Karl Marx warned that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” However, he was referring to similar events, not the literal repetition of the same failed policies by the same party (and several of the same people) 25 years later.
But that seems to be what Keir Starmer and his Health Secretary Wes Streeting are intent upon doing to the NHS in their so-called ‘reforms’: and while this may be farcical, it’s far from funny.
Today’s Labour government seems hell-bent on rebuilding the expensively constructed competitive health care market of the mid-2000s. Moreover, like Tony Blair’s government, Keir Starmer’s ministers are again determined to postpone or avoid any radical action to tackle the problems of social care.
Tony Blair promised in Labour’s 1997 manifesto to scrap the Tories’ “complex internal market,” in which hospitals had to compete to win contracts from health authorities and fundholding GPs. The manifesto declared that “The result is an NHS strangled by costly red tape, with every individual transaction the subject of a separate invoice,” and also insisted “Labour is opposed to the privatisation of clinical services which is being actively promoted by the Conservatives”.
However, as we now know, New Labour under Blair and Brown soon changed course on both of these issues, opting instead to drive far further and faster than Thatcher’s Tories, creating an even more complex competitive market system that was no longer “internal” to the NHS, but widened to include private providers. And of course they also began the privatisation of clinical care.
Full article in The Lowdown, 21 February 2025