Starmer’s choice: he won’t fund the NHS even though he knows people will die as a result
I just posted this on Twitter:
That, I think, summarises what Starmer will really be saying today.
He's refusing to provide the new money the NHS requires even though he knows, and will say, the Tories underfunded it.
Then he will claim he has no choice about that - which is completely untrue.
As a result, he is deliberately supporting the Tory plan, which was to collapse the NHS.
Worse, he's supporting the Tory plan because he, like them, is refusing to borrow the funds necessary to update the NHS to meet modern needs so it can provide the healthcare we require when those funds are readily available to be borrowed, whether from the City or people who would like to save with NS&I.
As a consequence, he knows that people who will need help will go untreated.
Worse still, he knows that by doing this, he is hastening the end of the NHS and its replacement by a private medical service - which would seem to be his goal.
And what he must also know - because he says that working people cannot afford to pay more for the NHS - is that the result is that many people will eventually be denied any healthcare at all because they will not be able to afford it.
In other words, what he is saying is that those without money must now accept that the reality is that they might die uncared for. There is no other reasonable interpretation of his words unless he's merely being superficially melodramatic, in which case he is acting wholly inappropriately for a prime minister.
As Noam Chomsky once put it "That’s the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
That's what Starmer is doing here. The result is that we would all pay a great deal more, except for those who might not be able to pay anything at all, and they might suffer or even die as a result.
And this is from a supposedly Labour government.
PS A version of the above has now been posted on Twitter.
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