Matthew Lesh has a topical CAPX piece on Keir Starmer's 'abolition' of NHS England and a reminder that in StarmerWorld, 'abolition' doesn't necessarily mean 'abolition'.
So long, NHS England, and thanks for nothing
NHS abolition was not on my bingo sheet for Keir Starmer’s Government. But here we are. A political earthquake. Kissinger has gone to China. The party most closely associated with Britain’s healthcare system are the ones who finally be replacing it with a much more successful European-style social insurance system. Finally, fewer Britons will die compared to world-leading healthcare systems, like Australia’s.
Reader, I have fooled you. None of this is true.
What Starmer has in fact abolished is NHS England. While this may be a gift to headline writers, it is not a radical step, it’s a bureaucratic reorganisation. A separate quango will no longer be responsible for overseeing the budget, planning and delivery along with commissioning GPs and some other services. Instead, this function will be bought in-house to the Department of Health and Social Care. The nameplates on several buildings will be changed, new stationery ordered and different email addresses in use. But fundamentally, the NHS will remain the same.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that "Sir" Keir Starmer has no notion of a world beyond the corporate state and no notion of any world beyond his ideology. This useless bureaucratic fiddling is merely a pale and irrelevant attempt to share a tiny fraction of Trump's radicalism.
- The PM's NHS reform is welcome, but unlikely to reduce bureaucracy
- To sort out our healthcare system properly, it must be decentralised
- Bureaucratic restructuring is not the wholesale reform the NHS needs
NHS abolition was not on my bingo sheet for Keir Starmer’s Government. But here we are. A political earthquake. Kissinger has gone to China. The party most closely associated with Britain’s healthcare system are the ones who finally be replacing it with a much more successful European-style social insurance system. Finally, fewer Britons will die compared to world-leading healthcare systems, like Australia’s.
Reader, I have fooled you. None of this is true.
What Starmer has in fact abolished is NHS England. While this may be a gift to headline writers, it is not a radical step, it’s a bureaucratic reorganisation. A separate quango will no longer be responsible for overseeing the budget, planning and delivery along with commissioning GPs and some other services. Instead, this function will be bought in-house to the Department of Health and Social Care. The nameplates on several buildings will be changed, new stationery ordered and different email addresses in use. But fundamentally, the NHS will remain the same.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that "Sir" Keir Starmer has no notion of a world beyond the corporate state and no notion of any world beyond his ideology. This useless bureaucratic fiddling is merely a pale and irrelevant attempt to share a tiny fraction of Trump's radicalism.
Perhaps next time we read headlines about ‘NHS abolition’ it will mean something a bit more meaningful than a bureaucratic restructure.
7 comments:
So he's going to take the 9000 people who work for NHS England and put them to work doing the same thing under a different name, right? Maybe with a pay rise
Bucko - that sounds like the plan, same people, same approach, different names on office doors. Maybe a few retirements and voluntary redundancies, but they could have happened anyway.
“… The nameplates on several buildings will be changed, new stationery ordered and different email addresses in use…”
I don’t like to say “I told you so”, but hey, I told you so.
According to the linked article it’s actually 15,000 staff. What the blue blazes do they all actually do all day?
Anon - meetings, emails, reports, gossip - I bet that's most of it.
Peter - sounds like the voice of experience, it is in my case.
If I understand it correctly he's going to make the English NHS more like the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish NHS.
And he's doing that because the English model was too much better than the others due to the involvement of the private sector.
Peter - Mrs H and I were talking about private sector involvement yesterday and the number of people we know who went for private healthcare when they needed some kind of treatment and weren't prepared to wait for many months in an NHS queue. We do it because it's better.
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