Starmer says he's prepared to let the NHS DIE

Right, so Keir Starmer has given another dreary, dull and boring speech, every time he opens his mouth it’s like the words he’s uttering are in need of CPR from the moment they leave his lying lips and given that we’re considering the NHS here, I suppose the resuscitation analogy is particularly fitting, not that you can possibly have any faith in Starmer doing what is required, investing in it which, whether he likes it or not, does come down to the matter of money if you intend to fix anything, or indeed as those fateful words NHS reform resurface, to reform anything as well. Reform is exactly what Starmer wants, he’s said no more money without it, so whatever Starmer wants to do with the NHS next, the health service either agrees, or he’s prepared to let the NHS die, to collapse. Labour MPs were recently accused of knowing the cost of everything, but the value of nothing and rhetoric such as this makes that painfully obvious. The health service we all rely on is going to be needed more than ever as Starmer’s policy moves elsewhere are set to make a lot more people a lot more ill and a lot more sick. Having come for the young and come for the old already with his child poverty indifference and his attack on pensioners heating support, the two demographics most in need of the NHS look set to suffer further and without an NHS at all, well it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Right, so the NHS must reform or die, such are the words of Keir Starmer in another speech so dull and tedious watching paint dry is akin to watching the World Cup final.
The NHS is in a bad way, that’s of no surprise to any of us, that’s hardly a newsflash, the Tories have been in power for 14 years, seemingly reforming the NHS themselves every 5 minutes, consistently letting more private healthcare provision into the NHS, consistently letting more NHS services be outsourced for profit, and the money sunk into the NHS itself as a result, too much of it ends up in shareholders pockets along the way. Every time the Tories say record breaking amounts of cash are going into the NHS, they never mention how much of it ends up going into the pockets of the already rich along the way, especially when the service gets worse despite more money going in, they can then turn around and say oh, dear the NHS isn’t fit for purpose in the 21st Century, we’d better do away with it, let’s face it, we know so many people would love to see it replaced with an insurance based system, from the Tories, to Nigel Farage, but with Starmer saying reform or die, he’s pretty much saying it to.
His basis for this thought? A report commissioned by Lord Ara Darzi, a crossbench member of the House of Lords and a former surgeon, his report spelling out much of the problems in the NHS, much of which you can hazard a guess at but what he certainly isn’t advocating is Starmer’s reform or die rhetoric. Here’s an excerpt of the Independent’s coverage of Darzi’s report identifying key findings that came out yesterday:
‘In his report, Lord Darzi described a “disastrous” 2012 shake-up by Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley as “a calamity without international precedent”.
“In the last 15 years,” he continued, “the NHS was hit by three shocks – austerity and starvation of investment, confusion caused by top-down reorganisation, and then the pandemic, which came with resilience at an all-time low. Two out of three of those shocks were choices made in Westminster.”
Lord Darzi said Britain “cannot afford not to have the NHS, so it is imperative that we turn the situation around”, adding that the health service “is in critical condition, but its vital signs are strong”.
Other key findings from the report include the following:
• Comparisons of cancer survival rates reveal that Britain is “substantially” worse than its European neighbours as well as the USA, Australia and Canada
• The NHS has made “no progress whatsoever” on improving early cancer diagnosis for nearly 10 years
• The programme to build 40 new hospitals would not have been needed if investment in healthcare had matched that of other nations since 2001
• In almost all NHS services, access to care has declined and long waits for care have become normalised
• Children are being let down by services and are waiting too long for mental health treatment and physical healthcare
• Despite there being enough dentists in Britain, not enough want to do NHS work
• Too much cash has been allocated to hospitals instead of community care services
• Patients are struggling to see their GP despite doctors seeing more patients than ever’
So Darzi hasn’t just pointed the finger of blame here at the Tories, though certainly has laid into them, especially the disastrous Lansley reforms that saw so much of the outsourcing to private healthcare providers in recent years accelerate, but identifies the problems with funding and NHS provision going back to 2001, back to Tony Blair, back to the days of PFI loans, back to when Alan Milburn was the Health Secretary, that champion of more and more PFI’s in the NHS, of lumbering the NHS itself in effect with more government debt and who since leaving politics has built up a substantial consultancy portfolio, including the advising of clients in private healthcare. Milburn is also of course right now an unpaid, unelected adviser of some sort to current health secretary Wes Streeting, over which Streeting has faced some awkward questioning in the media, even from mainstream sources, as I covered in a video from just the other day.
That said however, Darzi was himself a part of the health department under Gordon Brown, so does that not make him personally part of this story too?
At any rate, when Starmer says reform or die to fix all the problems Darzi has identified, and that excerpt only scratches the surface of these, how can we possibly have faith that Starmer and Streeting are going to steer another course?
NHS advocacy group EveryDoctor UK has for example, looked through the register of members interests for Labour MPs in government over the last year, the most relevant ones since this is the party of government and we’re talking just those with ministerial roles here and has discovered a staggering £500,000 in donations from private healthcare interests and naturally this includes Starmer and Streeting themselves. It makes you wonder what Alan Milburn really is advising Wes Streeting on, the NHS and how to fix it, or how to cash in even more, it is his day job these days it seems with those consultancies, does it not?
But where Starmer says it will be allowed to die if it doesn’t reform in a way he wants it to, that would be an intentional act by the government, that would have to be engineered by them. The NHS is underwritten by the government and cannot go bust by itself, it wouldn’t be the NHS being allowed to die, it would be the government purposely strangling it of support, suffocating it of funding to bring such a thing about.
Not that Starmer and Rachel Reeves would admit to such a thing, Starmer was after all just the other day talking about government cheques bouncing, which they never have and paying off the nations overdraft of which no such thing exists. Still the comparisons made to household finances and it is rubbish. The more it gets rubbished as is being done though, the more this Labour government look like they really don’t know how such things really do work, or at least that’s true enough of Starmer. Rachel Reeves isn’t a fool, she just takes us all for fools.
So what is Labour’s plan then? Well if you’ve heard the term ICS or Integrated Care System mentioned on the news in recent months, that is basically their fix, but it’s a fix to the narrative, not to the health service. Oh we’ll bring the health and social care bodies together, it’ll save money, they’ll better liaise with each other, the NHS will have never had it so good. Well this was a lie too. ICS’s are designed to make money, for cuts, closures and privatisation. A reward system in effect for the budget holders, if they manage to spend less money thereby fattening up the profits for shareholders instead. It shrinks the NHS as far as care provision goes by maximising time after time the profits that can be sucked out of the system. It no longer becomes a health service, just a redistribution system of public money into private pockets.
A prime example of this is the drive to scrap doctors now in favour of Physician Associates and Anaesthesia Associates, so called PAs and AAs, to replace doctors in key roles, because they’re cheaper and quicker to train than real doctors. They are a symptom of this privatisation infection pervading our NHS and Labour, in hock to private health interests will carry this on. If we’re to avoid the decline of our NHS becoming terminal, we need to stop voting for people who won’t reverse this, won’t restore it to the fully renationalised and redistributed health service brought in by Nye Bevan and Labour under Starmer and Streeting sure as hell aren’t going to do this. They want more profits and if they can’t get it, then they’ll happily ensure the NHS does die, but make no mistake, they will have engineered it’s destruction if that ever happens.
For more on Streeting’s scandal involving Alan Milburn, which he still won’t apologise for or rectify and more on why Alan Milburn being involved in our NHS again is unforgivable check out this video recommendation here as your recommended next watch and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.