Starmer’s plans for the NHS short-change the sickest patients and set the stage for corporate profiteering.

Call To Action

It’s a strange but depressing truth that many of the journalists who write about the NHS don’t actually know a lot about their subject. I’ve had lots of phone calls over the years with reporters who have said things like “I’m writing about NHS privatisation but I don’t actually know anything about it. Can you explain?”. To be honest, anyone raising awareness about NHS privatisation should be supported, so I’ve always tried to help by explaining the fundamentals, sharing reports and articles, and linking them up with others who can offer testimony, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.

The problem comes when these journalists receive government press releases about plans for the NHS; a non-expert cannot possibly read between the lines. They won’t identify the word that echoes a policy commitment from decades before and offers a clue about a minister’s true intentions. They can’t pick up on the nuanced language used by communication departments to gloss over stark problems. In short, they won’t be able to ask the sharp, pertinent, and necessary questions required to cut through the noise and get to the truth.

I know this, because when I started campaigning for the NHS I didn’t pick up on them either. I came straight out of school and went to medical school, and then into the NHS as a doctor where communications are very straight-forward. You are required to be direct, concise, and factual, and this is drilled into you until you become incredibly adept at it. It’s the only way to safely deliver information when you and your team are responsible for peoples’ health, and at the time I presumed the same thing applied elsewhere. I didn’t have an appreciation for the wild exaggerations and omissions that are employed by politically-motivated media outlets. I didn’t recognise that newspapers cleverly use “opinion pieces” and “comment” to inject inflammation, inaccuracy, and bias. In short, I was naive.

I’m not naive anymore though; I’ve been campaigning for the NHS for 10 long years and have become a lot more jaded. In fact, I can cut through the nonsense with a knife. Unfortunately, predictably, horrifyingly, there has been a lot of nonsense written about the NHS this week, and so I’m going to explain today what you actually need to know..