Selling the Family Silver
“The sale of assets is common with individuals and states when they run into financial difficulties. First, all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go.”
That was Harold MacMillan speaking in the House of Lords about Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal privatisation agenda in the 1980s.
The argument can be made that selling assets is unavoidable when in dire financial straights. But a fire sale of NHS property is another matter.
That is precisely what Theresa May said the government intended in a TV interview with Andrew Neil.
https://skwawkbox.org/2017/05/30/may-loves-naylorreport-everyone-must-seeshare-video-ge17-nhs/
Andrew Neil is not exactly a lightweight interviewer but even he failed to grasp just what May was saying or its significance. More importantly he failed to hold her to account.
But the video explains that this latest aspect of NHS privatisation is too dull to be interesting to a voting public used to sound-bite rhetoric and with social media sized attention spans.
So here is an example of what is at stake.
In 2015 it was announced that the old Royal London Hospital had been sold to Tower Hamlets district council for £9 million.
This went completely under the radar of the MSM. (Yes, Donald Trump is absolutely right, they are not to be trusted.)
Mainstream media didn’t even pick up on it. A press release from Barts Health featured in the East End Advertiser and that was it.
The real estate in question is a grade II listed Georgian façade that is a block long and takes up an enormous footprint. The true value must be closer to £90 million or even £900 million.
So why is there no comment or accountability? The answer is probably the same reason that May has not been held to account for the comments she made on the Andrew Neil show. It is too complicated.
The Naylor report recommends a fast track sale of surplus NHS land and buildings for private development.
Essentially this report is advocating a £10 billion fire sale. If the RLH deal was bad then this will be 1,000 times worse.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/what-naylor-report-everything-you-10543351
After his remarks about selling the family silver Harold MacMillan went on to say..
“When I ventured to criticise, the other day, this system I was, I am afraid, misunderstood. As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism. I am sure they will be more efficient. What I ventured to question was the using of these huge sums as if they were income.
I know now, I have learnt now from the letters that I have received, that I am quite out of date. Modern economists have decided there is no difference between capital and income. I am not so sure. In my younger days, I and perhaps others of your Lordships had friends, good friends, very good fellows indeed too, who failed to make this distinction. For a few years everything went on very well, and then at last the crash came, and they were forced to retire out to some dingy lodging-house in Boulogne, or if the estate were larger and the trustees more generous, to a decent accommodation at Baden-Baden.”
Privatisation of the NHS is policy on both sides of the political divide and has been for decades. Doubters are referred to The Plot Against the NHS, a book by Colin Leys and Stewart Player published to little acclaim in 2011.
According to the front page of the BMJ News this week, referring to the BMA manifesto, the NHS costs the UK 9.8% of GDP as opposed to 10.4%. That is a shortfall of more than £7 billion a year.
The figures are difficult to pin down but there is a clear trend. The UK is 13th out of 15 European countries in terms of healthcare spend and on a trajectory to increase that gap.
As Noam Chomsky said…
“That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
Anyone still doubting the extent to which the NHS is already privatised should look at the percentage of NHS operations already being performed in private hospitals.
It is difficult to get accurate figures for the extent of this outsourcing but certainly in London, a significant percentage of surgical operations in the private sector are NHS patients.
Another massive and often overlooked area of privatisation is PFI.
