Labour is responsible for NHS ‘privatisation’

There has been no claim by UKIP that Labour privatised the whole of the NHS, merely that most of  the privatisation thus far has taken place under Labour, and that they will go further, because the EU via The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will demand they go further.

Hospitals built under the PPFI agreements are a bad deal for the NHS and a bad deal for the tax payer; we pay back seven times what we paid for them. And for each one funded under these arrangements we could have had another three up and running. Most informed commentators agree that these arrangements were to keep this borrowing hidden not because it was a good deal.

Next there was the sell-off of IT services and patient data, followed by the set-up of the Hinchingbrooke private trust, begun and pushed forward by Andy Burnham. All of the above took place under Labour. Then there was the call for GP charging and NHS membership by the Labour peers Lords Warner and Winston, and all of this can be easily researched Mr Warren.

Now allow me to bring you more up to-date, only this weekend it was revealed that Ed Miliband’s secret donor makes cash from NHS privatisation contracts. Even worse he is a hedge fund manager,

Martin Taylor runs Nevsky Capital, a company based in Mayfair that manages a fund with a £10m stake in United Health, the American health insurance giant worth over £100 billion that has run NHS funded GP surgeries and is bidding for other NHS work including a contract estimated at £1.2 billion.

Last week came the news that The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership gives the coalition’s health reforms international legal backing. A key part of the TTIP is ‘harmonisation’ between EU and US regulation. In Britain, the coalition government’s Health and Social Care Act has been prepared in the same vein — to ‘harmonise’ the UK with the US health system. This will open the floodgates for private healthcare providers that have made dizzying levels of profits from healthcare in the United States.

There will be no EU referendum under Labour if elected and no opportunity to prevent further far reaching privatisation. I suggest you get up to speed Mr Warren.

Finally you mention funding, well if we stop paying £55m per day for membership of the EU and £23m per day in aid there just might be some money for the NHS.

Ralph Bartle, Whiston Brooke View, Rotherham