Last week's by-election in
Wythenshawe & Sale East was always likely to be a difficult seat for any
opposition party to take away from the Labour Party, let alone the likes of an
insurgent party like UKIP, who apart from having to rewrite their policy
manifesto from scratch, had very little by way of a political apparatus in this
Labour stronghold.
All that having been said
however, the by-election has been held, Labour's candidate, Mike Kane garnered
the most votes from a wholly miserable and derisory turnout of 28%, UKIP came a
creditable second with a much improved electoral support, the Conservatives
came a disappointing third and the icing on the cake, was the Liberal Democrats
losing their deposit, having failed to achieve a miserly 5% of the popular
vote.
Now although there seems little
doubt that Labour's apparently impressive result relied heavily on postal
ballots, which their local party machine undoubtedly took advantage of, to date
there is no suggestion, let alone credible evidence that Labour or its
candidate, did anything that breached current electoral rules, save for being
extremely well organised, during what was a very short and
"compressed" by-election campaign. Obviously being the incumbent party
and having a pre-existing election infrastructure in place, gave Labour an
enormous advantage, but hey, c'est la vie, that's life, it's nothing that the
other parties haven't and wouldn't have done in the past, so it's a pretty
pointless exercise to keep complaining about it, as some people in UKIP are
doing. Unfortunately for all of us, including the people of Wythenshawe &
Sale East, Mike Kane, is now the legitimately elected Member of Parliament for
the constituency; and so it's time for us all to move on from that particular
ballot and concentrate our minds on other things.
Even some of the most ardent
Labour supporters admit that Mr Kane is little more than a party apparatchik,
who just happens to be a locally born Labour Party member; and is a man who
will undoubtedly put national party interests ahead of local constituents needs
everyday of the week. After all, that is the nature of party politics in modern
Britain, much to our country's shame.
To illustrate the point perhaps,
I was particularly interested in the fact that Mr Kane attributed much of his
own electoral success to the fact that he had dealt with local issues, as
opposed to the bigger, national events that were occurring, examples being the
closure of Wythenshawe Hospital's local A & E Department, the rising costs
of energy, the falls in their standards of living; and all of the other
everyday sorts of issues that people complain about to their elected
representatives.
It was this "banging on
about" the local hospital that got me wondering why the people of
Wythenshawe & Sale East don't appear to have a shiny brand new hospital,
complete with a state-of-the-art A & E Department, able to treat anyone
with anything, bearing in mind that the local hospital was only approved by Tony
Blair's New Labour government in 1998? Was part of the problem, not only the
Coalition's almost complete reorganisation of the English NHS that Andrew
Lansley introduced in 2010, but also the fact that Wythenshawe Hospital was
financed and built under one of New Labour's much vaunted PFI (Private Finance
Initiatives) contracts? Subsequent research showed that not only was the
hospital constructed under one of these PFI deals, but also that by the time
the contract is completed, the local Health Trust will have repaid sixteen
times the original build price to the private contractors. According to one
source mortgage payments alone at Wythenshawe Hospital amount to an estimated
£29 million per year, monies that cannot then be spent on doctors, nurses,
healthcares, medical equipment, surgical operations, patient transport, etc.
etc. etc.
For as much as both legacy
parties, Labour and Conservatives "bang on" about the NHS, with each
blaming the other for the health service's almost inevitable failings, for the
purpose of this particular blog posting we're looking at Labour's years of
sheer hypocrisy on the matter; and boy, do they have form. For all of Labour's
double talk on health as they wandered around Wythenshawe and Sale East
canvassing for votes, whether in the form of Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham, or even
their prospective candidate, Mike Kane, each and every one of them must have
been keeping their fingers crossed that nobody pointed out to them that they
are equally culpable for the dire state of the NHS, as are their Conservative
adversaries; and yet they have the barefaced cheek to use the closure of the
local A&E to sell their own political brand to the masses.
As is often the case with our
current crop of politicians, they have highly selective memories when it comes
to their own shortcomings, something that we are happy to remind them of when
it comes to the subject of the National Health Service.
After all, how could we forget
that it was Tony Blair's government which in the process of renegotiating GP
contracts, ended up allowing family doctors to opt-out of the out-of-hours care
services that had previously existed, while at the same time giving GP's a
significant increase in their pay. As a result of this catastrophic
renegotiation, alternative measures had to be put in place, including telephone
helplines, employment of sometimes foreign locums and additional workloads for
frontline NHS staff.
The much talked about and
reported takeover of Hinchinbrooke Hospital by Circle Healthcare, a for profit
private healthcare company was initially negotiated by the Labour Party; and
only subsequently signed off by the succeeding Coalition government of David
Cameron.
It was the Labour government of
Tony Blair that established the Commercial Directorate within the NHS, which
subsequently rolled out the privately run, for profit, Independent Treatment
Centres that typically undertake "bulk" specialist surgeries, such as
cataracts, hip replacements, etc. Although it was initially claimed that such
centres would improve patient outcomes and free up valuable NHS resources, in
fact independent research would seem to indicate that these private sector
providers often "cherry-pick" their patients, taking the easier, more
straightforward cases and leaving the most difficult ones to be treated by the
NHS.
A report by the Nuffield Trust
indicated that PFI interest repayments in the NHS rose from £459 million in the
year 2009-10 to £629 million in the year 2011-12, a £200 million increase
within a two-year period.
Even though PFI deals were first
instituted by the Major government in 1992, the Labour administration of Tony
Blair proved to be a much greater advocate of such schemes, rapidly expanding
the sector from 1997 onwards, to include schools, hospitals, clinics and much
larger civil infrastructure projects. The main attraction for Blair and his
government was that PFI schemes allowed his administration to provide people
with a range of brand new schools, hospitals, etc. without the national
exchequer having to spend a penny piece, as the costs of construction were
carried by the contractor. However, as these were guaranteed contracts, with
high interest rates and running for extensive periods of time, 25, 30 and even
60 years, some critics claimed that all Blair's government was really doing was
racking up insurmountable debts for future taxpayers, a criticism that has
proven to be true. As a result, it has been conservatively estimated that every
single household in the country now owes £400 towards the costs of the various
PFI deals that have been signed, although as such schemes continue to be
agreed, that £400 figure is probably way out of date. All the same, households
throughout the UK are still going to be paying for schools, hospitals, roads,
etc. that they will probably never see, or ever use in their lifetimes, thanks
to the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
As of 2012 the various PFI
schemes already agreed are thought to be costing the country in the region of
£8.6 billion, while the British taxpayer will still owe a total of around
£121.4 billion on projects that only have a market value of £52.9 billion, a
figure that will inevitably decline as the structures get older and less
useable.
Taking into account associated
cleaning and maintenance costs that generally form part of such schemes, the
total amount owing on PFI schemes is reported to be in the region of £229
billion, which is hardly surprising when you consider one recorded instance of
a replacement wall socket costing £320 to the users of the building. On another
occasion a PFI hospital was reported to have been billed £52,000 for a job that
was later costed at £750, while in another case, a PFI contractor increased the
cleaning bill by £2500 per year, following the demolition of a smokers shelter
on a hospitals grounds.
In some cases the private
contractors involved in providing these schemes are said to be achieving
returns in the region of 70-odd percent, almost a doubling of their investment.
It is perhaps little wonder that a hospital in Bromley will eventually cost
taxpayers around £1.2 billion to buy, some ten times its original construction
cost. As previously mentioned, the new hospital at Wythenshawe will eventually
cost the taxpayer sixteen times what it cost to build, while the redevelopment
of a hospital in Nottinghamshire will reportedly cost the public purse around
£2.0 billion by the time it's finished, assuming of course that it ever is; and
that the local health trust doesn't go broke in the meantime. With annual mortgage
payments of £750 million per year until 2043, it does make you wonder if any
patient living in that particular area can have any confidence that they and
their children will continue to receive free at the point of delivery
healthcare, now and into the future.
The sad thing is that even if
that particular hospital trust went bust and closed tomorrow, the private PFI
contractor would almost certainly still get paid by the taxpayer. Take for
example the case of a school in Belfast, built under the PFI scheme, but which
then closed after seven years, leaving it empty and abandoned. The empty
building will still cost the taxpayer in the region of £370,000 per year until
2027, when the deal is finalised and the taxpayers of Northern Ireland actually
own it, although what sort of condition it will be in by then is anyone's
guess.
The irony is that thanks to the
Labour Party we probably have some of the most expensively modern hospitals of
any country in the world, yet haven't got the money to staff or run them
properly, principally because the Labour dealmakers failed to negotiate
sensible long term arrangements for providing us with the sorts of schools,
hospitals and infrastructure that we needed. Over recent months we've had Andy
Burnham, Labour's Shadow Health Secretary bemoaning that state of today's NHS
under the Coalition of David Cameron, the same Andy Burnham who was personally
involved in at least 200 PFI contracts during his time in office; and who has
subsequently admitted publicly that some of the PFI deals agreed by the last
Labour government's were wrong.
So we have Labour's latest and
newest MP making great play of the fact that his local hospital is facing
cutbacks, that they've lost their A&E Department, that his local community
are struggling to cope with the austerity measures being imposed by the
Coalition. Well, perhaps Mr Kane would like to take up his concerns with his
Parliamentary Labour Party colleagues when he gets to Westminster; and ask Mr
Miliband, Mr Balls and especially Mr Burnham why they did such a crap job of
financing the Health Service, Mr Kane professes to care so much about. After
all, it was their Labour government that agreed the deal that built Wythenshawe Hospital in the first place, so
it must be their fault that there's no money left to run it?
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