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Health Service Corbyn wipes the floor with May over NHS failings

YET again, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hit the right note at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, challenging Theresa May on the outsourcing scandal in the NHS.

He highlighted the profits being siphoned out of the NHS by the private sector, whose income from tendered services has more than doubled to £9 billion since the first Tory minority government took office in 2010.

May merely pointed to the record of the previous New Labour government and — a favourite target of the Tories — the Labour government in Wales, where the Tories have been punishing the National Assembly financially for its refusal to privatise and marketise health and education on the same scale as in England.

Even more tellingly, Corbyn pointed to the scandal of Virgin Healthcare being paid £1.5 million out of the public purse after failing to win an NHS contract.

That should have amused company boss Sir Richard Branson on his private island in the Caribbean, where hard-pressed NHS staff can take a break in his holiday resort for as little as £3,901 a night.

May failed to justify or criticise the generosity of Surrey NHS to the entrepreneur whose Virgin Trains outfit has just been sacked from its East Coast Main Line franchise.

The Labour leader then tried to elicit a response to the financial collapse of Capita, Britain’s biggest dealer in public-sector outsourcing contracts.

He pointed to the company’s long list of failures in the NHS cited by the Royal College of GPs, including the loss of patients’ records.

Had time and the Speaker permitted, Corbyn could have retailed Capita’s expansive record of profiteering and broken contracts in the NHS from London to Merseyside.

But whereas the National Audit Office has found that Capita’s inadequacies “may have compromised patient safety” in many hundreds of cases, May merely boasted about an increase in the number of doctors since 2010.

The opposition leader tried in vain to ground the Prime Minister in reality. As he pointed out, “this year is the 70th anniversary of the NHS. Yet it has the worst waiting lists on records, the worst cancer referrals and falling numbers of GPs. Yet the government is opening up the door to more profiteering.”

And May’s rejoinder? “This week we learnt Labour wants to overthrow capitalism,” she revealed, which would mean “lasting damage to the NHS.”

It beggars belief that a person in her position can be so unaware of the crisis in health and social care throughout Britain.

The British Medical Association declares that our NHS faces a “year-round crisis” of financial and staffing shortages. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee says it is “stuck in survival mode,” with no long-term plan to improve patient services.

The King’s Fund reports that the NHS is struggling to cope with record demand, while social care services are stretched to the limit.

The Royal College of Nursing calculates a shortage of 40,000 nurses and a net exodus of staff, although the number of managers is soaring in order to facilitate the marketisation and privatisation of yet more health services.

According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, NHS expenditure as a proportion of Britain’s GDP will continue to decline from its post-war peak of 7.6 per cent in 2009 to below 7 per cent today.

The King’s Fund reckons that spending must rise to at least £182bn in 2022 to keep pace with demographic change and increasing costs — yet Tory plans are for a budget of just £153bn.

Most of the gap could be plugged by reversing Tory cuts in corporation, capital gains and inheritance taxes that will save the rich and big business more than £18bn a year.

As NHS founder Aneurin Bevan might have put it: “For socialists, it’s a question of priorities.”

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