It’s very important that people who bring the party into disrepute are expelled from the Labour Party. Imagine David Cameron’s delight if he were able to ask Ed Miliband how his plans to introduce a £10 fee were going? For squeaky clean Miliband this would be the worst thing to happen, after he has been agonising over policy for years, with some sort of climax at last expected in the National Policy Forum later this year. There isn’t much which unites the main political parties on the NHS, although critics of privatisation feel that they have a lot of neoliberal missions in common. However, one theme which they are all keen to be seen to be promoting is a NHS free at the point of need. David Nicholson, whose last week it is this week, has consistently said that he has thought that top up fees are likely to be kicked into the long grass.

Good people have been expelled from the Labour Party before. With Labour in opposition Bevan’s patience with the Labour leadership, which he saw as timid and unambitious, ceased. In the years running up to the Second World War, Bevan established a reputation as a left-wing rocket. He became the parliamentary scourge of both the Tory party and the Labour leadership. Bevan’s fierce attacks on the official Labour line even led to his expulsion from the party for most of 1939. More than sixty years later, in 2003, George Galloway was expelled from the Labour party after being found guilty of four of the five charges of bringing the party into disrepute. On the fifth charge – urging voters in Plymouth not to vote Labour – Mr Galloway was acquitted. You can argue until the cows come home whether pretending to be a cat with Rula Lenska on Big Brother was ‘a step too far’, but many people have had enough with Lord Warner’s antics. While he has the Labour whip, he is able to tour TV studios as some sort of quasi spokesperson of Labour, and give the impression that his ideas of jet-propelled privatisation have some sort of traction in the Miliband Labour Party. Miliband may feel sympathetic to Warner’s views for all I know, and that is why he doesn’t want to expel him. But if on the other hand he feels that expelling him is the best way to protect the founding principles of Labour, and universality of the NHS is a totemic one, Miliband may be forced to expel Warner at last.

There is something much more sinister at play here. The revolving door between government and the private consultancies gives ample opportunity for political influence by the consultancies private sector clients. There’s a whole host of people who come of jobs in government only to advise private equity and venture capital companies. The private sector clients include not just private healthcare firms and pharmaceutical companies, but telephone and IT companies, data collectors, private care home congolmerates, insurers and financial brokers. Expelling Warner from the Labour Party would serve to clip his wings in policy downstream. He is at risk of bringing Labour into disrepute over his NHS views in the future, because he “has form”.

In June 2006, during a Labour government (strictly speaking a Blair government elected under the name of Labour), it was reported that a secret plan to privatise an entire tier of the NHS in England was revealed prematurely when the Department of Health asked multinational firms to manage services worth up to £64bn. The department’s commercial directorate had placed an advertisement in the EU official journal inviting companies to begin “a competitive dialogue” about how they could take over the purchasing of healthcare for millions of NHS patients. At the time, a certain Lord Warner, then a health minister, defended the policy in a statement; he said he was withdrawing the advertisement to correct “a drafting error”, but insisted the contracting out of NHS management would go ahead. The advertisement asked firms to show how they could benefit patients if they took over responsibility for buying healthcare from NHS hospitals, private clinics and charities. The plan would give private firms responsibility for deciding which treatments and services would be made available to patients – and whether NHS or private hospitals would provide them. This is critical now as Andy Burnham seeks to establish Labour as the party which can ‘save the NHS’, despite appearing to support the private sector through ISTCs and PFI in the past.

At the time, Lord Warner said: “The government has no plans to privatise the NHS.” He added that the contract advertised in the official journal would give PCTs access to expert help to improve commissioning of services, without going through expensive and time-consuming local tenders. But this is an ongoing lie of many, who are either stupid or malicious. Fast forward a few years, and Lord Warner announced he would vote against the Labour party in a key vote in the House of Lords on proposed NHS regulations that the opposition says will allow companies to bid for almost all health services. And he did.
Despite a three-line whip in the House of Lords on a so-called fatal motion to kill the government’s controversial NHS regulations, the former health minister Norman Warner said he would vote with the Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers. The question must be: why wasn’t the whip withdrawn then? Sources close to Burnham described Warner’s intervention as “unhelpful” and pointed out that “he has a track record to consider”, noting that Warner was the only Labour peer not to vote against the government’s sweeping changes to the health system. Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband should consider having ‘crisis talks’ to expel Lord Warner from the party now.

And now, in his latest stunt, everyone should pay a £10-a-month fee to use the NHS. Lord Warner called for the levy to be paid before anyone could benefit from free treatment. Patients should also be charged £20 for every night they stay in hospital, he added. Absolutely no thought has been put into the administrative cost of this exercise. Lord Warner, who previously advised Tony Blair on health reform, said the NHS was ‘unaffordable’, ‘out-of-date’ and unable to meet the needs of the population. Simon Stevens who takes over from David Nicholson very imminently, who also in a previous life had advised the Blair administration of “New Labour” before joining the leadership of a multinational, will wish publicly to distance himself from such comments, especially if Labour withdraws the whip. In a report written for the Reform think-tank, he estimated that a monthly £10 charge for using the NHS would generate £2billion a year. But Reform have been lobbing these moves, designed to pave the way for a private insurance-based system, for years. Lord Warner has referred to the fact there needed to be a ‘tough conversation with the public’ about new ways of funding the Health Service, but the tough conversation which must be had now is by Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham to expel him from the Labour Party.