A speech from 2020 on the NHS is about to come back to haunt Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting have committed to expanding for-profit privatisation within NHS services under the Labour Party this general election.

In Labour’s manifesto, for instance, it states “Labour will use spare capacity in the independent sector to ensure patients are diagnosed and treated more quickly”.

Starmer hypocrisy: “a matter of absolute principle”

But in March 2020, Starmer said the opposite, with a personal account of why Labour should halt profiteering in the health service:

This runs very deep with me. My mum was very very ill all of her life. And as children and as a family we spent a lot of time in… hospital where she was fighting for her life. And I remember her saying to me as a teenage boy once when she was really really ill and we were wondering what to do, she took my hand and say ‘you won’t let your dad go private will you’.

And it was really, it was so important to her… as a matter of absolute principle, she felt you shouldn’t make money from ill health. And it is a matter of principle.

Yet in April 2024, Streeting said that opposition to Labour’s plan for more NHS privatisation comes from “middle class lefties”. He couldn’t be referring to dear leader?

Starmer continued:

We’ve gone through the roof with privatisation in the health service and it’s heading in the wrong direction… and this theory that if you introduce competition you get a better service is complete nonsense

The thing is, Streeting also called for competition within the NHS, championing giving patients a “real choice”. He said the NHS is not a “shrine”, branding healthcare funding a “heavy… price we’re paying for failure”.

“End privatisation” in the NHS?

In another instance of hypocrisy, at the ITV leaders election debate, Starmer reaffirmed a personal commitment to public healthcare. He said he wouldn’t use private healthcare even if he was on a waiting list for surgery:

I don’t use private health. I use the NHS that’s where my wife works at one of the big hospitals. It runs through my DNA.

Yet Labour are committed to using private health within the NHS. That’s despite analysis from We Own It estimating that for-profit companies running services under the NHS creamed ten million a week from NHS budgets, from 2012 to 2024. Momentum co-chair Hilary Schan said:

It’s time Labour’s Leadership rediscovered the values which led to our party founding the NHS – and commit to end privatisation and give our NHS the money it needs.

Instead of funding the health service properly, Labour is using the crisis as an opportunity for private sector profit. Starmer’s mantra of ‘change’ is anything but.

Featured image via Guardian News – YouTube