Real Media caught up with Dr Bob Gill in Camden at the launch of a new grassroots campaign in Keir Starmer’s Holborn & St Pancras constituency.
[In the interview, Dr Gill mentions that 50% of GP data is held by ‘Vision’. In fact the company is EMIS, and has, as described, been bought by American insurer United Health. He has since clarified this and we are happy to correct the record.]
HSP4NHS aims to canvass on the doorstep and at stalls over the coming months in and around Camden, to educate voters about NHS privatisation, listen to their views, and to build a strong movement that will tackle their MP Keir Starmer directly over creeping privatisation of the NHS.
The plan is to present a 15,000-strong petition to Starmer’s office demanding he meets the public and answers their questions directly. This would be an enormous show of mood for just one constituency, and whether he agrees a meeting or not, should create wide media interest.
The hope is that by empowering a wide section of constituents to campaign over the NHS, it might open the way to future public engagement on other issues.
At the launch last week, Dr Gill, who we’ve interviewed on several occasions before, gave an excellent run-down of how the American healthcare model has been the blueprint for successive governments in a long-planned erosion of the NHS under both Tory and Labour administrations.
NHS users are facing more cuts in access to healthcare, difficulty in seeing qualified GPs, more GP practice mergers, maternity provision closures, a decimated mental health sector, longer waits for emergency treatment and a myriad of other issues. Dr Gill has mapped out why this is happening over many years, and there is little room for doubt that we are very close to the final stages of privatisation.
But it doesn’t need to be like this – with public engagement and education, we can fight back. The issue is not (as so often portrayed) one of funding, or immigration – it’s about a deliberate plan to withhold health services while siphoning huge amounts of money off into the private sector. Once exposed, it can be fought, and the hope is that HSP4NHS could be a model for similar campaigns around the country, starting with Wes Streeting’s constituency of Ilford North.
