Tag: NHS

Worshiping and Defiling Britain’s NHS

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13 April 2020 — Counter Currents

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Tories worshipping Britain’s National Health System are akin to fanatical carnivores who suddenly extol the virtues of vegans.  Has the grave response to COVID-19 signalled a change of heart?  In the case of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it was all heart, quite literally.  It might have stopped beating and that scruffy, buffoonish essence of a man, a compulsive hand shaker with those who had contracted the coronavirus, might have been snuffed out.  But in a message on social media, he was grateful.

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Cynical £13bn ‘write-off’ prepares NHS for more privatisation

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6 April 2020 — True Publica

By TruePublica: On April 2nd, the Government announced that the NHS was to benefit from a £13bn debt ‘write-off’.

“Health Secretary announces over £13 billion of debt will be written off as part of a major financial reset for NHS. More than a hundred NHS hospitals to be rid of historic debt, freeing them up to invest in maintaining vital services and longer-term infrastructure improvements and comes alongside new NHS funding model to make sure the NHS has the necessary funding and support to respond to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.” (source: gov.uk)

This £13bn debt announcement is at best spurious but at worst, downright deceitful.

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NHS Must Explain Role Of Surveillance Company in Covid Battle

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30 March 2020 — True Publica

By Rob Woodward – TruePublica: Peter Theil is the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies. Palantir is a data-mining company – nice words for it activity of surveillance and espionage. Their activities have been found in the past to breach all sorts of privacy laws. Its algorithms vacuumed up emails and browser histories, GPS locations from smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations. They comb through financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for personal and business connections and work places and at home.

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UK government buried 2016 report exposing catastrophic NHS failings during flu pandemic

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28 March 2020 — WSWS

[I’ve added links to this version of the story that don’t exist in the original. B]

By Steve James

Late in 2016, the British government and health authorities held “Exercise Cygnus,” (still classified) a three-day training exercise intended to determine readiness for a novel respiratory influenza pandemic.

Cygnus aimed to test coordination between hospitals, health authorities, those tasked with tracking the disease and central government. The results of the report have never been made public. At the time, however, the British government’s then chief medical officer, Professor Sally Davies, told a health conference, World Innovation in Health, that the exercise “killed a lot of people.”

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Coronavirus Has Destroyed the NHS Internal Market Overnight, Proving That It Never Worked

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27 March 2020 — Novara Media

by Jo Sutton-Klein

Covid-19 has forced the government to make drastic changes to the fundamental structure of the NHS, as the service struggles to cope. 

Since the 1990s the UK’s healthcare provision has been subjected to increasing marketisation, in particular through the so-called internal market. Introduced by Margaret Thatcher, this system splits the NHS into purchasers and providers who must trade with one another.

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Boris Johnson’s coronavirus measures: Political criminality that will cost tens of thousands of lives

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25 March 2020 — WSWS

By Chris Marsden

“Without a huge national effort to halt the growth of this virus, there will come a moment when no health service in the world could possibly cope; because there won’t be enough ventilators, enough intensive care beds, enough doctors and nurses,” Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared Monday.

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The UK will spend over £350bn on extravagant military projects while failing to ensure national health security

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25 March 2020 — Declassified UK

By Mark Curtis

Declassified Milspend main 1600x800The British Royal Navy’s future flagship aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth arrives at her new home port of Portsmouth, Britain, 16 August 2017. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Gerry Penny)

New analysis shows that Britain plans to spend hundreds of billions of pounds on expensive military projects while the UK’s under-funded public health system struggles to address pandemics such as Covid-19.

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Lancet chief skewers Johnson government for its disastrous Covid-19 failure

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24 March 2020 — True Publica

Lancet chief skewers Johnson government for its disastrous Covid-19 failure

An editorial piece in The Lancet – the world’s most prestigious, and best known general medical journal warned two months ago of the oncoming conflict between an ill-prepared, under-funded national health service and an indiscriminate invisible killer in the form of the 2019 coronavirus. More recently The Lancet warned again of the problems that health workers would be facing and yet the government took no notice – until it was too late:

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COVID-19: THE TRUTH – Gov’t docs emerge to show how they’ve failed us all

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20 March 2020 — True Publica

COVID-19: THE TRUTH - Gov't docs emerge to show how they've failed us all

In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise. It was codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, as part of the general antipathy towards the NHS in general by the Conservative party. But the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016. The public will now pay with their lives for deliberate government inaction and total disregard towards their primary function – to protect us all.

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People’s Assembly Statement on The Coronavirus Crisis

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15 March 2020 — Peoples Assemblies

The People Vs The Government

The people are ahead of the government in making serious moves to combat the spread of the coronavirus. It is clear the government were pushed by organisations already taking action to close down large events, a move we very much welcome. Where government refuses to act civil society institutions, trade unions, and ordinary citizens are taking matters into their own hands. We reject the ‘herd immunity’ theory that coronavirus can simply be left to rip through society until enough people develop immunity. Not only is there no proof this will happen with this virus, it is the most deadly and careless approach the government could take. The government should be acting on World Health Organisation guidance and learning from those countries it commends for swift and decisive action. Older and vulnerable people matter as much as everyone else. We insist the government alter course immediately and implement the following measures:

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After years of cuts – this is all it will take to completely overwhelm the NHS

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12 March 2020 — True Publica

This is all it takes to completely overwhelm the NHS

On the last quarter of last year, nearly 90,000 full-time jobs for NHS were advertised. Hospital beds are now half what they were 30 years ago. The government is stating it will give to the NHS ‘whatever it takes’ to cope with the impending virus and yet even the very lowest of expected numbers mean the NHS will be totally submerged in serious CoVid-19 virus cases within about 6 to 8 weeks.

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The Dirty War on the NHS

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11 December 2019 — Off Guardian

Philip Roddis

I saw this film last night at a one-off screening in Derby. It’s all you’d expect of a John Pilger documentary. Polished and professional? Well of course, but more importantly:

Hard hitting, its straight-from-the shoulder interrogations of power a far cry from the posturing of mainstream interviewers who, doubtless in all sincerity – albeit of the self serving kind – mistake Paxmanesque aggression for the real deal.[1]

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JOHN PILGER’S NEW FILM IN CINEMAS AND ON TV THIS DECEMBER

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8 November 2019 — John Pilger

DirtyWarpostersmall.jpg

The new John Pilger film, The Dirty War on the NHS, will be released in cinemas in the UK on 1 December and broadcast on the ITV Network on 17 December.

The film’s launch will straddle an extraordinary period in Britain, especially an election campaign which, for the first time for years, offers voters a genuine choice. The film’s theme, the privatisation and destruction of the NHS, is already a major election issue.

“The Dirty War,” says Pilger at the beginning of the film, “is about democracy. Above all, it is a warning.”

For screenings and tickets, go to www.thedirtywaronnhs.com

REPORT: NHS privatisation – real expenditure 26 per cent, not 7 per cent

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7 November 2019 — LSE Politics and Policy – True Publica

David Rowland is the Director of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest. Prior to this he worked within healthcare professional regulation in the UK as the Head of Policy at three national regulators and has developed significant expertise in social care policy, NHS workforce issues, regulation, safeguarding, whistleblowing and patient safety.

Political parties are making all sorts of claims to save the NHS from its current financial strangulation and the privatisation drive, mainly because a general election is due and the NHS is inevitably used a political football. This report really is quite explosive, not least because the general public has been ‘hoodwinked’ into believing that only 7 per cent of the NHS budget is spent on private contractors. However, are claims of eradicating privatisation unachievable given its current scale and depth?

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Amazon NHS partnership – more questions over backdoor privatisation

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16 July 2019 — True Publica

Amazon NHS partnership - more backdoor privatisation?

By TruePublica: There is a lot going wrong in the world today and big tech is driving much of it in its indomitable thirst for ever greater global influence and markets to profit from. In the meantime, the British government is already making many moves to ‘Americanise’ society and continues towards its unpopular privatisation model in healthcare. These are not the musings of TruePublica’s editor. Professionals at the heart of the artificial intelligence community, privacy, civil liberty and healthcare are alarmed the NHS has teamed up with certain tech firms with scant care for patient outcomes especially with the latest announcement of American behemoth Amazon giving health advice.

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