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The Scottish referendum was, predictably, a disaster for Westminster’s historic view of the NHS
Scotland’s decision on its future, everyone knows, was as much a referendum on the past performance of the Westminster governments to date. In human resources, a guiding principle is that a candidate is likely to behave in future as he or she has down in the past, unless there are exceptional circumstances.
Andy Burnham MP was quoted himself many times as warning against the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service in England. While the ‘No’ campaign consistently explained the Westminster government had protected the NHS budget, it was widely known that the statistical authority has rebuked David Cameron for stating incorrectly that NHS spending has increased in recent years.
The ‘no’ campaign nonetheless did put up a valiant fight, with exceptional campaigners Clare Lally and Johanna Baxter, for example. These campaigners, against some formidable abuse, tried to explain why the leverage of being united with England was especially important for Scotland to withstand future economic pressures resiliently, and why it was in fact intensely patriotic to keep Scotland as part of the United Kingdom.
Whatever Andy Burnham promises as the Shadow Secretary of State for Health, it is a fact that the efficiency savings in the NHS and the private finance initiative loan repayments have put enormous pressure on the operations on the service. Managers, who all too often behave in a divorced way to frontline clinicians, do not appear easily accountable for poor staff shortages impacting on clinical patient safety.
The efficiency savings operate on the assumptions that nobody wants to pay any tax to fund the NHS properly, and that the economy is not growing. Labour, whilst rightly drawing attention to how the ‘cost of living crisis’ is damaging the wellbeing of people, cannot easily claim that people are so unwilling to fund the NHS properly. Nor can they easily dismiss that the GDP of the UK might now be improving.
The resulting democratic deficit which has happened in Scotland is therefore an extreme serious one. Whilst it is the perception that New Labour and the Conservatives, at least, have paid more attention to their friends in the City of London rather than their workforce, there has been a lack of trust between voters and the mainstream parties. Today, UNITE decided it would go on strike. Labour has not yet given a clear indication of what intends to do about the private finance initiative.
In a way, the decision for Scotland was in fact very simple. It was about making a firm decision on separating from England, rather than subjecting Scotland to another eighteen years festering with Devo Max prior to another vote. But of course, we all know it was far from simple. Whatever one’s views about Johanna Lamont or Alex Salmond, the answer of many voters is a response to David Cameron’s original question, “We can’t go on like this.” Gordon Brown’s uttered the famous words yesterday, “And proud that with the powers of the Parliament we can guarantee that the National Health Service will be in public hands, universal, free at the point of need, as long and as ever as the people of Scotland want it.”
But will the general public believe Westminster any more?
It is clear that the Westminster governments totally underestimated the passion and drive of the ‘Yes’ campaign. If Gandhi had been subject to rolling news, one wonders how the Indian independence would have turned out. But the gut feeling of many ‘Yes’ campaigners was a blatant abreaction to lies and misinformation by people who were supposed to be acting in their best interests.
Predictably, Big Business were all mobilised to depict the #iScotApocalypse #ProjectFear scenario. Unfortunately, it had Westminster’s fingerprints all over it. The Westminster delegates, including Danny Alexander, George Osborne and David Cameron, looked utterly unconvincing in raising a populist case. And the media as per usual totally screwed up the reality of the economic contribution to the rest of the UK, which is quite a formidable one albeit not as strong as London and the South East.
When Margaret Thatcher reached Downing Street in 1979, she said, “And I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope’ … and to all the British people—howsoever they voted—may I say this. Now that the Election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country of which we’re so proud to be a part.”
England currently is deeply divided, between rich and poor, between employed and unemployed, and, as a result of the ‘welfare reforms’, between able bodied and physically disabled. September 18th was a chance for Scotland to have a ‘clean break’.
The question is, however, will Scotland go Alex Salmond’s way?
There’s no point striving for economic integration if we’re sustaining political and social disintegration
When Margaret Thatcher spoke on the steps of Downing Street, about to escalate eleven years of unforgettable government, a New Jerusalem was pictured of a country at ease with itself. Not reliant on any sense of collectiveness, but a group of individuals who could seek and achieve success.
And indeed her star pupil, Tony Blair, was the best product from this era for Thatcher. Ed Miliband later proudly admitted that he ‘believed in’ the sense of aspiration to be inherited from the late Baroness.
Except this nirvana was anything but heavenly. Far from liberalising people, the Hayekian market enslaved working people who did grew further apart from the fruits of their productivity.
Inequality ‘never had it so good’ in governments during Thatcher and beyond. Ed Miliband in his recent speeches for the Labour Party conference has had to refer to ‘responsible capitalism’, citing specifically how consumers’ bills have rocketed due to energy suppliers almost acting like a cartel.
The fact that Rupert Murdoch was backing the ‘No’ campaign was therefore bound to cause disquiet, as was the backing by BP. It seems that all the multinational corporates know which side their bread is buttered on, having been given a strong lead from Barack Obama.
So therefore the idea that Scottish citizens were rejecting the privatisation of the English NHS was a profound embarrassment for the Westminster parties. All parties, especially the current Coalition parties, have vehemently denied that there has been any privatisation in recent years.
The current Government adamantly state that the percentage of private provision in the NHS has gone up from 5% to 6%. Critics of section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act (2012), argued to turbo-boost the outsourcing of NHS contracts through competitive tendering, are continually told about New Labour’s drive towards the growth of independent sector treatment centres.
Tony Benn left people thinking that it did not as such matter which party you now voted for, as they all effectively have become frontmen for globalised multinational corporations. That nobody actually votes for the World Bank or the European Commission legislators led Benn to do a pilgrimage to Strasbourg which he proudly hated.
For Benn, it was more important that a citizen could achieve influence through a single vote in democratic socialism, than to buy influence as part of a lobbying organisation. And of course we see a profound failure of democracy in the springing of the Lansley Act and the “hospital clause” from nowhere.
The spectacle of Miliband, Cameron and Clegg marching up from Westminster to Glasgow made many of my Scottish friends to vote “Yes”. But for them their solidarity has been a reaction to a different ethos being inflicted from above.
Whatever the appearance of economic integrity there might be in the United Kingdom, even with the use of the Pound Sterling in Scotland, or Eurozone avoiding a currency crisis, the victory appears somewhat Pyrrhic if there has been in fact been decades of social and political disintegration.
If Scotland votes to be independent, Labour could end up losing MPs who instead become ‘foreign nationals’. Ed Miliband has a relatively united party behind him, but it is likely that many in the Conservative Party will want to get rid of him.
This is especially likely if Cameron’s party enters the farcical situation of wanting to opt out of Europe having lost Scotland. David ‘Little England’ Cameron would then, even beyond the Labour Party, would become the worst Conservative Prime Minister to have ever existed.
But, if Scotland votes no, then it is possible that the UK general election will occur ‘on time’, i.e. early May 2015. The truth is that, even if Scotland votes yes, it possibly is too much hassle to shift the date of the election pursuant to the Fixed Term Parliament Act.
Then it might become business as usual, where the UK Labour Party promise to halt the privatisation of the NHS. The Conservatives have adopted the position where they wish to deny absolutely any existence of privatisation of the NHS, completely unlike their position on the utilities or Royal Mail. So, presumably, if the Conservatives win the election, the ‘non-privatisation’ of the NHS will continue.
But, in addition to the goal of economic integration, an incoming Labour government does have a hope of political integration with an albeit devolved Scotland. The greatest challenge will, nonetheless, be an England at ease with itself, which does not have different groups of people pitted against each other.
There is much work to be done in English health policy, including review of PFI, the purchaser-provider split, abolition of the Health and Social Care Act (2012), exemption from TTIP, a properly funded health and social care system, and fair pay for NHS staff, as well as implementation of “whole person care”.
If, on the other hand, Whitehall organises a painful ‘conscious uncoupling’ of Scotland and England, that could take up a lot of effort which might be better used up elsewhere.
