NHS campaigns’ first task now is to stop social murder

I prepared this for the July 2023 Groundswell screening in Sheffield, organised by Sheffield Save Our NHS and dedicated to the memory of NHS campaigner Steve Carne. It was the first showing of the new edit by the director, John Furse, that questions what the reappearance of New Labour means for the NHS.

One of Steve’s last WhatsApp messages to me said,

“I’ve come to conclusion people don’t know anything lolol”

But Steve wasn’t about to give up telling the story of the attack on the NHS.

The documentary Groundswell tells one version of this story – the attempt to get the Labour Party to include legislating for the NHS Reinstatement Bill in its Manifesto.

Social Murder was a story Steve was intent on telling around the time of his unexpected death in January.

Social murder – untimely and ultimately avoidable and preventable deaths caused by premeditated and reckless indifference to human life on the part of the government and its corporate cronies.

The latest national Threads of Survival Quilt, sewn up in February this year, is one of four that piece together people’s experiences of how the government and its corporate cronies acted ‘Under Cover of Covid’.

It has a furious ‘Social Murder’ piece top centre in the quilt, sewn by Steve towards the end of 2022.

Social murder has been defined by the Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice, University of Bristol and an Open University Professor of criminology as,

“the outcome of deliberate policies that facilitate social, economic and political oppression, and which lead to untimely and ultimately avoidable and preventable deaths.”

The government doesn’t want us to discuss this

Between March 2020 and January 2021, there were 233 UK government press briefings, prime ministerial addresses, NHS data briefings and Covid-19 taskforce briefings. These briefings noticeably dwindled in 2021, even as known Covid-19 cases were in the hundreds of thousands and deaths continued to proliferate. The final press briefing was held on 21 February 2022.

The same Open University Criminology Professor wrote recently, as the Covid-19 inquiry started,

“In effect, the state fell silent over Covid.
“If the choices that the government makes result in a catastrophic number of preventable deaths, then the logical path to follow is to quieten, subdue and silence discussion about the dead, and deflect attention about who is accountable. Shamefully, that is what has happened, and is happening, in England and Wales right now.”

Excess deaths have been caused by “austerity” public spending cuts as well as Covid-19

The Office of National Statistics reports UK “excess deaths”, explaining that the term ‘excess deaths’ refers to the number of deaths above the five-year (non pandemic) average.

The Office of National Statistics is clear that Covid-19 is not the only cause of excess deaths.
More people were dying in the UK even before Covid-19. Excess deaths rose every year from 2012 to 2019.

“Austerity” public spending cuts, since the bankers crashed the global economy in 2008, have been reliably pinpointed as the decisive factor in what has increasingly been seen by academic researchers as social murder.

And excess deaths of NHS patients have risen since Spring 2022, due to ambulance and A&E delays, long NHS waiting lists, and the deterioration of people’s health during the pandemic when we couldn’t access many NHS services.

So what do we do to make sure that people defy the government’s wish for silence about social murder, and its causes?

Groundswell documents a time when there was still some hope that legislation was possible to reinstate the NHS as a properly publicly funded, planned, managed and provided comprehensive, universal health service that was free at the point of clinical need.

The NHS Reinstatement Bill campaign group, funded by Lord David Owen, was the basis for the 999 Call for the NHS actions in trying to get the Labour Party to formally endorse an updated version of Bill, and commit to including it in the Queens Speech in its first Parliamentary session, if elected to government.

But the NHS Reinstatement Bill campaign group folded in 2018 after the nth attempt to get the bill through the House of Commons by a private member’s bill.

So now there is no one to pull any Parliamentary lever, and even less leverage on the Labour Party for legislation to stop and reverse the imposition of the Medicare/Medicaid system on the NHS.

As a reminder – the publicly funded/ privately provided Medicare/Medicaid insurance system in the USA is limited to those who are too poor or elderly to afford private health insurance. And its insurance model is designed to limit those patients’ access to health care.

This model is being reproduced by Integrated Care Boards – the statutory NHS bodies that are responsible for planning and purchasing NHS services for their area. With the predictable result that those who can pay, increasingly use private health insurance and private health providers – with the exception of emergency care which only the NHS provides.

But NHS emergency care is now itself a source of “excess deaths” due to ambulance and A&E delays. This has recently been estimated by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine at around 500 deaths/week in England.

The 2022 Health and Care Act has created a lawful basis for this fragmentation of the NHS into 42 public/private partnerships – designed to limit patients’ access to healthcare – run by so-called NHS Integrated Care Boards.

And as far as I can see no one’s grasping this nettle. Support for restorative pay for NHS staff is necessary but not sufficient.

How do we get out of this impasse? Now it’s clear that – even beyond what Groundswell showed to be the case a few years ago – Starmer’s Labour Party accepts and endorses the fragmentation of the NHS, and its replacement by 42 public/private accountable care systems based on the USA’s Medicare/Medicaid system.

It’s becoming increasingly clear, if it wasn’t before, that statutory Integrated Care Boards are designed to shrink the NHS to a bare bones service that will in no way meet the health care needs of the public.

For example, Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board met today (5 July 2023) to consider its Chief Executive’s Report.

It sounds as if he’s proposing to drop a bomb on Lancs and S Cumbria NHS, under the guise of “System transformation and recovery.”

The Report acknowledges that the Integrated Care Board will end the year with a budget deficit, (which they are forbidden by law to do), and blames this on “how we are configured and how we do things round here.”

In the disaster capitalist spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste, the Report adds cheerfully,

“we are in a crisis, but there are some amazing opportunities that we need to take advantage of.”

The amazing opportunities include “a major clinical productivity and reconfiguration programme” which will cut the seven hospitals providing elective care to “two or three elective sites”.

Another amazing opportunity is to reduce the current six A&Es. And another is to shift many hospital services into people’s homes, as a result of Community Health services “transformation” across the whole Integrated Care Board. This means an “amazing opportunity” for the 2 new hospitals to be built in Lancaster and Preston to have fewer beds.

However, “robust leadership” is needed, because “reconfiguration is not for faint hearted and will be high risk.”

That must be why the agenda item on System transformation and recovery excluded press and public.

If it’s no longer credible to expect a change of government to mean a restoration of the NHS to its original principles, what do we do?

What went wrong? Groundswell provides some evidence.

What can we do differently – and better – now?

How do we stop social murder?

The Labour Party’s Medical Research Group were talking about social murder back in 1934. It concluded that a workers’ overthrow of capitalism was the only way to end social murder,

“In order to rise above the degraded standards of capitalism, to put an end to the social murder so vividly described by Engels, the workers must use their combined strength not only to resist all attacks on their standards of iiving but to overthrow the system under which these are inevitable.”

For years 999 Call for the NHS and other campaign groups pointed out that successive governments’ austerity policies in general – and the imposition on the NHS of accountable/integrated care since 2015 in particular – would kill people. We were called scaremongers.

But we weren’t. This is the saddest thing of all. We were right, we told them, they didn’t listen.

We have to do better now. And so does the Labour Party.

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