Privatisation or Bust: Starmer’s Stark NHS Reform Ultimatum

Starmer’s NHS Threat: No Money Without Reform, Privatise or Perish

Who would have thought we’d see the day when a Labour Prime Minister would resort to blackmail, holding the nation’s health service hostage unless we acquiesce to his grand designs for ‘reform’? Well, dear reader, some of us did, and we shouted ourselves hoarse trying to warn you well before the ballot boxes were dusted off and Starmer got his foot in the doorway of No. 10.

“No extra NHS funding without reform,” declares Prime Minister Starmer, his words dripping with the oily sheen of neoliberal dogma. Let us translate this doublespeak:

“We shall not pump a single penny more into your healthcare unless you allow us to flay it open for the vultures of private enterprise.”

This man, who once paraded about in the garb of socialism clinging to Jeremy Corbyn’s shirt tales like a little lamb, telling tall stories of his family connections to the NHS, and his saintly mother’s care, well – the promises he made now stands before us with a ‘For Sale’ sign hung around the neck of our NHS.

This ‘man of the people’ has the audacity to promise a 10-year plan for the health service, grandiosely billing it as “the biggest reimagining of the NHS” since its inception. One wonders if this ‘reimagining’ involves seeing how many private companies can feast on the carcass of our public health system before the bones are picked clean.

“That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”

— Noam Chomsky

To those who backed him, who believed his honeyed words of progress and change, I say this: shame on you. You have been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled by a political chameleon who has revealed his true colours again and again…

Starmer’s three-pronged attack – sorry, ‘reform’ – reads like a neoliberal wish list: a digital NHS (because nothing says ‘care’ like a chatbot diagnosing your chest pain), moving care from hospitals to communities (read: closing hospitals and replacing them with underfunded local services), and focusing on prevention over sickness (which sounds suspiciously like “it’s your fault you’re ill, so why should we pay – Join a gym!”).

It comes after the Darzi report, commissioned by Labour post-election. The report paints a grim picture of our NHS. It speaks of declining productivity, “ballooning” waits, and “awful” emergency services. Yet, curiously, the good Lord Darzi’s remit didn’t stretch to actually suggesting solutions. How convenient for a government chomping at the bit to implement its own ‘solutions’.

Let’s be clear about what this ‘reform’ really means. It’s not about improving patient care or supporting our tireless NHS staff. No, it’s about carving up our health service and serving it on a silver platter to private vultures who see pound signs where they should see patients.

This so-called ‘neighbourhood health service’ Starmer proposes is nothing more than a Trojan horse for privatisation. He speaks of ‘digital consultations’ and ‘high street healthcare’ as if they’re revolutionary concepts, when in reality, they’re just prettier words for ‘cheaper’ and ‘profitable’.

To add insult to permanent injury, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, channelling his inner Tony Blair, promises to be “tough on ill-health”. One can’t help but wonder if this toughness extends to being tough on the causes of ill health – like, say, poverty, poor housing, and the stress of living under a government that sees your health as a profit opportunity.

The Darzi report, for all its ‘raw honesty’, misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the NHS is struggling, but not because it needs more market forces. It’s struggling because it’s been systematically underfunded, understaffed, and undermined by successive governments who see it as a burden rather than a birthright.

The report resulted from a nine-week review by the independent peer and NHS surgeon Lord Darzi.

He was asked by Labour, shortly after the election, to identify the failings in the health service, but his remit did not stretch to coming up with solutions.

His findings present a stark picture of a service which he says is in “serious trouble” with declining productivity, “ballooning” waits and “awful” emergency services that put patients at risk.

The fact, that Lord Darzi produced a report recommending just this in 2007, when he was working for the Blair government has not gone unnoticed.

And no! We won’t forget the Tories’ role in this sorry saga. Their policy of austerity in the 2010s left the NHS chronically weakened, with crumbling hospitals and outdated technology. But rather than rectify these issues, Starmer seems intent on using them as justification for further privatisation.

However, the irony of Starmer evoking the spirit of 1948 in his speech while simultaneously dismantling the principles upon which the NHS was founded is not lost on us. As he talks of a “neighbourhood health service” with “more tests, scans and healthcare offered on high streets”, one can almost hear the cash registers chiming in the background.

Remember, when they say ‘reform’, they mean ‘Sell Off’. When they say ‘efficiency’, they mean ‘cuts’. And when they say ‘no alternative’, they mean ‘we lack the imagination and the will to truly serve the people’.

Last year on #GMB Dr Amir Khan brilliantly explained in just over a minute how using the private sector undermines the NHS & hastens its demise.pic.twitter.com/bg00HDeQng

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) September 12, 2024

We find ourselves in a moment of crisis, yes. But the solution is not to throw open the doors to profiteers and snake oil salesmen. It is to recommit to the principles of public ownership, of healthcare free at the point of use, of a service run for people, not profit.

As George Orwell, that great chronicler of political doublespeak, once wrote, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” So let us be revolutionaries. Let us speak the truth: The NHS is not for sale, not now, not ever.

As Jeremy Corbyn rightly points out, the NHS has been haemorrhaging money to private healthcare profits since 2012 – £10 million every week, to be precise. If Starmer truly wanted to save money, he’d stop this privatisation gravy train in its tracks. But no, it seems our Labour leader is more interested in conducting the train than derailing it.

The people don’t want the NHS run like a market. They want it run like a National Health Service – a radical concept, I know. But in Starmer’s brave new world, it seems the ‘national’ part is negotiable, and ‘health’ comes second to ‘profit’.

The battle for the soul of our NHS is not over. It’s just beginning. And in this fight, we must stand united, resolute, and unwavering in our belief that healthcare is a right, not a privilege to be bought and sold.

For if we lose this fight, we lose not just a service, but a fundamental part of what makes us who we are as a nation. And that, dear reader, is a price too high to pay for any ‘reform’.