***Long read, but URGENT and IMPORTANT***

This is an article about our NHS, and the point I hope to make is that ALL THE POLITICAL PARTIES must be recognised as the destroyers of our NHS. If we are to save this precious service, we need to think carefully: If you are not poor, or vulnerable, or alone in the face of serious illness, it is easy to be fooled. We need to analyse and learn to recognise the words and actions of the destroyers, otherwise our fightback will be wasted.

What do we say about the people who have allowed our NHS to all but disappear, either those who have made this happen for their own profit, or those who have diligently helped to hide what is possibly the greatest tragedy currently facing our country?

The best way to hide an emergency is to pretend you’re dealing with it. The best way to do that is to get everyone doing what they think will solve it.

It is hard to think of anything more urgent than the need to understand the weasel words that hide this greatest of evils being inflicted on our country. Unless everyone opens their eyes to this, the foundation of our civilisation, safety and humanity is gone. I’m going to use a couple of personal and local stories to illustrate this, so please bear with me when I look back a few years, and when I go local – this is a national call-out, and you will find similar stories where you are…

Slash, Trash, Privatise (STP)

Read about STP here – did you recognise that as a privatisation scheme?

It must be 4 years or more now since I sat in a trade union activist meeting, hearing about ‘Slash, Trash and Privatise’ (a campaign group’s re-wording of ‘Sustainability Transformation Plan’ a government privatisation-by-stealth initiative). That was the day I came to understand that the MPs and other politicians from ALL the Westminster parties have either directly taken part in the NHS destruction process or else nodded it along, judging our NHS, one of the most significant and impressive institutions in the world, less important than their own smooth career paths.

But why is it so hard for everyone to see? What are these weasel words, and why do they work? Here are two NHS destroyers who uttered the latest version of those weasel words this week…

NHS Destroyers Jeremy Hunt and Wes Streeting

Click here to see Jeremy Hunt’s comment reported in the Daily Mirror. Here it is again on Sky…

He said the NHS is on the brink of collapse. As a result, we are all going to be paying a bit more tax. Thus, he persuades a nation of people who are drastically short of funds already that we can barely afford our own NHS.

The Mirror gives a quote from Unite’s Sharon Graham that compounds this view: “The blame lies squarely with the Government. The Prime Minister should use the Budget to avert industrial action and fix the ongoing tragedy of underfunding across the NHS.”

Wherever you look, you see concerned politicians saying they’ll shovel in as much money as they can, but…

This is a common strategy of the destroyers, apparently terribly concerned, talking about funding crises and the danger of tax increases, never about the vast amounts of public money they have ushered, through the NHS, into the hands of contractors posing as administrators and innovators within the largely profit-based maze they have created.

It is because of all this — basically legalised embezzlement — that they can present the NHS as sadly too expensive for us to maintain.

The second destroyer I heard this week was Wes Streeting.

And this is where it gets personal…

(Please excuse this diversion into goings on where I live — I need to give a practical example of how the on-going work of destroying our NHS does not, on the surface, look like what it is…)

I was once quite proud of Hastings and Rye Labour Party. It was a large, lively, thriving branch a few years ago, campaigning under the Corbyn Leadership for a country in which ‘no one was left behind’ – just how is that going to work, when there is no NHS to keep us safe?

Yes, there is a heck of a lot wrong with the ‘service’ we now have. I have spent most of this year helping someone navigate through an operation, chemo and all the related, multi-agency flah that it takes to deal with a cancer. We were constantly confused, headed off or left hanging on the telephone as we attempted to find, and attend consultations with, the professionals he needed to see. It was only because I’ve been reading about what’s happening to our NHS that I could see the reason for all our difficulties. It is the expensive and entirely unnecessary layer of contractors and freeloaders operating in our NHS, in between us and the experts, the usually very good doctors, nurses, pharmacists and all the rest of them who are still at work, hidden behind a mass of administrative barriers and unexpected expenses.

Here’s a petition I set up with a fellow citizen in response, calling on East Sussex politicians to pick up on the problems we’d experienced, and see if there’s anything they can do…

Please click here to see our petition about access to health care (If you’re in East Sussex, please sign and share it. If not, please give it a share.)

Thus, we can have a hard time accessing health care, we may well be out of pocket as a result, we may come away angry with ‘them’, and angry that the NHS is so expensive, and yet so lacking in efficiency. That is when the destroyers – blue, red, yellow and green – and sometimes even your unions, can lead you – sometimes even lead themselves – unwittingly down the road to destruction.

… here is a snapshot from Hastings and Rye Labour Party’s Christmas Party invitation…

…Why am I showing you that? Because the snapshot is being passed around by horror-struck socialists and NHS workers in my town. They are only now discovering just how low their local ‘Labour’ party has sunk. They are mostly angry because the Starmer-flavoured candidate Labour are lining up for the next election is excitedly offering them a ‘star guest’ who they know to be abusive, but there’s a worse problem…

Here is a video of Crispin Flintoff talking to Dr Bob Gill about one of Streeting’s contributions to the destruction of our NHS…

… The point, of course, is that in a Labour-Party-flavoured way, Streeting is saying exactly the same thing as Jeremy Hunt is – he’s quite willing, for now, to shovel public money into funding all the contractors they’ve stuffed in between you and your doctor, but he’s going to keep reminding you how dodgy and expensive it is, so you’ll think they’re doing you a favour when they finally reveal the all-new, even more expensive, openly commercial version.

Dr Gill demonstrates why anyone who stands there and says they support a publicly funded NHS, without explaining where that money is going, is a part of the problem. Of course, publicly funded and very expensive are the tell-tale weasel words now, but because we’re flagging them up, they’ll soon find a new smoke-and-mirrors phrase to cover shovelling public money, through the NHS, into profiteers’ pockets. That is why political analysis must be on-going, and why people who don’t bother follow the story will always be easy to hoodwink.

At the moment, we need to challenge those words whenever we hear them, by asking about who is delivering those services, and what they cost, and why. We need to keep asking where the money is going, and we need to be asking what became of the NHS reinstatement bill that we called for during the Corbyn years. (Yes, really, we need to reinstate it — the politicians have already wriggled out of the idea that our government is directly responsible for our NHS — that is, they have already escaped legal responsibility for our health.)

Low and lower

But of course, the MPs we have now are so rotten that weasel words aren’t enough cover up their faults. Even people in my town who no longer follow politics closely are shocked by the Christmas Party invite, just as they’ve been shocked by the rudeness and inappropriacy of so many Tory MPs, because of Streeting’s recent behaviour in the House of Commons.

Above all, people are shocked because Labour’s chosen candidate for Hastings and Rye next general election, either callously or obliviously was happily sharing the ‘good news’ of Streeting’s party invitation, tickets for which they are selling at £40 a throw, in the days following Streeting’s appalling rudeness to older people across the country. (NB anyone who puts a £40 price on a party ‘for everyone’ has already demonstrated that they don’t know, or don’t care, why we need an NHS that is genuinely free to its users.)

In case you missed it, Streeting was caught sneering at Jeremy Corbyn, and asking whether he had “gone senile”. I wonder if his excuse will be that he was trying to be rude to Corbyn, but was so cack-handed about it he accidentally upset everyone?

Either way, I wouldn’t recommend going to Hastings and Rye Labour’s Christmas Party. In fact, I would not recommend being over friendly with any of the Westminster parties or even Parties, given their behaviour in recent years. There is no easy answer. Dancing between the blue, red, yellow and green parties of destruction doesn’ t help — all have been caught uttering those weasel words, either through ignorance or through evil, profiteering intent.

Let us keep up our own standards and expectations. Most of the people of this country are not professional politicians, and that’s why most of the people of this country have always valued and needed our NHS, greatest of this country’s assets. The politicians won’t do it, so let us get out and fight for it, along with all the other things we need, deserve and have a right to.

For starters, our nurses need to be paid decently. So Hastings folks, see you at the Pier gates on Saturday, November 19^th.

[Update: we had the rally – it was a good one – click here for photos – but please keep going – “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it”]

But this is a national emergency

Although I digressed into local issues there, this is a discussion that needs to be had across the country. Although Hastings and Rye is (was?) a lefty CLP, it had its candidate brought in by Starmer’s Labour. She, let us call her Parachute Pattie, was previously known as an absentee councillor, dropped into a seat elsewhere for some reason other than a sound local endorsement. She appears to have assumed command of Hastings and Rye Labour. The dwindling local branches, in that impersonal, distant way Starmer’s Labour branches have, have drifted far, far away from what Labour should be. They invited Billy Hayes as ‘guest of honour’ last year. No doubt seeing that as a nod to the left, Parachute Pattie probably now sees her promoting of Wes Streeting as a balancing nod to the right for this year.

That is not how the Labour Party is supposed to work. Hayes, as a trade union activist and a socialist, should be typical of Labour Party speakers. NHS destroyers should be nowhere. Apparently, it’s now going about that “it’s okay, it’s just that Streeting is a friend of Pattie’s family.” No, that is not okay. That means Hastings’ candidate for Labour is one of those ‘centrist’ types who think they aren’t political. Let us tell the Labour Party this: promoting NHS destroyers is not a politically neutral act, and we must not tolerate the election of MPs who do it. Labour Party members in Hastings must either change Pattie’s mind on this, or get themselves a new candidate before we get far into 2023.

If this kind of thing is going on in the Labour Party where you are, and especially if there is no other practical way to kick out the Tories but to vote Labour, please listen carefully to Bob Gill, work out how to spot those weasel words, and insist on a Labour candidate who really intends to defend our NHS. Seriously, literally, all our lives depend on it.

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Kay

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