UK: Starmer pledges Labour’s support for NHS privatisation

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the house organ of the ruling Conservative Party, Starmer declared in an op-ep that nothing was “off limits” when it came to the NHS. It should not be “treated as a shrine”, he said, repeating the formula employed earlier by his Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

The country, Starmer insisted, must “face the facts as they are, not as we’d like them”. The NHS must be “reformed,” a phrase well understood in ruling circles to mean a root-and-branch restructuring for the benefit of the private sector and the wealthy. Reform “doesn’t mean rearranging chairs,” he added, and was not about spending more money since “investment alone won’t be enough.”

He had never believed it was Labour’s job to “merely defend public services,” but rather to “drive up standards,” more code for increasing productivity at the expense of the workforce. He was “hungry for new ways of working, for tackling ingrained thinking, for reform and modernisation.”

After criticising Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for taking the “path of least resistance,” Starmer finishes by extolling his own fitness for doing “the hard yards and tell[ing] the hard truths.”

His statements in the Telegraph were followed by a series of television interviews where he expanded on Labour’s new pet subject of using private healthcare as an answer to the NHS crisis.

He told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge, “One of the issues that we’ve looked at is whether or not we’re using the private sector, effectively, a number of people do go as NHS patients to the private sector. Our research shows that that’s been underused, and we could do more of it.”

He told the BBC’s Laura Keunssberg that he would encourage people to bypass GPs and go straight to a private specialist via “self referrals”. The ignoramus was so caught up in his vision of eliminating “bureaucratic nonsense” that creates a “mind-boggling waste of time” that he even suggested, to universal derision, “If you’ve got internal bleeding and you just need a test, there ought to be a way that doesn’t involve going to see a GP.”

Starmer is positioning himself to the right of the Tories, as a firmer advocate of NHS privatisation. But it was his Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting who made this still clearer and spelled out that doing so will mean a direct conflict with the working class.

A devout Blairite, Streeting declared last December that the NHS had to “reform or die,” describing doctors and health workers as “vested interests” that he would not allow to “stand in the way of reforms.”