Boris Johnson planning NHS England overhaul, leaked paper shows
Boris Johnson is planning a radical overhaul of NHS England, as he reverses controversial privatisation policies introduced by David Cameron, a leaked document suggests. According to the draft white paper, the government is planning to reduce the role of the private sector in NHS England and give the health secretary greater control.
NHS commissioners would not be required to put contracts out to tender, which can draw competition from competing health groups. Instead, a new policy would leave the NHS and local authorities to run services and encourage them to work together more effectively. The health secretary would also take more direct control over NHS England, with the plans putting emphasis on reducing bureaucracy and improving integration between the different departments of the NHS.
>>92214 He fucking what?
He locked the stable door after the horse has bolted is what he did. It is quite easy and obvious to see the value of effective preventative measures after you have failed to have them in place at the time you needed them.
Chances are the private sector screamed afoul of having to do their job, having kicked the can of prep for worst case scenarios down the road when they have cut corners, and now the problem is so obvious even BoJo can see it.
And rightly so. Devolution has accidentally given us a remarkable test of a relatively centralised, co-operative NHS versus the half-privatised half internal-marketed half-what-the-hell-chimera-abomination-unto-the-lord and at even in the most unsympathetic analysis, the best you could say is that there's no difference on the whole. The billions and billions of pounds and countless man hours wasted on reforming the English NHS every 5 years were completely squandered.
>>92216 There's a whole host of reasons why he could be doing this, but my hunch is that is partially because they're a bit worried about Keir Starmer but mainly because they're looking to integrate social care more with the NHS and they absolutely don't want to fuck this up because of their elderly voter base.
Look how swift and effective the vaccine thing has been when they just put up the cash and let the appropriate people get on with it, instead of putting it out to contractors who'd invariably have spunked it up the wall and left yet another public inquiry on the agenda in three year's time.
Even the Tories don't like getting ripped off. The difference is it's normally a handshake with a wink and a nudge where the money flows into one of their powerful mate's pockets; whereas during corona, they've just been taken for mugs by the private sector. PPE, testing equipment, school dinners, it's starting to become embarrassing for them.
When I was a teenlad I used to work as an Auxiliary Nurse for the NHS (07-08). The wards that I worked on sometimes had patients come through who were private (BUPA or whatever) and the nurses were directed to pay greater attention to them. These patients were quicker to be allocated private rooms on the public wards, saw Doctors more frequently, and had access to treatments not available to plebs like you and me. In effect there has been a two-tier system in place for over a decade.
The structural basis for privatized healthcare was implemented in 2012 and the government has subsequently been creeping towards creating an environment that would allow them to make the switch. The only reason they haven't done so yet is that NHS and Pensions are literally the only issues that the Tories aging voting base get riled up about (as stated by otherlad earlier in the thread)
COVID-19 has only accelerated the process of the privatisation of healthcare in this country. Why were Deloitte offered untendered contracts to provide services that the NHS could have easily provided? Private Enterprise has performed this role with a fraction of the competence at a severely greater cost.
Pretty much all Private-Public partnerships operate like this, and the whole neoliberal free market rhetoric is bullshit spewed by demagogues to justify the allocation of your tax money to their mates and their failprogeny.
You're only noticing the incompetence because it's had you locked in your house for a year. If it were something more mundane like building shit public transport infrastructure, or crashing an economy you would likely not bat an eyelid.
Hell of a time to be restructuring the NHS even if it's needed. I feel for the bureaucrats who will have to plan a fundamental change of one of the largest organisations on Earth on top of covid and the spending review.
>>92220 I'd argue that the policy direction goes as far back as Brown that was only briefly interrupted by a half-baked experiment.
>>92225 Careful now, if the Tories aren't about to close the NHS then the entire narrative of the Labour electoral campaign collapses. If Johnson can pull this off then he can hold the red wall and the Tories might end up ruling an effective one-party state unless Labour can mutate itself into a national socialist party.
>>92227 It seems like it's easy for the Tories to outflank Labour, like in 2015 when Miliband pledged an £8 per hour minimum wage and about a week later Osborne said he'd raise it to £9, but when Labour try and pull off something similar they get absolutely shat on.
>>92229 The question is whether they can actually pull it off which, given the reception the 'leak' had in the party, might not even be attempted. If nothing comes of it then I don't see a plan B outside of 'let's run Jeremy Corbyn again' once Starmer gets himself locked in a cupboard and even his own family forgets about his existence.
I honestly can't see Labour ever mounting a significant political offensive ever again. Either they do the Tony Blairs thing (i.e. Starmer) and are an effete version of the Conservative party who has less appeal to Tory voters than the Tories do and alienate Libs, or they go full Lib and alienate all the normals (focusing on marginal identity politics issues). I can't see a Labour play that doesn't ensure a Conservative victory.
Politics is all a load of shit anyway and you should just be content in the knowledge that you're the 21st century equivalent of those dirt farmers from the beginning of Monty Python's Holy Grail film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
You really must qualify you sarcasm better. You sound too close to the mark that I take it at face value, which obviously isn't your fault but the sheer volume of cunts who think this way.
I once matched with a self-identified LibDem on Tinder, and she has to have been one of the most objectively awful human beings I have ever had the misfortune to interact with.
Imagine being both so far up your own arse and yet so utterly vapid that you fully think it is 100% okay to hate specific groups of people, as long as they're the groups you've been told deserve it because of their privilege rank according to identity politics. That is your brain on liberalism.
Have you considered the possibility that most of the electorate want a centre-right government, which is why we've had one for most of the last century?
>>92233 >>92235 Lads...I was taking the piss because terms like 'full lib' is some Yankee political discourse 'spiced up' by teenagers getting into political extremism from facebook memes. Kindly have a word with yourself.
>Lineral Democrats are the party for closet Tories
Taking the piss or not, I can't see how this is anything but empirically true. They're basically just the Tory party in everything but image- And they lost even that after the coalition.
>sapping valuable votes from Labour
Arguably actually the case for Remainers who were still clinging to the idea of reversing the referendum, when they would have been far better served just voting for a more humane Brexit under Corbyn.
>>92234 There is a strong electoral case for this though: One recognised tendency in British politics has always been that when people are sick of the Tories, nice middle class Tory types will vote Liberal and help Labour get in that way. At every election where Labour has taken power except 1997 the Liberals have also gained votes. (Up 0.9% in 1923, 5.8% in 1929, 2.3% in 1945, 5.3% in 1964, 11.8% in 1974, and down 1% in 1997.)
1997 leaves the question: Did Labour win Liberals, or Tories? Was there a "Tories go Liberal, Liberals go Labour" effect, or did Labour win over Tories while Liberals stuck to Ashdown?
But then in 2001 and 2005 things go all weirdy wobbly with the Lib Dems running to the left of Labour on all sorts of issues and even the Conservatives having a pop at it on tuition fees (opportunism, but they still did it!). Then 2010 happened and we all know how that went.
Anyway, it's a shame our Labour party didn't follow the trajectory of New Zealand: Labour there did Thatcherism from 1984-90, got it all out of their system and caused untold social harm in the process, sold off the trains and the planes despite promising they wouldn't. People were sufficiently upset (about the social harm, not the vehicles) that Labour feared coming third in the 1990 election, so were overjoyed when they merely went down to the biggest defeat of a sitting government in their nation's history.
Then in they came back to power in 1999 and mixed the electorally useful parts of Blairism (mostly late-TV era campaign techniques) with policies like renationalising the trains and the planes, creating a state owned bank, abolishing workfare, creating tax credits but branding them properly so people actually know what on earth they are, calling the Iraq war illegal, and more.
In part as a result of delivering a government that most people can basically agree was alright within living memory, NZ Labour returned to govt in 2017. Unlike UK Labour, which is spiraling the plughole like a discount Lloyd George Liberal.
>>92235 >at you fully think it is 100% okay to hate specific groups of people, as long as they're the groups you've been told deserve it because of their privilege rank according to identity politics. That is your brain on liberalism.
That sounds so completely bonkers to me, I hate to go full no true scotsman, but that violates the very core pricipals of liberalism.
I accept that the term liberal has probably been co-opted by a paticular type of arsehole, and that arsehole considers classical liberals to be closet racists and sexists but usually those people self identify as left first rather than liberal.
Yeah, this one was all those things you usually associate with a radical twitter leftie, except socialism was the bit she objected to.
That's what was so vexing and why I found her so repulsive. I can tolerate and to some extent understand those sorts when they eanestly believe it's all part of one big package to make society fairer overall, but this one specifically and consciously wanted neo-liberal capitalism as it exists today to carry on as normal, just with more women and minorities in the 1%.
