It is said that two things in life are certain: death and taxes.

Or maybe three. That at some point you and your family will need medical help. That’s why British workers still overwhelmingly support our NHS, which lends a helping hand to all, and a lifeline to those of us who need it – when we need it most.

It is a hand that 70 years of nation-wide practical experience – some sweeter, some more bitter, but all infinitely easier than had the NHS not been there – have led us to trust, and to love. Yet all is not rosy in our national health garden.

In this excellent and informative video, NHS campaigner and GP Dr Bob Gill and NHS Surgeon Ranjeet Brar speak about the challenges faced and the threat posed to our National Health Service by privatisation that started as a slow, hidden creep, but is increasingly  breaking cover and becoming a headlong gallop toward the ditch of a disjointed and bankrupt system.

We cannot afford to let that happen. We cannot allow ourselves to become resigned to its inevitability. We cannot afford to stop caring for the health system and its workers – who care tirelessly for us. So we hope you’ll take three simple steps to help yourself and all of us who live and work in Britain:

1. Educate yourself: what are the issues?

2. Be outraged: let everyone else know! Help Bob produce his film and help him get the message out (start by sharing this blog post and video!)

3. Organise a meeting and ask Dr Bob Gill to speak (we can help you, email Ranjeet at rango@cpgb-ml.org)

First: Read this brief summary and watch Dr Bob Gill’s NHS Briefing (in the video above):

Despite its value to working-class Britons, a sustained and stubborn campaign is being waged to stop the universal and free provision of our health service, slamming shut the open door policy of the NHS, to which so many of us have turned, and will continue to turn, in our hour of need.

By contrast the revolving door between an increasingly unaccountable and complex NHS management and health sector is not just smoothly revolving, it is spinning at a dizzying pace.

Our government and media often blame the financial shortfalls and strain in the NHS on immigrants placing extra pressure on the service, but the public recognise for the lie that it is.

On closer inspection – that few have the time to make, but Bob and others have undertaken and summarised for us – it turns out that the campaign against the NHS is not being waged by some alien or immigrant enemy. Rather the conspiracy (for they do not tell us honestly what they are doing) is home grown. It is led led by our very own ‘democratic’ parliamentary representatives, in close collaboration with the giant business interests of private insurance, private health, and private capital.

By rights, if we lived in a true democracy where the wishes of British citizens were respected, and not trampled on this movie would have government funding. Indeed the circumstances that compel its production should never have come about.

Instead, our government, like its predecessors, channel our tax in the opposite direction, to KPMG and Deloitte management consultant gangsters, directly funding and promoting that conspiracy.

The big four consultancy firms in return pen scandalous million-pound reports with the inevitable recommendations:

  • to sell off first “non-core” hospital services to wage-slavers like Carillion; And subsequently to sell off the rest, lock-stick-and-barrel to vultures like Virgin Health and United Health;
  • to implement STPs, which mean £5 billion of cuts in London alone, while opening the door for charging of patients and wholesale privatisation;
  • to form CCGs, effectively removing planning from our health service, so – guess what guys? Deloitte and KPMG can step in and plan services for us, which incidentally means putting the full £120 billion NHS budget at their disposal (*ahem*, returning it to the front line GPs if you prefer. KPMG are also masters of public relations [propaganda]);
  • splitting up the NHS into 44 CCG bite-size chunks, across NHS England, and inviting United Health, the US insurance giant, to oversee the whole project (strictly out of its moral duty of good global governance) in the name of the increased efficiency of the market!;
  • to bring in the incredibly wasteful internal market, that means your GPs can sell your custom (sickness) to your own hospitals. But they are equally “free” and in-fact increasingly forced to sell you (with or without your consent) to the private sector.  This staggering “freedom” has also meant that some 20 percent of 2017s NHS funding was spent on bureaucratic capitalist management (buying and selling the nations sick, of course, requires contracts. Some kinds of sickness are more lucrative than others; and the juiciest morsels of sickness are the quickest to be sucked up by the greediest capitalists!) – as opposed to just 4% before the internal market when it was rationally planned and running on a national scale.
  • to rebuild cash-starved hospitals instead of upgrading them on the basis of extortionate PFI loans, repaying eight times the initial loan – and still not owning the re-built hospitals when all is paid!

This is what counts for ‘increased efficiency’. Which makes sense from the bankers’ point of view aiming to increase his profits, but rather less when viewed from the angle of the health of the average British worker. So if we cannot have both, which would you choose?

All of this betrays the incredibly glib and frankly contemptuous attitude of our ruling political and business elite toward us workers.

None of this, of course, is an accident. It goes against the wishes of 99 percent of the British people, and has been future-proofed (from changes of minister, changes of government, changes of political party, reorganisation of parliament – indeed it is only by dispensing with bourgeois parliament, that answers only to the billionaires, that can actually throw out this sinister conspiracy) as an unfolding series of carefully planned measures that have been implemented over the last forty years, and has now reached an advanced stage, accelerating from almost imperceptible to rapid and fundamental change.

The conspiracy to change the NHS from a universally free and accessible service to an insurance-based US-style system, has been ongoing in one form or another for as long as we have had the NHS itself; but the campaign has gradually been implemented since the late 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher’s (Tory free-market fundamentalist) tenure, through John Major’s (Tory free-market fundamentalist), Tony Blair’s (Labour free-market fundamentalist), Gordon Brown’s (Labour free-market fundamentalist) then Cameron-Clegg’s (ConDem free-market fundamentalist coalition), and of course throughout the present Tory administration (Tory free-market fundamentalist).

The truth is that all parliamentary governments are coalitions. The trouble is that they are all free-market fundamentalist coalitions, allied to the financial oligarchy and dedicated to fleecing the British working-class.

Conservative, Labour and the Liberal Party have gaily cooperated in promoting the interests of the financial oligarchs, under the mantra of market efficiency which has led to a reduction in funding of front-line services, the mushrooming of management and consultancy fees and overheads, the bleeding of the NHS by drug companies and medical device companies, and of course the infamous gift to bankers of some 80 billion of NHS funding in the form of Private Finance Initiative and Public-Private Partnership (PFI, PPP) deals.

Ministers, MPs and Lords support the measures to privatise healthcare not out of concern for “increased efficiency” and providing in “world class healthcare”, but because they expect and receive huge financial kick-backs in turn, often running into hundreds of thousands, or to the truly useful, millions, for services rendered.

The corruption is not made as direct payment. Nothing so scandalous and uncivilised in ‘the mother of parliaments’, but in the not too distant future, a non-executive place on a board, a share-offering or speaking engagement, a donation or consultancy fee, a lucrative appointment in an NGO in New York, or as, say, a middle east peace advisor to the quartet’ – as the Millibands, Alun Milburn, and Tony Blair, amongst a host of others, have demonstrated.

Cash for questions, the Leveson Inquiry, and the MP Expenses scandals (let no back-bench run enquiry fool you) are the tip of the iceberg. These are not the “few bad apples that spoil the barrel.” These are the few bad apples that were unearthed from a largely hidden, but entirely rotten, parliamentary barrel!

Our serving MPs and senior civil servants are immersed in corrupt anti-democratic activities. That, in fact, is what a career in public service is all about.

Bob Gill, leading health campaigner outlines the steps in this conspiracy, including the key policy decisions and their backers, through Thatcher, Blair, Oliver Letwin and John Redwood, Gordon Brown and of course Jeremy Hunt, that have driven the policy of dismantling by stealth in cooperation with the powerful private health and insurance lobby. Their ultimate goal is to rake in huge profits. Good for them, but not for you!

This great video is as watchable as it is informative, and although the meeting in the above video followed the NHS march in 2017, every word is relevant to our struggle to save the NHS today.

The speakers also outline the real features of the post WW2 climate that led to the formation of the NHS; and conversely the current economic and political landscape that is permitting it’s dissolution.

Bob is both personally incorruptible, and holds no brief for any parliamentary political party – only for his patients, and the truth which is what makes his testimony and research so powerful.

The meeting at which this video was filmed took a generous donation to help Dr Bob Gill cover some of the production costs of the movie The Great NHS Heist (out soon) and dedicated to spreading knowledge of how our NHS is being damaged by privatisation, and what we can do to save it.

You can donate online to help meet the production costs via GoFundMe.

 

Think of it as an investment – a cheap one, but a shrewd one.

For all those who never want to be burdened by a private medical bill, a private health insurance premium, or get told that the insurance won’t foot the bill for your medical care when you, your child, your parents, relatives or close friends get ill (we will all need the NHS, and none of us know when, or how badly).

They advocate a mass campaign to raise consciousness, of which this video and Bob’s documentary are part; and advocate a broad grass-roots campaign to prevent and reverse the dismemberment of our NHS – upon which so many of us depend.

Get involved. Subscribe! Donate! And most importantly: philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it! Join us in building a bright future for humanity!