I saw the above misinformation floating around on Facebook and felt compelled to respond…
What’s with that headline? I thought the Lib Dems were pro NHS?
Put simply: Labour spin doctors are trying to portray the Lib Dem’s as enablers of Tory privatisation of the NHS. This is Labour treating the NHS as a political football. And while the Labour position is clearly BS (as I’ll go on to explain below), in fairness to Labour, this is just politicians doing politics. The Lib Dems want to capitalise on their simple pro remain position vs Labour‘s unclear Brexit mess.
And likewise Labour want to distract from their internal split over Brexit by focusing attention on a simple anti-privatisation of the NHS message. Even more so if they can attack the Lib Dems who are currently polling in second place (behind the conservatives and ahead of labour and the Brexit party. [2]
So what actually just happened?
Basically Labour want to repeal the Health and Social Care Act 2012 which devolved funding from large centralised NHS Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities to more local Clinical Commissioning Groups (run by GPs).
The act in itself is not about “privatising the NHS” but about moving decision making around spending NHS money closer to the front line staff and their patients.
The act does not provide for any parts of the NHS to be sold off or privatised and actually preserves the commitment for NHS services to be free at the point of use.
Furthermore, the service tendering processes were made more rigorous in the new structure- making private sector involvement more transparent and more efficient [1].
It is really important to emphasise here- the Lib Dem position has been really clear for a very long time on this: the Lib Dems want to raise taxes to provide more money for the NHS, to expand mental health services, and are committed to ensuring the NHS remains free at the point of use.
So did the Lib Dem’s vote for this bill in 2012?
Yes - one of the core Lib Dem values is community. Lib Dems believe that Humans are better when they work together and that local people should have a say in things that effect them.
To repeat - the act is not about privatisation, but about localism.
The current Labour leadership’s default position is that of left wing socialism. They think that, as a rule, private enterprise is bad, people can’t be trusted, and more central government is good. To be reductionist: ‘the government should control every aspect of your life’.
To be fair to Labour, they believe that the act could make privatisation easier in future, so they want to repeal it. To be fair to reality- the Original Act has not ended a publicly funded and administered NHS.
So why don’t the Lib Dems want to repeal the act?
Aside from the ideological differences between Labour wanting a central government controlled NHS and the Lib Dems wanting locally controlled services, repealing the act would have required a massive reorganisation of the NHS.
This would have resulted in a monumentally expensive exercise without a clear goal. The repeal proposal wouldn’t have given any direction or plan, and so the changes required would have had to be worked out and delivered by NHS managers who, to be honest, aren’t exactly sat around with nothing better to be doing.
But then, the repeal proposal wasn’t expected to pass, it was purely political for the purposes of trying to create negative PR for the Lib Dems, who are in the process of overtaking Labour to become the second most popular party in the UK (after the Conservatives) [2].
A much better proposal would have been to table a new bill to guarantee that NHS services will always remain free at the point of use. Within this, there would be room for a sensible conversation about the amount of privatisation that is acceptable [1]. Rather than point scoring, I’d much rather the parties were working together. Regretfully in the context of a Tory hard Brexit, a labour soft Brexit and Lib Dem remain, I can’t see much chance of the parties working together for a long long while. Sorry to end on a bummer!
Notes
[1] To be very clear- to remove all private business from the provision of healthcare in the UK we would need to have a global socialist revolution, where governments take over all the things, like; all manufacturing of pharmaceuticals; all production of non pharmaceutical medical products like bandages, bed sheets, cleaning products and prosthetics etc; all food production and nutritional supplement production for patients; all logistics and distribution for moving items around; providing the enormous upfront capital investment for drugs research, development, testing and approvals process etc etc.
At some point the NHS has to interact with private businesses. Even if Labour had the mandate to nationalise all the things in the UK, the rest of the world would need to do the same. The question is not should private companies have anything to do with healthcare. The question is to what extent and within which regulatory framework should private companies interact with the NHS.
The labour position is wilfully nieve and cynical to try to win votes by misrepresenting truth. The Lib Dem position is nuanced and complex making it difficult to explain to voters. Still, both positions are better than the Tory’s who are just straight up lying about the NHS (big red bus anyone?).
[2] lots of opinion and voting intention polls have shown the Lib Dems to have overtaken or come close to overtaking Labour. It’s been well known for decades that when voters pick policies they prefer, without knowing the party, the majority pick Lib Dem.
Quite literally the majority of the population would vote Lib Dem: https://youtu.be/d5455K_PzA8.
Recent opinion poll article: