Tories are asset stripping the country

[Letshaveablackcelebration22]

I don’t remember things ever being as bad as they are now in the U.K. and I am 50 this year. The NHS is collapsing/ has collapsed (depending where you live), we have the most expensive energy costs of any country in Europe, public transport is shit, housing is dreadful & unaffordable for many, we have the most expensive water in the world etc etc.

The tories made a fortune through their dodgy dealings in covid- many work on the sly for private companies lobbying while in power. The want the NHS to fail so it’s easier to privatise (exactly what they did with trains, water, power companies etc). The country is being pillaged for the wealthy & is in a right state.

We should be on the streets but people are struggling so much at the moment, it’s hard to have the energy to do it.

Is a general strike the answer?

And yet they opposed it's existence in the first place.

Why is that, do you think?

Yes because most of the population have a spare 20% of their salary lying around. They don't need food or heat.

You know some countries didn't sell off their national power grids and provide cheaper heat to households? And some countries have invested in infrastructure and renewable energy and can provide community heating so individuals aren't paying half their wages to heat their home (or choosing to eat instead).

Anyone who thinks that the NHS hasn’t been (already) mostly privatised, by both labour and the conservatives, really need to watch this documentary:

The Great NHS Heist

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Www0cHLQulw

Although, I really recommend anyone who cares about the care they receive when they’re unwell to watch it.

Pp seem to be saying they’d like to pay more into the system as it is.

Apart from social care directly I’m not for this.

One thing other systems have in common in nominal fees at point of service - would people vote for this though?

We’re really not used to it and much more used to we must ‘protect the NHS’. I can’t see either party winning in including at service fees.

Privatisation isn't us paying, it's private companies which are run on a profit and loss basis delivering the service, as long as utter incompetents aren't tasked with negotiations (like PFI & Labour) then I can't see the issue.

The issue is shareholders. With state run services, we don't have shareholders grabbing percentages of the profit.

I don't understand why we are sleep walking through all of this. We had the poll tax riots? Why aren't we having this government is shit riots?

Can’t believe some people haven’t twigged that the NHS is already being sold off! Have some of you been living under a rock?!
Dh (hospital consultant) is cancelling clinics and cancer diagnostic procedures this week, because the hospital is in total meltdown and he’s trying to help on wards that are not his specialty. He says says it’s fucking terrifying how dangerous the wards are at the moment.

Oh and at 8am this morning there were 121 patients waiting in our A&E with a wait of 70 hours- yes 70!! And 100 patients on trolleys needing beds but zero beds available.

You just need to Google to see that the Tories do want to privatise the NHS. Jeremy Hunt even wrote a book about it. Dominic Raab has written about it too.

Many MPs have shares in private health companies too. See here for example. Its clearly a conflict of interest and shouldn't be allowed. www.everydoctor.org.uk/blog/private-healthcare-politicians

My DH is an A&E Dr and he says it really is the worst it's ever been. I can remember a time when he was shocked to have to go and treat someone in an ambulance and now it's a regular thing.

Can we force elections? Nobody seems to be going for this option.
Striking will not sort the issue, in my opinion. We will just lose more money, to the UK finances and our own.
Also, does UK not have a way to make the government accountable? Like impeachment? Surely Lizz Truss well qualifies for one. No money should be going to her and her team as an ex PM.
I think we need to back a few years and get basic assets back, owned by UK.
Change the employment conditions fot MPs. Only one job, no other jobs, forget about benefits once they leave the position and forget wage increases for a good while. See if we get someone with a vocation in post instead of money grabbers.

Regarding how to get out of this pit hole we are in, how do we feel about a temporary Technocracy, that is to choose experts in each area (actual proper experts, exceeding in the area of interest, who have worked for years on it) and make them the decision makers. It has fully revolutionised the structure of other countries in times of crisis.

It sickens me that a woman like me who protested Cruise missiles at Greenham, VAWG, the torture of political prisoners, the Poll Tax and the Iraq War is now written off as a ‘TERF’, a ‘Karen’ and ‘a right wing religious bigot’ by younger generations who won’t get up off their arses to protest about anything except maybe for screaming at women trying to speak.

Local Labour parliamentary candidate is obsessed with pushing gender ideology in schools. Doesn’t give a fuck about teachers’ pay and conditions or unseating the Tory. It’s all about the purity of the wrong ideology.

That's the generous interpretation.

But what you have to remember is that socially unified motivation to action and change doesn't come from nowhere. It rests upon worldview, attitude, understanding that need to filter and percolate through society at base level before creating the kind of "pressure cooker" effect necessary to break through the power of vested interests and effect change.

The Tories understand this, they have sufficient control of the media and channels of public discourse to direct it, they are willing to play the long game and they do things in the right order. The law changes, budgetary decisions etc. that serve their own interests rest upon years and years, often literally decades, of social manipulation and brainwashing to get people to the point where those changes seem inevitable and unstoppable.

"There Is No Alternative". That's what Thatcher said about neoliberalism, and everything about the last 40 years has been dedicated to making that something that people feel as deeply and inevitably as their own heartbeat. And every problem that neoliberalism creates can be blamed on something else - benefit claimants, immigrants, the EU, wasteful NHS culture - the solution always being, of course, something that furthers neoliberalism.

We're fucked - not because the Tories are fucking us but because most people have lost the ability to conceive of any other kind of world that is not based on being fucked, and the courage to make any such conception into reality.

There Is No Alternative". That's what Thatcher said about neoliberalism, and everything about the last 40 years has been dedicated to making that something that people feel as deeply and inevitably as their own heartbeat. And every problem that neoliberalism creates can be blamed on something else - benefit claimants, immigrants, the EU, wasteful NHS culture - the solution always being, of course, something that furthers neoliberalism

Well, I think Corbyn was probably the alternative (I don’t nescessarily agree with him or want to debate that) but he offered a vision of the country that was more appealing but it terrified the rich so much that they destroyed him in the media.

Yes they are. NHS England are rolling out new community models ie Urgent care response teams & virtual wards. I know because I work in one and have just landed a post in another area. Brand new service aimed to create 2500 virtual beds by December this year. There is a lot of investment but it's just a drop in a massive ocean of public needs because until the social care system is sorted flow into / out of hospital will not improve.

Luckycatt millions of businesses are run either without profit or as businesses that pay shareholders successfully. If there is a watertight contract that ensures a certain level of service then it isn't a problem.

What you need is people who have worked in private industry to draw up these contracts rather than the numpties who work for the NHS who don't care about the bottom line as they just put the same old shot underfunded narrative out and the public generally swallow it. The public that hadn't worked in the nhs and seen the shocking level of waste that is.

They should give nursing staff their pay rise and make nurses training free with the proviso that you have to stay for a certain number of years or pay a certain amount back.

Stop the ridiculous sick pay doled out in the nhs, the number of people that have dreadful Bradford scores and that take their 6 months full pay sick leave then are miraculously able to come back when their pay drops is shocking.

Come now, they’re building 48 new hospitals by 2030. We’ll have the best health system in the world, we just have to keep believing (and voting Conservative). Any day now it will start getting better. Any day.

🤪

If they want the NHS to fail why are they throwing more money at it than ever before?

Because they've already started setting up routes to send money to private contractors (most likely where they have private financial interests).

I don't understand what labour would be doing differently now? They can't change the electric prices etc , they can't throw more money at the nhs unless we all pay more tax and as many of us are struggling already that won't help
This has been years in the making and the fault of both parties
Labour started privatising nhs long ago , they also never capped house prices when they started rising faster than wages by huge amounts
They never undid any privatisation
Both parties are to blame over a long period of time as they never fix anything they complain about
Thats whats more worrying we have no legitimate party it seems to actually change things that I would be confident putting an x in a box for.
We need a german style healthcare and properly run by those higher up so money isn't wasted
We need as many people to work as are able to keep the economy going and a party willing to do whats needed to stagnate house prices for a good few years until wages go up
One that will invest in more social housing so people have homes for life that are affordable and available to more families

I don't understand what labour would be doing differently now? They can't change the electric prices etc , they can't throw more money at the nhs unless we all pay more tax and as many of us are struggling already that won't help
This has been years in the making and the fault of both parties
Labour started privatising nhs long ago , they also never capped house prices when they started rising faster than wages by huge amounts
They never undid any privatisation

Well their 2019 manifesto resolved to do exactly that - undo privatisation.

"Every penny spent on privatisation and outsourcing is a penny less spent on patient care. Labour will end and reverse privatisation in the NHS in the next Parliament. We will repeal the Health and Social Care Act and reinstate the responsibilities of the Secretary of State to provide a comprehensive and universal healthcare system. We will end the requirement on health authorities to put services out to competitive tender."

So that's one answer to your question what they would be doing differently.

Part of the problem with this question is that "Labour" can mean two different things - the Blairite cooperation with Tory ideological thinking, privatisation etc, which you're correct to say contributed to the long term structural problems (although it needs to be acknowledged that even Blair's Labour managed and mitigated those problems much better), and the radical Labour vision with a central role for state-run services that started the NHS in the first place, and enjoyed a brief resurgence under Corbyn.

That latter "Labour" was offered as a choice and rejected by the electorate. You can argue the rights and wrongs of that, you could try and argue that it would have been an even greater disaster than what we have (though there's not really any way to prove or disprove that, particularly with wild cards like the pandemic in the mix, so everybody will just tend to argue it by asserting their own ideological preference).

But you can't really claim that it wouldn't have been any different. The fact that it WOULD have been so different is why people rejected it.

That documentary is terrifying!

The problem is always presented as the tories are going to privatise the NHS.

The problem in reality is that the tories aren’t going to privatise the NHS.

And so the shambles continues ever downwards.

You know the tories are bad when the best defence one of its fans can come up with is that brainless comment.

We're fucked - not because the Tories are fucking us but because most people have lost the ability to conceive of any other kind of world that is not based on being fucked, and the courage to make any such conception into reality. This is spot on:
But would labour have done any better?
But it was a pandemic nobody knew what they were doing..
He's doing his best ..
All other countries are going through it..
It's because there's a war on..
and on and on it goes until the end of time....

The Tories did a lovely pilot in asset stripping during the pandemic didn’t they?

PPE scandal,Nightingale Hosp, T&T, the lunch bags for kids etc

There were existing PPE companies trying to help who were ignored in favour of brand new private companies and the like.

I wonder how many Pandemic Millionaires were made?

I’ve not verified it but I’m seeing that the failed PPE/T&T etc were added to the NHS budget, now hailed as a budget increase…

Warning: unpopular opinions....

One.
The reason the NHS is sinking so badly this year is because of the long lasting effects of lockdowns.

And two...

Although I think it's perfectly possible, even likely, Tories are running the NHS into the ground on purpose, there still remains a legitimate question of how do we run the NHS successfully. In Europe, many countries work health insurance policies without diving to the depths of American style carnage. It is right that the wealthy pay more for their health care. Outside certain emergency care, it seems to me perfectly respectable to think that people should contribute according to their means. I don't believe 'free at point of need' is something that in this era is going to lead to an efficient, well-run and safe health care system.