Category: Privatisation

News of a sort emerged last week that the Iranian Hospitalier’s circle of shadowy investors are to receive an annual bung for stitching up Hinchingbrooke Hospital. The first £2 million of any surplus will be top-sliced, and wired to Jersey, or perhaps some other island where the sun shines a lot. The sweetener came to light after the Health Service Journal unearthed a letter deposited in the House of Commons Library last November by Lord Howe. In it, Howe writes: ‘Under the contract with Circle at Hinchingbrooke NHS Trust, the first £2 million of any year’s surplus will go to the Franchisee, Circle, as it must cover its costs and earn a fee [emphasis added]’. Howe may call it a fee, but to Dr No it looks uncommonly like a kick-back. No wonder the thinking epidemiologist’s crumpet, Professor Allyson Pollock, is scandalised.

Word is in the air that The Beard is out to spike Max Pemberton. The redoubtable and excellent Max, whose weekly column in the Telegraph has repeatedly shone penetrating light on the sinister implications of the Tory NHS reforms – and here it is good to praise the Telegraph for printing copy critical of Tory policy – has, by way of his latest column, lit a burner under The Beard, and the balloon has gone up. Word further has it that the balloon is to be navigated to a position directly over Pembers, from which position it will descend hard on him, like a ton of bricks, or more precisely, £90,000 or more of legal costs. The threat follows an earlier failed attempt to drop a injunction banning publication on the Telegraph. You can – for now at least – read the article that provoked such corporate ire here, and judge for yourself who is speaking the truth, and who is full of hot air.

The Blameless Broadcasting Corporation, which doth protest too much, because it did take sides, by providing skimpy superficial coverage of the Health and Social Care Bill, have at last done something useful. An independent survey ordered by the corporation of over 800 doctors, which we have no reason to assume is not unrepresentative, unlike the GP monkey surveys, has found that only 12 percent of doctors believe GP led commissioning will lead to ‘patients seeing a noticeable improvement in their care’. More than half (55%) disagreed; the remaining third must have sore perineums, for they are still sitting on the fence, saying they don’t know one way or the other.

The Retail Raptor is developing a social conscience. Hot on the heels of her project to put the High back into High Street, she has moved on to save Britain’s dying textile industry. Following the trend set by Hacksaw’s there is ‘no such thing as society’, which taken to its logical conclusion means there is no such thing as Britain, and the rise of globalisation, Britain’s textile industry has, like many others, gone west by going east. Here at home, the looms lie still, the sewing machines silent, the thread of manufacture first snagged, then cut short. The grim jaws of benefit dependency have bitten across generations; the darkness of despondency and despair lies thickly in the air. This is the kind of blight up with which the Raptor will not put.

Dr No doesn’t really get Hendrix; nor does he get migraines. But if he did get the latter, listening to the former might bring on the latter. Given Dylan’s own haunted enigmatic recording of All Along the Watchtower, why strangle genius in a dustbin of dying cats?

Such odd thoughts come to Dr No as news emerges that the Land of the Baskervilles is soon to decide on who should run Children’s Services in Devon. There are two front runners: neither is NHS; both are for-profit. One is Branson’s Virgin, the other SerCo – the ‘Service Company’.

Right queer goings on at the Lib Dem Spring Conference this weekend, after Shirley Williams started bowling from the pavilion end last week. A procedural vote yesterday to decide which NHS motion should be debated today had the ditch-the-bill motion win on first past the post; and then, by some quirk of bent Lib Dem voting logic, the Williams didn’t-we-do-well motion won. Since the two motions were in some respects mirror images of each other, it did not seem to Dr No that yesterday’s vote was the end of the world: a vote against Squirls’ motion sends much the same message as a vote for the ditch-the-bill motion, the only significant difference being the former lacks the explicit ‘ditch’ directive of the latter.

The Faustian nature of the coalition pact is now plain for all to see. In the run up to, and now at their Spring Conference, the Lib Dem grandees have been forced into an ignominious cul-de-sac of bombast. The crowing and gloating fools no one except those who crow and gloat. The empty rhetoric of influences exerted and battles won sounds ever more like a catastrophe of paperclips rearranged, files shuffled and deck-chairs shifted this way and that. Baroness Bloomers has emerged from the parliamentary salon sporting a new blue rinse, her blustering opposition seen to have all the substance of a wet paper bag. She may say that the amendments she has brought about are substantial and significant, but even a cursory examination shows them to be insubstantial and insignificant: the central thrusts of the bill remain unchanged. Professor Pollock, the thinking doctor’s crumpet, provides an excellent of just how little real change Baroness Bloomers – definitely not the thinking doctor’s crumpet – has achieved here.