OUR NHS IS UNDER THREAT
I would like to draw your attention to potential threats to our National Health Service provision. There is a complex deal being struck between the EU and US called the Trans-Atlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP) which aims to remove regulatory ‘barriers’ that they claim restrict the potential profits of transnational corporations on both sides of the Atlantic. However, these ‘barriers’ are in fact hard won social and environmental regulations that are there to protect us, such as food safety (including the lifting of restrictions on genetically modified crops), the use of toxic chemicals, digital privacy, labour rights, and more stringent banking safeguards. The EU insist that this trade agreement will not apply to publicly funded services, such as health and education. But how do we distinguish between public and private provision when these services are already partially privatised? As anyone who has had a hospital appointment recently will know, our local health service is now run by Virgin Care. With no clear boundary between public and private provision these services will become vulnerable to the deregulatory effects of the TTIP agreement. Furthermore, the Health & Social Care Act moved the ‘duty to provide’ healthcare from the Secretary of State for Health, The Rt. Hon. Jeremy Hunt MP to unelected Community Commissioning Groups who, in 2012 alone, spent £8.7 billion on outsourced or contracted private medical services across Britain.
Even more worrying, the Transatlantic Trade and investment Partnership (TTIP) could make these NHS private contracts irreversible. Under the agreement, in a clause known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), our elected government would not be able to bring privatised NHS services back into public ownership for risk of being sued by corporations. Already this is happening in Germany where the Energy Company Vattenfall is suing the German government for phasing out nuclear power.
I believe that the Trans-Atlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) will harm Britain and further undermine the NHS. This view is shared by a growing number of individuals, civil society groups and academics who are now calling for David Cameron and Nick Clegg to use the UK veto to protect the NHS and protect us from the risk of foreign investors suing our government for loss of profits resulting from public policy decisions.
There could be no worse time for effectively elevating powerful corporations to a status equivalent to the nation-state itself, thereby threatening to undermine the most basic principles of democracy in Britain.
Richard Barrington
Green Party candidate for North Dorset
