A £10 charge to visit a GP would be just the commence of a slippery slope for the NHS | Owen Jones

A GP with a patient. ‘This ideological assault is being accompanied by an actual try to dismantle and privatise the NHS.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

A slow hand clap for Andy McGovern, a London hospital nurse who has proposed that the Royal School of Nursing support a £10 charge to check out a GP. On its very own terms, the proposal is an unacceptable assault on the very foundations of the NHS: that it is free at the level of use. But the suggestion is so menacing due to the fact of where it originates from. The a lot of enemies of the NHS – who have to be diplomatic, understanding that the NHS “is the closest the English have to a religion”, as Nigel Lawson after put it – will rejoice. “Aha!” they will believe. “Now even the nurses are debating NHS costs, we have been offered the political cover we require!”

That the NHS has just been declared the world’s greatest healthcare method by the Washington-primarily based Commonwealth Fund should be a matter of national pride. But the institution is in mortal danger. The totally free industry crusaders who 1st took power in the late 1970s have extended regarded NHS as an aberration. It is an irritating example of a service run on the basis of social need, rather than private profit – and, even worse, it is loved for it. As lengthy as it exists, it serves as a defiant reminder that there is an substitute to the neoliberal undertaking.

No wonder it is below constant assault. Nick Seddon is the former deputy director of rightwing thinktank Reform before that, he was head of communications at Circle Partnerships, which boasts of becoming “Europe’s largest healthcare partnership”. Reform is an outfit funded by personal healthcare firms such as Bupa Healthcare, the Basic Healthcare Group and BMI Healthcare. Seddon has backed charging to see a GP, NHS budget cuts and the sacking of frontline workers. Last year, he became David Cameron’s well being adviser.

Then there is Lord Warner, a Labour peer who in March published a report with Reform calling for a £10-a-month NHS membership charge. What he didn’t mention was that he performs for personal businesses that rely on the NHS.

Even in this newspaper, Simon Jenkins and Ian Birrell have been floating tips to dismantle and privatise the NHS. And then there is Ukip, that famed anti-establishment get together whose financial policies are largely about cutting taxes for members of the establishment and handing them public assets. Paul Nuttall, Ukip’s deputy leader, has declared “that the extremely existence of the NHS stifles competition”, claiming that the “as extended as the NHS is the ‘sacred cow’ of British politics, the longer the British folks will suffer with a second rate well being services”. Read through the Commonwealth Fund report and weep into your Milton Friedman textbook, Mr Nuttall.

This ideological assault is being accompanied by an real attempt to dismantle and privatise the NHS. I’m not going to insult people’s intelligence by pretending that the final Labour government was some socialist utopia: it also promoted a private sector agenda, including personal finance initiatives which saddled hospitals with lengthy-term debt. But which is nothing at all in contrast to this government’s Well being and Social Care Act. Again, realizing the acceptance of the NHS, the government did not have the guts to place what it was going to do to the British public, and promised no further “best-down reorganisations”. Panic stations should have been manned just before the general election, when it was revealed that the personal workplace of Andrew Lansley, who would turn out to be Tory health secretary, had been bankrolled by the former chairman of Care United kingdom to the tune of £21,000. And lo, beneath Part 75 of this government’s legislation, the NHS is driven to place its services out to competitive tender. In Surrey, community overall health services were handed to Virgin Care in 2012 final 12 months, NHS outsourcing well worth £1.1bn was announced in Cambridge and Peterborough. And so on.

On top of all of that, the government is implementing the most protracted squeeze on NHS spending since its basis throw in the government’s savage cuts to regional authority spending – which is placing pressure on the NHS as solutions like social care are hit – and get into account our ageing population, and a serious crisis without a doubt is on its way.

And so it’s up to us. We can let our NHS be trashed by the privatisers and cutters, the private overall health organizations and their assortment of outriders and valuable idiots. We can surrender the principle of a support cost-free at the stage of use. We can move towards the grotesquely inefficient and unjust US technique we have long ridiculed. Or we can defend a correctly funded, publicly run, universal technique that is cost-free at the stage of use. It’s make our thoughts up time.

A £10 charge to visit a GP would be just the commence of a slippery slope for the NHS | Owen Jones