend on the NHS in England. Although the NHS is devolved, ultimately Westminster controls the purse strings. The only way in which the government of Scotland can increase NHS spending in Scotland relative to that in England is to take the money from other parts of the Scottish budget, or to use its limited powers to vary income tax to increase tax on the incomes of Scottish residents, which naturally leads to the opposition parties having a tantrum about “SNP cuts or SNP tax rises.”
The other thing you never hear from Sarwar is what exactly he proposes to do about the problems in the NHS which he so frequently complains about. His sole concrete proposal to date is to say that he’ll reduce the number of NHS health boards in Scotland from the current 14 to four or five. This will do very little, if anything, to improve frontline services and will reduce the degree of local control and input into decisions such as closing a hospital and merging services into a central facility which may be geographically distant. Indeed with only four or five supra-regional NHS health boards in Scotland, a central facility is more likely to be geographically distant and difficult to access for patients, particularly elderly and disabled patients who have to rely on public transport.
There is a very good reason why Sarwar and his partner in slime Jackie Baillie rarely specify what exactly they would do in order to remedy the problems in NHS Scotland which they so loudly complain about and how they would fund those remedies without cutting other parts of the Scottish budget. That’s because they know that what right wing Labour party politicians like them and their crony Wes Streeting want to do is deeply unpopular with the public in Scotland, and that is to open up NHS Scotland to private healthcare companies. They hope that by avoiding scrutiny they can sneak in privatisation by the back door after winning an election in which with the assistance of the Scottish press they attack the SNP led Scottish Government’s handling of the NHS without ever having to account for what they would do differently.
There are concerns that Tony Blair – who Thatcher once described as her greatest success – is shaping Labour’s health policy in Scotland, after after the Tony Blair Institute published a report on “transforming” health in Scotland. The report calls on a Labour Scottish Government to “explore innovative financing mechanisms that make large-scale prevention fiscally sustainable”. It proposes to achieve this by including “outcome-based contracts with pharmaceutical firms” and “funding models under which providers are paid a share of future welfare savings.” In other words, encouraging private health care companies to parasitise public funding. The Labour party in Scotland has taken almost £200,000 in donations from private healthcare companies. About half of all Labour’s Scottish MPs – including former Scotland Secretary Ian Murray and Scotland Office minister Kirsty McNeill have received donations from companies or individuals linked directly or indirectly with private healthcare, worth a total of £192,071.
Labour’s largest recipient of donations from private healthcare companies is Sarwar’s close ally, health secretary Wes Streeting who once declared that he would “hold the door wide open” to private investment in the NHS. Sarwar’s recent call for Starmer to resign was widely seen as Streeting testing the water for a leadership bid. Streeting’s love of private sector involvement in the NHS has of course got nothing to do with the £224,575 he personally has received in donations from private healthcare companies, and heaven forfend you might think otherwise. Streeting is central to a ten year plan for the NHS in England which involves handing over patient data to the controversial data company Palantir as part of a multi-million contract. Palantir’s chairman is nutjob fascist billionaire Peter Thiel, a man who has said democracy is incompatible with freedom of speech and who believes Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist. Entirely coincidentally, these coincidences keep piling up, Streeting’s mentor, the discgraced Peter Mandelson, had close business ties to Palantir. The Scottish Government has refused to get involved with the scheme, much to Streeting’s displeasure.
Jackie Baillie, Labour’s deputy Scottish branch manager and the party’s health spokesperson, met with a private healthcare firm last year to discuss providing ophthalmology services in Scotland. None of this is suss at all, oh no.
The NHS in Scotland would not be safe in the hands of any of the anti-independence parties, Labour has sold its soul to private healthcare companies while Reform UK’s leader talks openly about ending the NHS as a universal service which is free at the point of use.
If you want to protect the NHS and keep it safe from the vultures of the private sector, ultimately the only way to do so is in an independent Scotland, but in the shorter term only a constituency vote for the SNP and a list vote for the SNP or the Scottish Greens will keep the NHS safe in the interim.
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