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Medacs: how to make money from a run-down NHS
SOLOMON HUGHES illuminates the dark art of Tory trickery in the health service: cut public spending, then pay major party donors like Lord Ashcroft to fill the gaps with their private medical companies
READY TO STEP IN: Lord Ashcroft is all for privatising the NHS as the head of a private healthcare supplier
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
IF you want to see how politically connected privatisation firms make money out of the NHS, you can look over the latest accounts for Medacs Healthcare PLC, released at the end of July. They show how the NHS privatisers do well out of the NHS doing badly.
Its annual report tells us: “The group has identified Lord Ashcroft as the ultimate controlling party” of Medacs. Ashcroft “has influence” over half the shares of Medacs’ parent company Impellam, which he chairs.
Ashcroft is one of the Tories’ main donors, giving the party millions over the years.
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Channel 4’s Dirty Business shows why private companies cannot be trusted with vital services like water, says PAUL DONOVAN
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
