'While we welcome Boris Johnson going, we must remember the Conservative government’s ideological attack on a publicly provided NHS remains and must be resisted.'
Keep Our NHS Public, a non-party-political organisation that campaigns against the privatisation and underfunding of the NHS, has criticised Boris Johnson for leaving behind a legacy of putting profit before lives.
Whilst welcoming the resignation, the group slams the decision for the PM to stay until a new leader is appointed, saying: “He must go now.”
In a statement, Holly Johnson, an NHS nurse, and Tom Griffiths of Keep Our NHS Public, said:
“Prime minister Boris Johnson should have resigned a long time ago, but whoever in his party replaces him will be no better for the NHS or for working people. He leaves behind a legacy of putting profit before lives, the privatisation of the NHS and creating a cost-of-living crisis that we’re all paying for.”
Years of ‘economic mismanagement’
Describing the impact years of ‘economic mismanagement’ has had on the NHS, Dr John Puntis, co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public, said: “The NHS is now facing its biggest crisis ever, with underfunding, 110,000 staff vacancies, bed cuts, ambulance services collapsing, record high waiting lists now over six million, and a massive maintenance backlog of around £9 million. With life expectancy stalled and poverty and inequality increasing, population health continues to suffer from the adverse effects of overall economic mismanagement.”
The group points to how throughout the pandemic, the government had claimed to have done a good job, but the country saw “countless avoidable deaths, private contracts for their friends and big party donors, inadequate supply, quality and guidance of PPE, and a failed track and trace system.”
Tory ‘chumocracy’
Reports revealed that during the first six months of the pandemic, the government awarded £18m in Covid-related contracts, most with no competitive tendering processes. Contracts that totalled £1.5bn had gone to companies with connections to the Tory party.
In April 2021, Sir David King, a former government chief scientist, said Johnson’s ‘chumocracy’ was using the health crisis to sell off the health service by stealth.
Speaking to the Guardian, King had said: “I am extremely worried about the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, about the processes by which public money has been distributed to private sector companies without due process.
“It really smells of corruption.”
Accusing the government of acting deliberately to carry out ideological aims of privatising the NHS, King added: “It is slipping this through in the name of a pandemic – effectively, to privatise the NHS by stealth.
“I’m quite sure this has not been an accident, I’m quite sure this has been the plan, there has been clarity in this process. The audacity has been amazing.”
According to the World Health Organisation: “Privatisation is where non-government bodies become increasingly involved in the financing or provision of health care services.”
In its analysis of how the NHS is being privatised, Patients4NHS, a resource for providing patients and the public with up-to-date information on what is happening to the NHS, says the privatisation of the health service started at least as long ago as the 1980s but has been accelerating since the Health and Social Care Act of 2012.
This Act, says Patients4NHS, introduced a network of Clinical Commissioning Groups and required them to put health services out to competitive tender, allowing the NHS to become increasingly open to the involvement of private sector providers.
The group also notes how outsourcing services to for-profit companies has consistently increased following the Health and Social Care Act, which made it almost compulsory to outsource some services.
Referring to the Tories’ ‘ideological attack’ on the NHS, Keep Our NHS Public says that it is likely to take yeas of hard campaigning to undo the damage done to the NHS, stating:
“What the population needs, and what the NHS needs is not just a new PM but an entirely new Government with new policies designed to return the NHS to its founding principles.”
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward
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