With a number of registered supporters easily in excess of the total regular membership of any other single party, Labour has just raised well over four million pounds.
Mostly in order to pay for the chance to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
Imagine how many registered supporters there would have been if more people had been able to afford it.
Meanwhile, Owen Smith has taken £60,000 from PwC, the tax avoidance specialists.
This Leadership Election is a referendum on the privatisation of the National Health Service in England.
And it is a referendum on the whole culture and subculture behind the push for that privatisation.
This line is really working, Smith will be lucky to get 30% of the vote. "He wants to privatise the NHS." He's got no chance.
ReplyDeleteYes but the line is a lie advanced by dimwits who can't distinguish between introducing choice into public provision-which both parties have always done-and charging people for using public services which Owen Smith has never once advocated.
ReplyDeleteDavid Lindsay's source for this nonsense is Murdoch's Times newspaper, (the same "source" that mutilated Andrea Leadsom's comments beyond all recognition).
She had really said it, and so has he.
DeleteJeremy Corbyn's supporters claim this shows he supported NHS privatisation but Smith told ITV's Good Morning Britain such allegations were "clearly a lie".
ReplyDeleteHe said the Pfizer report on NHS choice, published in October 2005 in association with the King's Fund charity, had been commissioned before he went to work for As head of policy and government relations, Smith was involved in an initiative to promote greater "choice" for patients in the NHS, including focus group research on "direct payments" for some services.
the US pharmaceutical giant.
He said he had always believed a "100% publicly-owned NHS free at the point of use" but he had supported the Blair government's contracting out of minor operations to private hospitals to clear NHS waiting lists.
He said that "with hindsight" the policy had "opened the door to the current government to step through into a real attempt at marketisation and privatisation of the NHS, using the language of the last Labour government".
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36834096