The NHS is 78 and on life support: Doctors are begging Andy Burnham to act
A coalition of doctors, nurses and patients has written to Andy Burnham with a warning: save the health service, or watch it disappear into private hands
Seventy-eight years ago this month, Britain built something the rest of the world envied. A health service free to everyone, funded by everyone, there when you needed it. No bill. No credit check. Just care.
That promise is now on life support.
A coalition of health campaigners, doctors and workers has sent an open letter to Andy Burnham, the man widely tipped to be the next Labour leader, and the next Prime Minister. Their message was blunt. The NHS has been carved up over 15 years by cuts, underfunding and privatisation. And they laid out the human cost in a single line: “tens of thousands of patients needlessly losing their lives and burnt-out staff leaving faster than they can be replaced”.
Read that again. Not statistics. People. Someone’s mum on a trolley in a corridor. Someone’s dad waiting for a scan that never comes.
Free at the point of use: that was the deal
The letter does not spare the current government either. Two years in power, and the campaigners say ministers have entrenched the damage rather than fixed it. They point to a deal signed with the US and the pharmaceutical giants. They point to another wave of PFI (Private Financial Initiatives), the same accounting trick that saddled hospitals with crippling debt the last time round. They point to job cuts across English hospitals and more of your care handed to companies chasing a profit.
Then there is the technology. The letter names Palantir, describing it as a “human rights abusing corporation”, now being rolled out across the NHS. Your medical records, your data, handed to a firm most people have never heard of.
Meanwhile the basics collapse. Dental care is disappearing. Maternity scandals keep breaking. The corridor care figures keep getting worse. This is what happens when a public good is treated as a market.
Millions of us built it: millions of us can save it
Here is what the campaigners want. They want Burnham to think again on the US pharmaceutical deal, the new PFI centres, the hospital job cuts and the Palantir contract. They want a meeting with workers and patients before summer recess ends. And they want a clear timetable to bring NHS services back into public hands over seven years.
They are not asking for the moon. They are asking for the health service to belong to the people who pay for it, again.
The letter carries a sting aimed squarely at Burnham. Back in 2012, as Health Secretary, he warned that Labour had gone too far in privatising the NHS and that the coalition was going further and faster. He was right then: the question is whether he means it now.
After his win in Makerfield, Burnham called this Labour’s “final chance to change”. The campaigners threw his own words back at him. This is also, they wrote, Labour’s final chance to save the NHS.
The letter was signed by 19 organisations: doctors, nurses, firefighters, teachers, pensioners, disabled people. Ordinary working people who have watched something precious get sold off from under them and decided they had seen enough.
The NHS was never a gift from politicians. It was built by ordinary people, for ordinary people and paid for out of every wage packet in the country.
Now they want it back.