The prospect of the Democratic Socialists of America member’s victory in the mayoral race has terrified billionaires and outraged the centrist liberal Establishment by showing that listening to voters about class issues works, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Latest editorial
Centrists and the NHS
So much for ‘middle of the road’ populist politics – Change UK is wedded to the deeply unpopular neoliberal extremism of privatising the NHS, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
Sixty Red-Green seats in a hung parliament could force Labour to choose between the death of centrism or accommodation with the left — but only if enough of us join the Greens by July 31 and support Zack Polanski’s leadership, writes JAMES MEADWAY
For the first time in years, the dominant voice within Chile’s official left comes not from neoliberal centrists but from the world of labour, writes LEONEL POBLETE CODUTTI
200 years since the first dinosaur was described and 25 after its record-breaking predecessor, the BBC has brought back Walking with Dinosaurs. BEN CHACKO assesses what works and what doesn’t
Just as the Chilcot inquiry eventually exposed government failings over the Iraq war, a full independent investigation into British complicity in Israeli war crimes has become inevitable — despite official obstruction, writes JEREMY CORBYN MP
The Congolese independence leader’s uncompromising speech about 80 years of European colonial brutality and injustice went round the world in 1960, and within months, he had been executed by Belgian and CIA-backed forces, writes KEITH BARLOW
THE ongoing link between centrist politics and NHS privatisation always resurfaces: journalist Joe Lo, working for the Left Foot Forward website, reports that the partners of Change UK have been appointed to top jobs at the new centrist party.
One detail caught my eye: Nicola Murphy, wife of ex-Labour MP Chris Leslie, has been made Change UK’s “nominating officer.”
She was previously a “special adviser” to Gordon Brown and she left government to become a lobbyist.
As Lo points out, Murphy worked from 2007-8 as head of government relations in Britain for US healthcare firm Humana.
At that time Humana was looking to break into the NHS through New Labour privatisation. So it hired New Labour people.
Baroness Sally Morgan, the former Blair aide and New Labour minister also advised Humana for a short while, among her many corporate jobs.
Humana hasn’t made the big breakthroughs into the NHS that some private companies have. Which is just as well, as the firm is frequently fined in its native US for misbehaviour.
In 2016 Human was fined $500,000 in Florida for charging too much for HIV drugs. It was fined $700,000 in Texas in 2018 for not having enough anaesthesiologists at the hospitals it funded.
In 2011 it was fined $3.4 million for not reporting fraud on the US limited public healthcare system, Medicaid.
“Centrists” often claim to be offering popular “middle-of-the-road” politics. Change UK is rather proving this is not so, by being unpopular.
One of the reason “centrist” politics has proved to be less popular than it claims is the strong commitment to market methods means corporations are always trying to persuade them to privatise the NHS, and they are happy to be persuaded.
More from this author
SOLOMON HUGHES explains how the PM is channelling the spirit of Reagan and Thatcher with a ‘two-tier’ nuclear deterrent, whose Greenham Common predecessor was eventually fought off by a bunch of ‘punks and crazies’
Israel’s combination of starvation, coercion and murder is part of a carefully concerted plan to ensure Palestinian compliance – as shown in leaked details about the sinister Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which reveal similarities to hunger manipulation projects in Vietnam, Malaya and Kenya, says SOLOMON HUGHES
SOLOMON HUGHES reveals how six MPs enjoyed £400-£600 hospitality at Ditchley Park for Google’s ‘AI parliamentary scheme’ — supposedly to develop ‘effective scrutiny’ of artificial intelligence, but actually funded by the increasingly unsavoury tech giant itself
SOLOMON HUGHES details how the firm has quickly moved on to buttering-up Labour MPs after the fall of the Tories so it can continue to ‘win both ways’ collecting public and private cash by undermining the NHS
