[This is the 14th in a series of 14 posts. I suggest you scroll down and start with Number 1]
The Plot Against the NHS is a book by Colin Leys and Stewart Player; I would recommend it, read it and judge for yourself.
Briefly, their thesis is that a ‘concordat’ was negotiated in 2000 by the Independent Healthcare Association with Tony Blair’s second Secretary of State for Health, Alan Milburn. ‘The Association’s leading negotiator, Tim Evans, was very clear on the ultimate aim of the concordat. He looked forward, he said, ”to a time when the NHS would simply be a kitemark attached to the institutions and activities of a system of purely private providers.”‘ (page 1)
The authors document the steps that were taken to further this aim. They call it a plot because it was covert, never made explicit, never debated. ‘Neither parliament nor the public have ever been told honestly what was intended. Misrepresentation, obfuscation and deception have been involved at every stage.’ (2)
Some excerpts:
‘So in spite of it great popularity Britain’s most famous postwar oscial achevement was unravelled through a series of step-by-step ‘reforms’ each creating the basis for the next one, and always presented as mere improvements to the NHS as a public service. They were billed as measures to reduce waiting times, to offer more ‘choice’, to achieve ‘world class’ standards, to make the NHS more ‘patient-centred’—anything but the real underlying aim of the key strategists involved, to turn the health care back into a commodity and a source of profit.’ (5)
‘Each of the so-called reforms involved persistent, behind-the-scenes lobbying and fixing by a network of insiders—inside the Department of Health, above all, but also by a wider network, closely linked to the Department: corporate executives, management consultants, ministers’ ‘speacil advisers’, academics with free market sympathies and a taste for power, doctors with entrepreneurial ambitions—and the House of Commons Health Select Committee, packed with just enough compliant back-benchers and deliberately insulated from advice from expert critics of the market agenda. Not to mention a large and growing corporate lobby.’ (5)
‘Each ‘reform’ needed its own quantum of dissimulation and occasionally downright lies. The culture of the Department of Health was radically transformed. In place of old-fashioned ideas of accountability and fidelity to facts the priority shifted to misrepresentation and spin. This was accelerated by the fact that from the late 1990s onwards more and more private sector personnel were active inside the Department, often in leading roles.’ (5-6)
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These are just a few excerpts. I have bought and read the book. To me it helps make sense of DOH behaviours which are otherwise mind-bogglingly stupid.
If you understand the ‘Choose your GP’ policy as aiming to de-regulate English general practice and open it up to for-profit companies, then it is rather clever, not stupid. But it does rely on the public being duped, and not seeing through the duplicity and deception; and the journalists, and the GPs, and other health professionals.
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