Former Labour Health Minister Lord Warner’s call for everyone to pay £10 a month fees to use the NHS got very wide press coverage. The Mail, Telegraph, Times, Guardian and Independent wrote 500-odd-word stories on Warner’s charge-for-the-NHS call. The Mirror, Sun and other tabloids chipped in with 200-word pieces on Warner’s fees, including his extra demand that […]
Posts Tagged ‘Privatisation’
The latest privatisers’ idea for the NHS: charge patients £10 a month
Apr 2nd, 2014 by Michael Meacher.So now we know the latest steps being proposed to make the NHS into a full-blown private health service, just like it was before 1948. The various steps to achieve this supreme goal of the private marketeers have been prepared right from the start with great care. First, Blair encouraged and then pressured NHS hospitals […]
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Instead of charging for the NHS, try cutting the costs of privatisation
Apr 1st, 2014 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Let’s get one thing straight from the off. The idea of charging a £10/month NHS “membership fee” is bloody stupid. Not just because it violates the principle that health provision should take place, but for a whole host of other practical reasons. But let’s glide Lord Warner’s suggestion into a lay-by for the moment and deal with […]
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The private sector isn’t just providing NHS services, but now commissioning them too
Mar 9th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.It had always been the Thatcherite/Blairite dogma of service provision that the big private companies – whether the likes of Capita, G4S, Serco, A 4E, Atos or the huge US healthcare multinationals – wouold provide all the health services, but the commissioning would be done by the independent public sector. Now even that split, with […]
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Private oligarchs have it all stitched up in Whitehall outsourcing
Mar 6th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Once upon a time we had nationalised industries; now we have Capita, G4S, Serco, A4E, and the rest of a small coterie of private conglomerates who dominate the service world. Unlike the nationalised industries they have no specialist focus, but merely bid for anything going, much of which they handle poorly or badly as we […]
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Putting public interest first means rejecting Tory dogma that private is best
Feb 23rd, 2014 by Jon Trickett.Recently, Ed Miliband said that the times we live in demand “a new culture in our public services. Not old-style, top-down central control, with users as passive recipients of services. Nor a market-based individualism which says we can simply transplant the principles of the private sector lock, stock and barrel into the public sector.” In […]
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Welfare for Gideon’s corporate chums, but forget about it if you’re poor
Feb 4th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Last year, the “big four” banks – HSBC, Barclays, RBS and Lloyds – enjoyed a ‘too big to fail’ taxpayer subsidy of no less than £38bn, the New Economics Foundation thinktank (NEF) have revealed. This is in an economy where the budget deficit is still £111bn, and where money is so tight that Osborne has […]
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Nuclear privatisation scam: public subsidies but private profit
Dec 27th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.According to advisers to the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC), the government is now giving consideration, on top of the economically very foolish decision to go ahead with a new nuclear plant at Hinkley C in Somerset, to building not another 10 as was originally mooted, but 50! The French EDF and its […]
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When will Labour tackle market failure and revive the role of the State?
Dec 3rd, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The roll call of shame and disgrace about the record of the private banks, privatised utilities and outsourcing companies has now reached such a pitch that surely Labour must now challenge the whole culture of ‘the market knows best’ and in the extreme form of the neoliberal ideology that ‘government should get out of the […]
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As Tories privatise the post, Labour must expose where the market has failed
Oct 10th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The imminent privatisation of Royal Mail once again draws attention to the deficiencies and failures of private markets. It is going to cost the country £12bn as the deficit on the Royal Mail pension fund is dumped on taxpayers. The underpricing of the sale will also cost the country at least a further £1bn, the […]
