The NHS Conspiracy of Silence

I’d have more luck publishing a piece about colonic irrigation than the NHS right now.

Despite the fact that it’s the one thing that unites the electorate, the NHS was airbrushed out of the budget. That should have been a media talking point, but it wasn’t. In the first of the leaders’ non debates (King Cameron threw Milliband to his Tory attack dogs, Paxman and Burly, instead), there were no scripted questions about the NHS. As soon as random audience members were allowed to speak, it was the NHS that stirred the audience. One woman accused Cameron of breaking his promise about no more top down restructuring. “You broke your promise before, how can I trust you again”. The answer is, you can’t.

This week 100 business bosses, who happened to have either OBEs after their names, or Lord/Baronness before them, signed a letter supporting the Tories. Shut the front door! There’s no other group in society that can cheat the exchequer of tax and get away with it.

This week Sports Direct hit the headlines for giving staff in one of their warehouses 15 minutes notice of their redundancies. The subsidiary was put into administration then immediately bought back by Sports Direct, wait for it, without the debts. The taxpayer was left to pick up the bill for the staff redundancies and suppliers. Then there’s the unpaid tax bill, which comes to almost £700,000. What is staggering about this scandal, is that none of what Sports Direct did was illegal, apparently. A Conservative Government has presided over a system that allows big business to exploit loopholes at the taxpayers’ expense.

Trillions of pounds that should be going to our health service is being siphoned off into offshore tax havens. The Conservatives had 5 years to redress this injustice but chose not to. They chose instead to clamp down on the disabled and the most vulnerable in society. Many of whom have been driven to suicide as a result of the hideously inhumane bedroom tax and other savage benefit cuts, which after all, are not a nice to have but the difference between eating and starving. Keeping warm or freezing to death.

Last Tuesday, David Cameron got heckled by an Age Concern audience for presiding over, what actor Michael Sheen described last month as, “a systematic dismantling of the NHS”. A report published on the same day, showed that mental health related absences in the NHS, due to stress, depression and anxiety, have doubled under the Tory administration. Apart from the tragic human costs, sickness and absence costs the NHS millions every year.

There has also been a 3 fold increase in the use of agency staff, who can charge as much as £1,600 a shift (most of which goes to the private company). The total agency bill to the NHS this year is expected to be £980 million. Peter Carter, RCN chief executive, said: "This report shows the true financial cost of a health service which takes a 'payday loans' attitude towards workforce planning”.

One NHS hospital paid more than £3,200 for a locum doctor to cover a single 24 hour shift over the Christmas crisis. No organization could withstand this level of gross mismanagement. It's no wonder the NHS is on its knees. We know from history that running down public services is a precursor to privatization (see Privatising the World by Tory MP Oliver Letwin).

The coalition’s Health and Social Care Act (waved through under the media’s radar) means CCG's (Clinical Commissioning Groups) can privatise chunks of the NHS without the inconvenience of consultation. Taxpayers, won't know about it until it's a done deal. Last week, leaked documents showed this is exactly what's happening at Staffordshire, where the CCGs are pushing through plans to privatise cancer care. A contract worth £1.2bn is up for grabs without any safeguards for quality of patient care or provision for what'll happen when it goes belly up. This barely got a mention in the mainstream media.

Despite the disastrous failed privatization experiment at Hinchingbrooke hospital (which was recently handed back to the NHS when Circle Holdings were exposed by the Care Quality Commission as having scant regard for quality of patient care), CCG’s are still blindly pursuing the reckless strategy of outsourcing to private companies, who are driven by profit, not patient care.

That, in the words of one of the doctors interviewed in the incisive documentary “Sell-Off: The Abolition of the NHS, “is like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank”.