Labour gets four times the private health donations of other parties

The Labour Party is now unequivocally the party of the private healthcare sector. Thanks to campaign group EveryDoctor, we now know its MPs in parliament have taken millions in donations from companies and individuals linked to the private interests carving up the NHS for profit. Tellingly, elected Labour politicians have racked up four times the number of donations of any of the other political parties.

And who happens to be front and centre of a sizeable chunk of these donations? None other than dodgy think tank that simultaneously orchestrated Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral downfall and propelled Keir Starmer, and many of the neoliberal Labour MPs now calling the shots in Cabinet into power: Labour Together.

EveryDoctor: private healthcare donations

EveryDoctor pored over donations that the current crop of elected MPs have accepted between 2023 and 2025. It found that MPs had bagged more than £2.7m in donations from individuals and companies directly or indirectly linked to the private healthcare sector.

Previously, EveryDoctor had revealed to its supporters ahead of releasing the full research that:

More than half (£1.4m) of the donations came from companies with investments in the private healthcare sector such as asset management firms.
A tenth of the donation (£312,204) came from companies that already provide services to the NHS.
More than £230,000 was donated to MPs from directors of companies that have investments in the private healthcare sector.
Lobbyists with private healthcare clients donated more than £110,000 to MPs.

Now, the campaign group has published a report delving into these donations in more detail. Alongside this, it has produced a searchable map. Each red pin denotes an MP with donations connected to the private healthcare sector.

Where an MP isn’t marked on the map, EveryDoctor explains that it has yet to find said links. However, it tempers that this is a ‘living’ map; the campaign group is still exploring data for 2025 and will continue to update it as MPs add new entries to the register of donations.

Labour: the party of the private healthcare sector

Arguably the most staggering finding was the sheer scale of the Labour Party’s slice of the private healthcare donation pie.

Notably, Labour MPs took more than £2m of those £2.7m donations. It accounted for four times the amount of every other political party combined.

Of course, some of this could be owing to the fact the Labour Party has a significant number more MPs in parliament after the Tories tanked at the election. At 403 seats, the Labour Party occupies 62% of the House – or in other words – has 1.6 times the number of seats of every other party combined.

However, that hardly accounts for having quadruple the number of donations from the private healthcare sector.

Evidently, the private healthcare sector has considered Labour the right horse to back for advancing its interests, namely through NHS privatisation.

What’s more, the situation gets more revealing when you consider the proportion of those donations going to the Labour government’s current cabinet members. Notably, fourteen ministers collectively raked in £869,625. That’s close to a third of the total donations that EveryDoctor identified linked to the private healthcare sector.

Surprise surprise, Labour Together has its fingerprints all over it

So, who’s responsible for a significant proportion of these donations? That would be think tank Labour Together, that gave Labour candidates more than £1.4m ahead of the election. It’s the infamous brainchild of prime minister Keir Starmer’s now chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.

This isn’t the first time in recent months that the think tank has reared its ugly head. In March, the Canary uncovered the plethora of connections between the think tank and MPs pushing for the government’s disgraceful disability benefit cuts. Moreover, as the Canary’s Steve Topple pointed out at the time, this is the same Labour Together that:

Plotted to destroy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
Fomented the exaggerated antisemitism crisis.
Went after grassroots Labour supporters and smeared them as antisemites.
Created Stop Funding Fake News to try and destroy the Canary, SKWAWKBOX, and other independent media outlets.

And notably, as EveryDoctor highlighted in its report, the think tank has a multitude of private healthcare links:

Its biggest funder is Martin Taylor whose hedge fund Crake Asset Management holds over $20m (£15.8m) in shares in United Health, one of the largest private hospital operators in the US and the parent company of UK-based health services firm Optum.

Other major political donors include businessman Trevor Chinn, a senior advisor to private equity firm CVC Capital Partners, which owns stakes in dozens of private healthcare companies across the UK, Europe and Asia.

Moreover, it also pointed to individual Labour Together donors – who happened to pour sizeable donations into the pockets of Labour MPs ahead of the election as well. One was Daniel Luhde-Thompson, an advisor at the now notorious hedge fund Quadrature Capital.

This is indeed the very same Quadrature that gave the party that £4m bung. EveryDoctor noted that Luhde-Thompson donated £25,000 in total to four Labour MPs ahead of the election. On top of that, he ploughed a further £50,000 into Labour Together. And significantly, it underscored that according to investigative outlet Torchlight:

Quadrature Capital has invested more than $200m (£158.7m) in private healthcare firms

Paying dividends for the private sector

The inordinate scale of private healthcare-linked donations should be a stain on the conscience of MPs. The fact it isn’t shows how little this parliament cares about political integrity. But then, it’s all in service of that revolving door into high-paying private sector positions for many of these MPs who will be booted out at the next election.

The connections once again call into question the degrees of separation between Whitehall and the private sector. Corporations can curry favour with this Labour government. And it’s clear, this is already – quite literally – paying dividends.

For instance, EveryDoctor honed in on health secretary Wes Streeting. It revealed that he had taken £65,000 from head of UK investment firm Egerton Capital John Armitage. Its a hedge fund that holds “hundreds of millions” in US healthcare stocks. Significantly, it has $216m (£169m) invested in Big Pharma corporation Eli Lilly.

In October, the Labour government struck a deal with the UK government for a £279m investment in a new life sciences centre.

He also received a donation from multimillionaire recruitment tycoon Peter Hearn as part of the £260,304 he made to several Labour MPs. As EveryDoctor highlighted:

Hearn made his fortune through recruitment firms PSD and Odgers Berndtson, which has faced criticism over some of the senior executives it has helped place in the health service.

So, it’s evident that these donations are already paying off for some of these private healthcare interests. Largely, it’s all amidst this Labour government’s fixation on privatising the NHS – which will only be to corporations’ further benefit.

Selling the NHS down the privatisation river

Overall, the research makes for a damning pool of privatised healthcare connections to the Labour Party and government.

You can look at its broader findings in its report here, or search the map database for specific MPs here.

Of course, this is hardly the first time EveryDoctor has painted an appalling picture of politicians in the pockets of private healthcare. The Canary’s Maryam Jameela wrote about its previous research on the very same thing back in 2020. Then, the situation was no different to how it is now. Prominent Labour MPs like Wes Streeting were taking donations from all the same culprits.

Now however, EveryDoctor’s new research shows without a shadow of a doubt that this Labour government can’t be trusted not to sell the NHS down the privatisation river. However, if that wasn’t clear by now – you haven’t been paying attention.

Featured image via the Canary

Comments 1

PeterInSeattle says:

1 year ago

Is anyone over there familiar with Liz Fowler? She’s the revolving-door aide who helped Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus — Democratic Senator from Montana, ~96% of whose campaign contributions came from out of state — shape the final details of what I call the “Patient Protection [Racket] and [Un]affordable Care Act of 2010.” (Thanks, Obama! I sure wish Dennis Kucinich had stuck to his guns and scuttled your polished turd of a healthcare “reform.” Institutionalizing and further subsidizing the status quo ante is NOT what we elected you to do.)

From memory, Fowler started out as Baucus’s aide, rotated out to become a vice president at Wellpoint (a for-profit health-insurance company), and then rotated back in to help write the [Un]affordable Care Act. After the Act was passed with the bare minimum of required votes (the much-hyped promise of a “public option” magically vanishing between the House and Senate votes and reconciliation), Fowler moved to the White House to oversee implementation of the newly formalized agreement among America’s healthcare crime families. And from there, she rotated back out to work for Johnson & Johnson in, uh, LONDON. At the time, I quipped that it was to teach British MPs to dip their snouts into the for-profit healthcare trough every bit as greedily as their porcine cousins in Congress. It looks like I might have been on the right track.

Last I read, Fowler had rotated back in to what I believe was the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, I’m guessing to oversee the coercive transfer of seniors from traditional, unrationed, fee-for-service Medicare to capitated Medicare Advantage plans gamed and rationed by private health-insurance companies with an eye to maximizing profit. “Deny, Delay, Defend,” indeed.

I hope the Canary will follow up this article with detailed investigations into how Big Health concerns are paying off “your” elected representatives, because leaving their avarice and mendacious rationales unchecked is going to end up getting a lot of you bankrupt, maimed, disabled, or killed. (In addition to the classic deferred golden-parachute payoff, there are ongoing insider stock tips, contemporaneous side-door payoffs to relatives, and in the case of healthcare, the promise of being first in line at the best clinics with the best specialists and the latest, cutting-edge treatments. That last one, incidentally, is the major reason non-health-sector Fortune 500 executives aren’t up in arms about their companies being bled dry by healthcare costs; they’re getting even higher-priority care than their proxies in government do.) Trust me: as an American who lived in France *before* Sarkozy, Hollande, and especially Macron started taking a hatchet to one of the most egalitarian, most humane, most effective healthcare systems in the world — a largely publicly financed system — I *know* where this is headed.