Questiontime

[Strontium]

Tristram Hunt "capitalism isn't working, for capitalism to work you need to interfere".

 

Wow, just...wow - could this be the start of something here?

Confused. Is there anyone in mainstream British politics who doesn't believe this? Any disagreement is surely over the extent and variety of interference that should be utilised.

[Stickman]

I'd prefer this:

 

That would be brilliant to do that to Oborne any chance anyone could set that up?..oh and throw in Dominic Sandbrook as well for a tag match he's just as much of a cunt.

[Stu Monty]

Confused. Is there anyone in mainstream British politics who doesn't believe this? Any disagreement is surely over the extent and variety of interference that should be utilised.

 

A simple yes or no to "Is capitalism working" would not get 100% negative responses.  So there are plenty that disagree with the first part.

 

For the second part it's hard to know how much interference people selling off the NHS to companies they have shares in would want. It won't be much though.

[Strontium]

 

A simple yes or no to "Is capitalism working" would not get 100% negative responses.  So there are plenty that disagree with the first part.

 

For the second part it's hard to know how much interference people selling off the NHS to companies they have shares in would want. It won't be much though.

 

Of course it won't be 100%, some people are doing very well out of capitalism. But politicians are not there to represent the narrow interests of those at the top. Any politician who thinks things are fandabbydozy has no place representing the public.

 

I'm unaware of portions of the NHS being sold off to companies in which those selling it off have a vested interest. Perhaps you have examples?

[dennis tooth]

Then once again you need to ignoratise your ass!

 

 

Vested Interests of MPs And Lords

Many of the MPs and Lords who voted the bill through stand to gain financially from the Health and Social Care Act. In a responsible democracy, this would be deemed a serious conflict of interest, and yet it would presumably not come as a shock to a British electorate used to unpleasant surprises – if they ever get to hear of it.

Research by Éoin Clarke has revealed that 333 donations from private healthcare sources totalling £8.3 million have been gifted to the Tories. (Click here for the database of those donations and ‘gifts’.) Moreover, the website Social Investigations has compiled an extensive list of the financial and vested interests of MPs and Lords in private healthcare. This list, says the site, ‘represents the dire state of our democracy’.

Here is a sample from the list:

Lord Bell: Conservative - Chairman of Chime Communications group whose companies include Bell Pottinger, and whose lobbying clients include Southern Cross, BT Health and AstraZeneca.

Lord Blyth of Rowington: Conservative - Senior adviser to investment bankers Greenhill. Former Boots Chemists deputy chairman. Tory Donor. Stands to gain from the break up and privatisation of the NHS, and would surely like to buy NHS Walk-in Centres at an agreed cut-price with Cameron.

Nick de Bois, Conservative MP for Enfield North: De Bois is the majority shareholder in Rapier Design Group, an events management company heavily involved with the private medical and pharmaceutical industries, and whose clients include leading names such as AstraZeneca. The company, which had a turnover last year of £13 million, was established by the Tory MP in 1998. A number of the company’s clients are ‘partners’ of the National Association of Primary Care (NAPC), a lobby group that supported the NHS bill. Rapier Design Group’s biggest clients stand to profit now that the NHS has been opened up to wider private-sector involvement. The GP commissioning consortium for south-west Kent, covering 49 GP practices and known as Salveo, has already signed a contract with the pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca.

And then there is Andrew Lansley himself, the Tory Secretary of State for Health. John Nash, the chairman of Care UK, gave £21,000 to fund Lansley’s personal office in November 2009. According to a senior director of the firm, 96 per cent of Care UK’s business, which amounted to more than £400 million last year, comes from the NHS. Hedge fund boss Nash is one of the major Conservative donors with close ties to the healthcare industry. He and his wife gave £203,500 to the party over the past five years.

Nash is also a founder of City firm Sovereign Capital, which runs a string of private healthcare firms. Fellow founder Ryan Robson is another major Tory donor who has given the party £252,429.45. His donations included £50,000 to be a member of the party’s ‘Leader’s Group’, a secretive cash-for-access club. The would-be MP, who tried but failed to get selected as the election candidate in Bracknell, is managing partner at Sovereign Capital.

 

 

Andrew Robertson, founder of the blog Social Investigations, observes that more than one in four Conservative peers - 62 out of the total of 216 - and many other members of the House of Lords 'have a direct financial interest in the radical re-shaping of the NHS in England' that has just been implemented. These unelected peers - with personal interests in insurance companies, private healthcare and private equity groups – were able to help push through a bill from which they will now profit. If they had been elected local councillors, such personal interests would have debarred them from voting.

Consider just one example: Lord Waldegrave, who was Secretary of State for Health from 1990-1992. He is an adviser to UBS Investment Bank whose healthcare division has earned the firm over $1 billion since 2005. He has a poor voting record in the House - less than 8 per cent of votes in his time there - but he did manage to vote on the Health and Social Care Bill. He is Director of Biotech Growth Trust plc which is managed by Orbimed, the world's largest healthcare-dedicated investment firm, with approximately $5 billion in assets under management.

Robertson rightly points to 'the network of vested interests that runs between Parliament and the private healthcare industry. This cosy, toxic relationship,' he warns, 'threatens not only the future of the NHS but that of democracy in the UK.'

He adds:

'the companies who have lobbied for the NHS to be privatised have taken one giant leap into its eventual dismantling.'

Although clearly a scandal, it is no surprise that:

'Our politicians sit on the boards, they own the companies, they are the directors. [...] They are meant to be public servants, yet the evidence points towards them serving another element of society, one that is hidden behind corporate confidentiality and "Chatham House" rules.'

Along with the NHS, the BBC is supposed to epitomise the best of British institutions. The BBC has a duty, enshrined in its Charter, to report objectively on stories of national and international interest. The NHS affects every man, woman and child in the country. And yet we suspect very few members of the public realise what has just happened to their health care system.

The BBC mostly failed to cover the story, and otherwise offered coverage heavily biased in favour of the government’s perspective. On the very day the bill passed into law, the tag line across the bottom of BBC news broadcasts said ‘Bill which gives power to GPs passes’. The assessment could have come from a government press release, spin that has been rejected by an overwhelming majority of GPs. The BBC has also repeatedly failed to cover public protests, including one outside the Department of Health which stopped the traffic in Whitehall for an hour.

 

 

The BBC's Private Healthcare Perks And The Lord Living It Large

Some have suggested that a possible factor explaining BBC indifference is that many BBC staff don’t themselves depend on the NHS. The BBC actually spends millions of pounds on private healthcare for its staff. Under a Freedom of Information request, it was revealed that the BBC shelled out almost £2.2 million of public money on private healthcare for several hundred senior BBC staff between 2008-2010.

The Daily Telegraph reports that last year 506 BBC managers benefited from the £1,500-a-year perk. When challenged, the BBC responded that this is ‘common industry practice’ for senior managers, ‘although the BBC has recently announced this benefit will no longer be made available to new senior managers'. (‘Medical insurance for 500 BBC bosses’, Daily Telegraph, March 12, 2012; not found online). No word, though, on existing senior BBC managers having to forgo their private health insurance.

There are also ties that link BBC bosses with private health companies. Recall that the BBC is managed by an Executive Board while the BBC Trust is there to ensure that standards such as impartiality and fairness are maintained in the public interest.

Consider Dr Mike Lynch OBE who sits on the BBC's Executive Board. Lynch is a non-executive director of Isabel Healthcare Ltd, a private company specialising in medical software. He is also a director of Autonomy PLC, a computing company whose customers include Isabel Healthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield (a health insurance firm), AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and several other pharmaceutical companies.

He is also on the advisory board of Apax Partners, which describes itself as ‘one of the leading global investors in the Healthcare sector’ and has invested over €2.5 billion in the area. These medical interests all stand to gain from the new legislation. Is this the resumé of a man who would really insist on impartial reporting of controversial ‘reforms’ of the NHS? (For more info click here.)

The Chairman of the BBC, Lord Patten of Barnes, is similarly tied up in private medical and financial interests. Lord Patten is a member of the European Advisory Board for a private equity investment company called Bridgepoint. Alan Milburn, the former Secretary of State for Health under Tony Blair, is chair of Bridgepoint’s board. The company has been involved in 17 healthcare deals over recent years. Its current investments in the UK total more than £1.1 billion.

One company acquired by Bridgepoint for £414 million in July 2010 is the residential care company Care UK. As mentioned in Part 1 of this alert, Care UK chairman Jonathan Nash donated £21,000 in November 2009 to run Tory Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s personal office. Further transactions for Bridgepoint and a private healthcare company involved Alliance Medical who sold the MRI scan company for £600 million to Dubai International LLC in 2007.

Lord Patten was appointed to the Lords in 2005 and, before being accepted as the head of the BBC, was urged to cut back on his business activities. However this didn’t happen, and in addition to his advisory role in Bridgepoint, he remains a stakeholder of energy giant EDF, advisor to telecom business Hutchison Europe and a member of the advisory board of BP.

http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Health_Portal

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Isn't Mandelson set to rake it in some selling off of some public services?

[lifetime fan]

Blonde in the blue and white spotted dress.

[lifetime fan]

Whilst I nearly always disagree with Peter Oborne I don't hate him like daily mail hacks.

 

He reminds me far more of Heseltine and Clarke than the modern day cunts like Cameron, Gideon, Hitchens and Littlejohn.

[Champ]

Whilst I nearly always disagree with Peter Oborne I don't hate him like daily mail hacks.

 

He reminds me far more of Heseltine and Clarke than the modern day cunts like Cameron, Gideon, Hitchens and Littlejohn.

 

His clothes were more noteworthy than anything he said last night

[lifetime fan]

His clothes were more noteworthy than anything he said last night

Geography teacher.

[Champ]

Geography teacher.

 

What school did you go to? 

 

Sunday lunch with the family, more like

[lifetime fan]

What school did you go to?

 

Sunday lunch with the family, more like

 

http://www.stbedescc.org

[Jairzinho]

Fucking hell.

[lifetime fan]

Good catholic boy me.

[Jairzinho]

The 5 aside pitch, running track, etc all this stuff wasn't there when you were?

 

We didn't even have a fucking field at mine.

[lifetime fan]

The 5 aside pitch, running track, etc all this stuff wasn't there when you were?

 

We didn't even have a fucking field at mine.

Did we fuck.

 

We did have plenty if sports grounds but it was a shithole.

[Sugar Ape]

My school was condemned and knocked down about 2 years after I left. It was an absolute shithole, this is what it actually looked like when I went:

 

 

It still had a field, though.

[Jairzinho]

We had one field which was sold about two years before I got there. Wanted it for houses. Walked past there a few weeks ago, still a field.

[Stu Monty]

 

 

Of course it won't be 100%, some people are doing very well out of capitalism. But politicians are not there to represent the narrow interests of those at the top. Any politician who thinks things are fandabbydozy has no place representing the public.

 

I'm unaware of portions of the NHS being sold off to companies in which those selling it off have a vested interest. Perhaps you have examples?

 

You should maybe become more aware then. In general. If you want informed opinions.

 

Or, you know, use google.

[Stickman]

My school was condemned and knocked down about 2 years after I left. It was an absolute shithole, this is what it actually looked like when I went:

 

 

It still had a field, though.

 

And don't forget the luxury golf course connected to it.......:-)

 

That was my old school too......ahh those were the days, hard to tell if that picture was when it opened or was closing....

[lifetime fan]

Did we fuck.

 

We did have plenty if sports grounds but it was a shithole.

It was, and still is a very good school though.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

My school was condemned and knocked down about 2 years after I left. It was an absolute shithole, this is what it actually looked like when I went:

 

 

It still had a field, though.

That's what you get for going to school in Beirut.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

My school was condemned and knocked down about 2 years after I left. It was an absolute shithole, this is what it actually looked like when I went:

 

 

It still had a field, though.

What school is that?

[Sugar Ape]

And don't forget the luxury golf course connected to it.......:-)

 

That was my old school too......ahh those were the days, hard to tell if that picture was when it opened or was closing....

 

What year did you leave mate?

 

That's what you get for going to school in Beirut.

 

Probably would have been better off in Beirut, This blog is done by two lads about 15-20 years older than me who went, it's quite funny and horrifying in equal measures some of the shit that happened, not just in the school but in Netherley in general. Some excerpts:

 

http://www.granta.com/Archive/102/Netherley/Page-1

 

 

In the 1980s, the estate achieved notoriety, a byword in the city for poverty, crime, addiction and squalor. In fact, its reputation attracted wider attention: Beryl Bainbridge visited in 1983 on the Merseyside leg of her English Journey: Or the Road to Milton Keynes in Priestley’s footsteps. If the Russians could see ‘the infamous Netherly Estate [sic]’, she wrote, ‘the Eastern bloc would send food parcels and donations’.

 

My dad used to tell me this story, he went to school around the same time as the two fellas who wrote the blog, and I always thought he was blagging me. Seems not.

 

 

One day in school, a lad I knew called my name down a corridor outside the music rooms; he kicked a ball towards me and I automatically received his pass, trapping it with my instep, but it was heavier than I’d expected, rock-hard underfoot, and it took a few stunned seconds for me to realize it was a pig’s head.

 

What school is that?

 

Netherley Comp.

 

 

It changed it's name to Lee Manor High School for the last 6-7 years it was open to try and change it's image. Didn't work

 

[Skidfingers McGonical]

And I thought Bootle High looked a shithole. Wouldn't be out of place in a scene from 1984 that.