Will Labour’s radical plans for the NHS favour private shareholders and ignore the most vulnerable?

Call To Action

Since the Summer of 2022, I’ve been watching Keir Starmer anxiously. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a very long time, but with the utter turmoil and chaos that has been going on in UK politics, it has certainly felt like it. Since then, we have had three Conservative Party leaders. We saw one tank the economy, we saw Suella Braverman and the Rwanda scheme rise to terrifying prominence, and we’ve seen a General Election fought and won by Starmer. We’ve seen Farage and the Reform Party on the rise and the Greens gaining ground too, and throughout all of this change I’ve felt anxious about Starmer and his plans for the NHS.

When I’ve voiced this unease - calling out his behaviour, drawing attention to the company he keeps, and to the decisions he’s made, I’ve faced backlash. I’ve endured smear attempts and attacks online, misogyny, and internet trolls spreading misinformation about me. It’s been pretty awful to be honest, and I’ve had to grit my teeth more times than I can count. But none of those attacks stopped my lingering distrust of Starmer and his plans for our healthcare system; my uneasiness was always there in the pit of my stomach, ever since an article was printed in The Independent on 15th July 2022.

When the article came out, I was in the planning stages of writing a book about how politicians have betrayed the NHS, and was sketching out ideas. I was trying to work out how to tell a very specific story - the story of how the NHS hasn’t suddenly deteriorated because of one thing or one government, but instead has been slowly undermined by successive governments for the past 40 years. I was trying to describe the layers of legislation and policies that have been introduced in a stepwise fashion; policies which have enabled privatisation to infiltrate the service and have benefitted corporate interests at the expense of the public.

That’s a difficult story to tell at the best of times; it’s complicated and historical, but it was particularly difficult in the Summer of 2022. There was widespread unhappiness at the Conservative government, many people were looking for change, and a convenient narrative had begun to form about Labour, and what a Labour government could look like. “Change!” we were told, “Labour will represent change!”. They almost didn’t need to propose their own policies and manifesto ahead of the General Election; the fact that they weren’t the Tories was enough for many people.