Streeting’s Sellout: Labour’s Privatisation Agenda for the NHS

Wes Streeting’s Profiteering Doublespeak Betrays the NHS

Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has launched an extraordinary attack on those rightly opposing his plan to increasingly privatise NHS services should Labour take power. In crass remarks to “ The Sun”, yes, it’s worth repeating, “The Sun”, the frontbencher derides what he claims are “middle-class lefties” critical of outsourcing healthcare to profit-driven private providers as representing “the real betrayal.” he also claims – he was “up for the fight” with NHS unions.

This is naked projection of the highest order. For it is Streeting himself who personifies the unforgivable treachery against Britain’s envied public healthcare model through his enthusiastic embrace of private sector leeches bleeding it into capitalist anaemia. To claim it is the “middle-class lefties” that decry Labour’s Tory cloning of NHS privatisation is to disregard the righteous anger building like a steam kettle ready to blow its lid among this country’s disenfranchised working class—those most brutalised by the Uniparty duopoly of Red and Blue.

With shocking candour, he derides the NHS as a “20th century service that hasn’t changed with the times” while hailing its proposed exploitation by avaricious corporatists as visionary “reform.” His euphemistic “using spare capacity in the private sector” doublespeak is nothing more than a veiled privatisation putsch marketed under the burnished branding of “pragmatism.”

The “pragmatic” solution, Streeting disingenuously claims, is to essentially pirate NHS staff, resources and patients into the ravenous maws of firms like Virgin Care, Spire, and other apostles of Americanised profiteering from routine procedures. All while perpetuating the fiction that a mercantile incentive model can somehow alleviate systemic deficiencies decades of deliberate underfunding by Tory/Blairite neoliberals have engineered.

Again, Streeting’s pitiful justifications about winning over “grassroots” members expose his myopic disregard for genuine public interests. Since when did effortlessly regurgitating Tory policy constitute ideological victory? This is not nuance, but naked capitulation to the privatising dogma that has perpetuated this crisis.

The EveryDoctor website states: “We will oppose any politician, whatever their political allegiance, if they do not support our vision of, and for, the NHS.”

Doctors working in and committed to the NHS know that the private healthcare genie will deliver a poor (often unsafe) service, will disappear when things go wrong (or when there is simply no profit to be made – because that is the DNA of these corporations) and be found counting your taxpayer pounds in a tax haven when the NHS is picking up the pieces of the disaster that it has left behind (as happens more often than you can possibly imagine).

We cannot agree more…

Confronted with the reality that his private sector panacea simply cannibalises the same overstretched NHS staff, his response is a masterclass in obfuscating ambiguity. He feigns acknowledgement that employing them privately may “deplete” NHS resources, before inexplicably suggesting campaigners should rebuke those “professional colleagues who spend so much time in private practice.”

Let’s be clear – these private hospital entities possess no miraculous “spare capacity” to leverage. They have no clinical staff or facilities of their own beyond what they parasitically leach from the NHS, private hospitals do not employ doctors or nurses, they are moonlighting from health system whose demolition they accelerate. When Streeting speaks of “using” their infrastructure, he refers only to the rentier class’s gluttonous cannibalising of what few remaining operational NHS resources still exist.

This is not some high-minded bid to “reduce waiting lists” as the Shadow Health Secretary markets his privatising zeal. It is the institutionalised profiteering of care, with overworked NHS clinicians being pirated into providing wealthy individuals Queue Priority while society’s most vulnerable sicken and perish awaiting “treatment” from an asset-stripped husk.

The sophistry that such rapacious privatisation represents genuine “investment” in public health provision is so flagrant it defies belief. All it ensures is a further exodus of staff, resources and public funds into the obliging hands of the very same corporate vultures whose lucrative “partnerships” have facilitated the disembowelling of our NHS over successive decades.

Streeting’s £200,000 in “donations” from these same private health care lobbyists creates greed institutionalised as national policy.

If this retrograde New Labour privatisation revival is not the very height of cold hearted betrayal towards the principles of universal public healthcare access, then as the owners of the American healthcare systems set to profit from this would say, I’ve got a bridge to sell you! Streeting’s fluffy wrapping of this asset-stripping plunder as some ambition to “save our NHS” with exciting” reform” is the sort of bald-faced deception that should have any remaining ethical Labour MP howling from the house rooftops.

The actual answer to revitalising our healthcare lies not in these lucrative “partnerships” enriching leeches. It resides in comprehensive public reinvestment, revitalising a fully people-owned and operated NHS free from profit motive conflicts and self-serving privatization dogma. A workers’ revival of the very principles upon which this crown jewel of the British welfare state was first constructed.

But such eminently pragmatic solutions require ideological vision entirely lacking in this corporatist Labour cohort. They remain intellectually and financially captured by these establishment forces who would secure beloved public institutions immolated upon the Pyramid City Moloch sacrificial altar. Until the people reclaim their political vehicle to actually serve, rather than ruthlessly exploit them, our beleaguered NHS will remain a free ride for predators masking their parasitism behind weaselled “pragmatism.”

Paul Knaggs