Lindsey Morgan, Bristol Socialist Party
During the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of pounds of our money was wasted on unusable personal protective equipment (PPE). This week, the government won a court case against the company PPE Medpro for providing unsafe PPE, with damages of £122 million. This was the company owned by the husband of the once-Tory Baroness, Michelle Mone.
Contracts were awarded for vital equipment such as gowns and respirators, then in short supply, through the use of VIP (‘Very Important Parasites’) lanes. Businesses with political connections got first dibs on ripping us off. Many of these VIPs provided substandard and often unusable equipment to the health professionals that risked their lives, and the lives of their families, to deal with the pandemic. VIPs were prioritised over and above companies which already produced PPE. Mone approached Michael Gove and Lord Agnew for the contract (who referred her to the VIP lane). At the time PPE Medpro was awarded the contract they didn’t even have a factory to produce the promised gowns. Her husband pocketed £65 million, of which £29 million was put in trust for Mone and her children.
Compare pictures of nurses wearing bin bags in 2020 with Mone in 2021 on her yacht, called Lady M, without a care in the world. She even captioned the pic “Living My Best Life”. But PPE Medpro is just one of a long line of private companies that leeched off our NHS at our expense.
And it continues. We pay for their profits not only with our taxes but often with our lives and health. Massive waiting lists for less profitable operations are a direct result of NHS privatisation which Labour health secretary Wes Streeting plans to expand, egged on by the US healthcare hawks that lobby him.
Huge backlogs in radiology and scanning leave us waiting for answers and treatment as our health deteriorates.
The mental health crisis has been offered no meaningful solutions as austerity and poverty continues for our class.
In 2024 alone, £8 billion was spent on ‘medical consumables’ (bandages, syringes, etc). How much of that figure was pure profit that could have gone to providing us with the NHS services we need and deserve?
Medical suppliers, pharmaceutical companies and all the assorted private companies must be nationalised. We need our NHS fully renationalised and democratically managed and controlled by those who know where the money should be spent – workers and their organisations. When that happens millions of us may then have our chance at living our best lives, in decent health.
