E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Nexxo,

I wonder how many years have you been saying that the NHS will be sold off if the Conservatives win the next election? It does seem to have been a while now.

In any case both main parties will no doubt spend the next election campaign proposing to "Spend Billions More" on the NHS as that's all it needs after all being better than every other system in the world etc, etc.

 

It has been happening since the 90's --in gradual, cumulative steps. No great conspiracy or long-term planning, just each step in that direction is sooner or later followed by another, and before you know it, you're there.

First was the Conservatives' ideas around 1990 of creating an artificial internal "market" with the idea that this competition would encourage efficiency. Why you'd want an interdependent system to compete with itself no sane person could tell you; it certainly didn't work for Microsoft. In any case it resulted in a split of the NHS in purchasing and providing authorities, which opened the door to a commissioning structure that could contract in private providers. Of course the first services to go private were the invisible ones: cleaning, catering, laundry etc. but soon private providers started to tender (well, cherry-pick) for clinical services. Labour then continued the trend in 2001 with Primary Care Trusts replacing GP fund holders.

Remember when the Tories promised in their 2010 manifesto that the NHS would be safe in their hands, and there would be no more huge top-down reorganisations? That was soon followed by the Health and Social Care Act 2012 --the largest top-down reorganisation in NHS history. Turns out political parties promise all sorts of fine things and then totally U-turn on them once in power. This Act devolved the responsibilities for the NHS duties of care further away from the government, and also opened up the market more for private providers. Incidentally it allowed those private providers to decide whether patients were appropriate for their services --which was the beginning of the end of the concept of duty of care and patients being "referred on" in a big circle to never actually get treatment anywhere.

Private companies have no duty of care. They can cherry-pick the profitable, easy services and leave the expensive, high-risk complex services to the NHS. They also are a lot harder to sue for compensation, it turns out. They are not subject to Freedom of Information requests. And they can bail from their obligations, as Circle demonstrated when, in 2015 it simply walked away from its 10-year contract signed in 2011 to run NHS Hinchingbrooke Hospital, after promising to not only lift it out of debt, but return it to profit, leaving it in an even bigger debt than it had started with (its defence was that it hadn't counted on austerity budget cuts and an increase in the use of A&E --issues which every NHS Trust had to deal with as well and couldn't walk away from).

The NHS does not get more money spent on it. In order to keep up with inflation and population growth and aging, its budget should increase about 4% every year. This is certainly the trend in any comparable Western country in the EU. Those countries also spend about 10-12% of their GDP on health care; the UK spent about 9% and with its freeze on its budget since Austerity, that has been declining to about 8%. The objective was about 7.6% by 2020. Make no mistake: in 2012 only a few Trusts were in the red. In 2014, all of them were.


That, too, plays into Conservatives' hands: if you defund a service enough, it will start to fail to meet the expectations of the public, who then get angry and think that perhaps a privatised service would be a better option after all.

"That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital." --Noam Chomsky

Could the NHS be run more efficiently? If so, no other nation in the world has managed to run theirs on the same budget and still perform to a reasonable standard, and neither has any private company (as e.g. Circle proved). Also there have been 12 re-organisations of the NHS during its history. All were ideologically motivated; none had any evidence base whatsoever. Every reorganisation set the NHS back by 2 years as it had to adapt and find its feet again. It is, by now, 24 years behind on where it could have been.

So yes, the NHS privatisation will not be televised; it will continue to happen behind the screens. The NHS will become the purchasing / commissioning body, plastering its light blue logo on everything, but services will be delivered by private healthcare providers, which will be unaccountable, unsue-able, and will have no legal duty of care. And one day, it will be the electorate who will vote to abolish the NHS, just as they voted for Brexit. It is the future, and it will be due in the next decade.

 

As bad as my day is going, i think it's probably still going better than May's

 

May's defeat is self-inflicted. She went and very publicly asked for something that the EU has been saying since 2016 is not possible. Shock, surprise: the answer is again: "Not possible". Who would have thought?

 

May's 'It's just negoation tactics', has taken use from Argument Clinic Python to either Black Knight or Dead Parrot Python.

It's just a negotiation tactic.
'Tis but a scratch.
Chequers is merely pining for the Fjords

 

Yea but it's all the EU's fault, they never wanted to negotiate in the first place, they're being intransigent, we should've just left, or <insert exoneration here>.

 

Also:

"I'm not dead... I'm feeling much better now..."

 

There aren't enough Picards on the internet to respond to that link.

 

Q's

Parliament gets to vote on any deal.
If May decides to go full no deal, would parliament actually be able to vote on it or block it?

 

I'm not sure anyone know for sure, i was listening to politics live yesterday and it seems there's disagreement on what and how something like that would play out, something about parliament not being able to vote on no deal as the government would need to legislate for that versus the government being in chaos and either collapsing or being forced into it.

 

Is it just me not seeing EU news, and thus not seeing the reporting on the EU's side, or is the UK the only party in this negotiation repeatedly in the news showing their hand?

And, often, how they don't intend to abide by their hand anyway?

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45591733

It seems several countries fear a hard brexit

 

She has completely lost the plot, and the posturing today was a move into war mode - not what you want when you are entering into a new relationship and trying to agree trading terms.

Today's performance was an effort to make the other European governments out to be the baddies, "look at how they are treating us" in an effort to shore up support at home when the inevitable no deal comes to pass.

 

I think you are right. I think this is not just getting the masses on side for a no-deal. I think the stress is getting to her.

Der Spiegel has its own take on what a no-deal Brexit may look like. It's not pretty.

 

I don’t think she really has a choice but no deal at this point, it’s the only option that could be forced through parliament, if the voting thing works like that.

 

What's most irritating about this burgeoning disaster is that the people responsible for the lies, the misinformation, and the brain-dead bravado after the vote will never, ever, feel the burn.

 

#justsaying

 

Sorry dude, would be funny if it were true but that is just the Brexit map and the same map in black and white.

Probably best not drop to regurgitating nonsense like the leave camp did, it does nobody any favours.

 

There has been plenty of talk for months from the Tories about throwing her under the bus and installing someone else in her spot... so she had no choice but to spit her dummy hard and try to blame everyone but herself when her "plan" shattered like a raw egg dropped onto a Tank.

Of course she could also have chosen the path of trying to do what is right for the country rather than her career... but hey, politicians be politicians.