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John Pilger’s passionate film addresses threats to the NHS, from the burgeoning presence of private healthcare companies to the invasion of bureaucrats
Veteran campaigning reporter John Pilger makes no apology for returning to the subject of the National Health Service, and nor should he. The NHS could become Britain’s Gazprom: a gigantic public resource that could so easily be carved up to make corporate oligarchs even richer than they are already.
These are points that have been made by Michael Moore’s Sicko (2007) and Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45 (2013), but Pilger brings us more up to date. He takes us through the familiar history, from the founding of the NHS in 1948, through to the 70s, as a new generation of Thatcherite rightists (such as Oliver Letwin and John Redwood) took on health care with a new objective – privatise by stealth. The complaisant Blair government brought in private finance initiatives, which allowed hospitals to be built with private capital but burdened their governing trusts with heavy debt repayments; and the Cameron/Clegg coalition gave us the 2012 Health and Social Care Act “freeing up providers to innovate” – that is, opening the door to private healthcare companies and a metastasising invasion of bureaucrats and management consultants. Continue reading...