Frank Hammond, Coventry Socialist Party
Preparing a new round of big businesses making money from our health service, the Department of Health and Social Care has dished out contracts to management consultants Deloitte and lawyers Addleshaw Goddard, as reported in the Guardian. The firms are tasked with blueprinting a business strategy to build new NHS clinics using public-private partnerships (PPP). But PPP is not a fancy, friendly acronym, for the bosses it means: ‘We’ll take it from here, along with your assets’. Like ‘splitting’ a pizza with a mate, only to be handed crumbs and forced to pay extortionate interest for years afterwards.
Unfortunately, the private sector invading the NHS is nothing new. Tory prime minister John Major plagued the NHS by introducing Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) in 1992 as a privatising ploy to build hospitals and schools. Big business would stump up the cash for investment in exchange for massive payments years later, and other profit-making perks. After their use was expanded by Blair’s New Labour, the NHS has £40 billion of PFI debt to private companies. It was a disaster for us but Christmas for the bosses.
In Coventry we have seen the impact of this. Walsgrave Hospital was notable for being the biggest PFI hospital built at the time. The £334 million project ‘super-hospital’ replaced two demolished hospitals. Unlike the old hospital, the new ‘super-hospital’ isn’t in the easily accessible city centre, but rather on the eastern edge of the city. With their outrageous parking charges, you’re out of pocket while you visit your sickly family. Even NHS staff aren’t safe from these extortionate fees. And those charges go straight to PFI bosses, not even back to the hospital itself.
Coventry Socialist Party has led the fight locally against these measures, protesting in public weekly for our campaign. We meet many people during our campaigns, but we don’t meet any supporters of further privatisation of our public services.
Once again, we can see a pro-capitalist government putting big businesses’ wants above our needs. A government that claims to be ‘for the people’ while continuing the path to our doom paved by the Tories. They are spending billions repaying private contracts instead of investing in our health or paying health workers adequately.
Increasing the involvement of the private sector hardly sticks to Labour’s manifesto pledge to keep the NHS “publicly owned and publicly funded”!
We need to kick out the big bosses looking to get rich from our healthcare, and loosen their pockets to serve the interests of the many, not the few.
If Labour wanted to learn from the mistakes of the past, they would, though currently it seems their interests lie in what will keep ‘the markets’ happy.
Workers can fight against any new attempts to make profits that bleed our NHS dry. We can kick out private profit from our health service, including cancelling all PFI deals.
