I was reading something the other day about NHS outsourcing. This, if you don’t know, is allowing private companies to undertake NHS services. My brain hasn’t got the capacity to remember which companies are which, because there are so many. The important bit was the claim that some private contractors had actually done a half decent job.

As I read it, the pitch given to the masses is that to make the NHS fully functional, some services must be privatised. This is because the NHS is overburdened with bureaucracy and demotivated staff. By allowing private companies to take these services over, the treatment patients receive, will be better.

Selling Privatisation

You can see in the paragraph above, how easy it is pull people in. Especially those who have seen their parents lying on a trolley in a hospital corridor for two days. If we are emotional and vulnerable, we are also easy to sell an alternative option to. That’s what troubles me. Not much I have seen that has been privatised, has rapidly improved since.

Privatisation all goes wrong when the parasites move in. Check out the bonuses received by CEO’s of PPE and Test & Trace organisations, then tell me that the NHS has benefited.  Councils across the land with public health departments were denied the opportunity to administer test and trace whilst companies like Serco raked it in. The UK budget for T&T is £37 billion whilst in Germany it was under a billion. Where has that money gone? 

If privatisation was properly regulated, I guess it is possible some sectors of public services could benefit. However, as it stands now, it is an open goal for corrupt businesses like Serco. Serco CEO, Rupert Soames, has been paid over £10 million since the start of the pandemic. Serco’s CFO, Angus Cockburn, received around £5 million during the same period. In fairness, Serco are just one headline example amongst tens of others who have milked the pandemic.

Future Generations

History will teach future generations that allocation of private Covid contracts has been the biggest raid of public funds in economic history. The tax payer has been raided and now they are being raided again with tax hikes to pay for those who raided them. It’s remarkable that people don’t see that. The opposition need to make more of it and raise public awareness.

To make this extraction of urine even worse, most of these private contractors have failed. Test & Trace has been utterly useless with the UK only excelling with death tolls. However, that doesn’t matter when the head of test and trace is the wife of the government’s appointed anti-corruption champion, John Penrose, MP. A situation so ridiculous, you should check it out, as I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought I am a conspiracy peddler. 

So, the next time someone tries to convince you that Boris Johnson and theUK government “are only doing there best”, think of the words of American philosopher and historian, Noam Chomsky. 

Privatisation: Defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, hand it over to private capital.