NHS: Come clean, Boris

A LOT of people will breathe a sigh of relief on hearing Donald Trump say he doesn’t want to take over the NHS in a future trade deal with the UK.

But who can trust him? It’s not just his ‘it’s all about me’ fixation; or his incoherence and inconsistency; or his ability to back-stab allies, associates, colleagues, and anyone getting in his way; it’s the simple fact that there are many ways of skinning a cat and the NHS can be milked without being owned.

One fairly obvious way this can be done is by financial involvement, scandalously done in Manchester and across the country by the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), sometimes rebadged as ‘PublicPrivate Partnership’ to make it sound more cuddly and less of a Trojan horse.

Who could object to another country building us hospitals? Well perhaps those whose treatment would be compromised by our exporting fees for decades to come to financiers. The sorry tale of PFI in this country should act as a wake-up.

Another approach, and one which the now revealed Trump Trade Files show is dear to the US government’s heart - preserving the privileges of pharmaceutical companies to make big profits by extending patent restrictions and setting the prices they want.

This seems to me to be akin to vampire blood-sucking!

So whilst we may not see the Stars and Stripes over the MRI, the NHS is NOT safe at the moment, and the louder Boris Johnson and his friends protest without explicitly ruling tricks like this out, the more Queen Gertrude’s words (Hamlet III. ii) spring to mind: ‘The (lady) doth protest too much, me thinks.’

P Schrivener, Greater Manchester Trade Action