A Treasure Worth Trillions

As Wes Streeting’s partner is tonight selected for Stockton West, JM Smith (John Smith, son of Harry Leslie Smith) writes:

Free at the point of use, universal public healthcare was once democracy’s strongest castle wall. It protected, for decades, our civilisation from the predatory nature of oligarchic capitalism. Then not long ago, we allowed the entitled class inside those walls like a modern day Trojan Horse. Now like a marauding army, the one per cent loot our state infrastructure and treat it like a pirate’s booty.

Why this happened is easy; citizens got lazy about their civic responsibility to be their brother’s keeper. They became ignorant of their working-class history and preferred to think their elevation to the middle class was from hard graft rather than a social safety net that granted to them proper wages, affordable housing, and inexpensive higher education.

Once believing that merit alone took their ancestors from the slums of the Great Depression rather than the kind hand of socialism it was simple work for the news and entertainment media owned by the rich to indoctrinate them with propaganda. Into their minds a notion was seeded that private enterprise knows best- and that wealth accumulation is a benevolent force in society. 

After that, neoliberalism smashed the gates of the Welfare State down with a battering ram of austerity, the poison quiver of xenophobia, and a phalanx of cheap consumer goods to occupy our spare leisure moments snatched in between hours of underpaid drudgery.

The one per cent began this quest, so far successful, to acquire ownership of public healthcare because it’s a treasure worth trillions to them. Privatising public healthcare is an eternal wealth generator that unequally divides society from the haves and have-nots. Our human right and desire to live in good health and dignity is a fortune the one per cent can milk for evermore. If you want proof, look at the unfair, unequal wealth divide in the USA. Most of it is generated by a pay-as-you-go and private insurance healthcare system.

Privatisation of public healthcare irrevocably shifts ownership of society from the many to the few. A pluralistic democracy can't be sustained when the quality of a citizen’s life and health is determined by their wealth. It is the death knell for humanity and a no-return ticket to authoritarianism.

The surest way a government hastens the death of public healthcare is to starve it of funds and demoralise its frontline staff by underpaying them. A political class kills public healthcare when it identifies most with its wealthiest citizens rather than its ordinary ones.

Since 2010, Britain’s governments, despite having different opinions on Brexit, have never varied over their ideology that privatisation is best for the NHS. Too much private healthcare money has flowed into Conservative Party coffers, their MPs and members sitting in the Lords, to suggest otherwise.

Even Labour, the government in waiting, now believes the private sector must play a greater role in delivering healthcare. I still find it gobsmacking that the political party who in 1948 delivered the NHS to the people because the working class defeated Hitler will probably be the party who despatches it with an assisted suicide of less funds than the Tories have given it. But there are still means to keep the one per cent mitts off the NHS.

One essential tactic is for the public to stand in solidarity with junior doctors and consultants during their strikes scheduled for September and October. They have been underpaid and overworked for too long and it’s not because Britain doesn’t have the dosh. Britain is the 5th wealthiest economy in the world. So, if there is money for Trident, there is money to properly pay a doctor to save you or your loved one’s life.

The Tories want the best of Britain's medical community to leg it to the private sector or abroad. They want to be able to say, “We can't fix the NHS without the one per cent  investments and privatisation.” Standing with junior doctors and consultants forces the government’s hand because they have little voter support left. It makes them know, England is for a public system that pays its employees a decent wage that rewards their dedication to preserving human life. Instead of clapping for carers as was done during Covid, it’s time to join their picket lines.

The best way to explain why it matters for you, for public healthcare and democracy, that junior doctors and consultants in the English NHS must win their job action against the government is to listen to a video Harry Leslie Smith made for junior doctors during their 2015 strike. It’s moving and inspiring to think when Harry Leslie Smith was 92 and 93, he hit the ground running and travelled by train, bus, and car across England to support junior doctors. During that period, he talked at rallies, on TV and on the doorstep about life before the NHS and why equitable pay for doctors, nurses, and all hospital staff was good sense.