INTEGRATING social care and healthcare is seen as the way forward by many commentators.

But it also creates a whole new business stream for care firms:  local authority social care — care homes and visitors — is largely privatised, where “medical” healthcare is still mostly NHS.

Growing calls for integration may explain why Cratus, a company specialising in lobbying councillors on behalf of developers hired former Tory health secretary Stephen Dorrell (above right) this February.
 

Dorrell was health secretary under John Major before 1997 and from 2010 he was chair of the health select committee.

In between Dorrell chaired the  “Public Service Improvement Group” set up by David Cameron to review policy in health, social care, housing and education. So he has been closely involved in developing Tory health policy, which has moved towards market methods and privatisation.  
 

Dorrell took a job as a healthcare and public services adviser to KPMG during his last six months of sitting as an MP in 2014-15.

He still mixes “public sector” and private health work — Dorrell is Chair of the NHS Confederation, which represents both NHS Trusts and private providers. He is also chairman of “Healthcare market intelligence company” Laing Buisson ltd and runs it’s offshoot, Public Policy Projects Ltd.

Under Dorrell’s lead, Public Policy Projects charges a subscription to corporate executives and in turn  arranges “policy breakfasts” where they can meet ministers and  senior NHS officials for businesses willing to pay their subscription.

So Dorrell has a long experience of developing Tory health policy — he is embedded in the NHS and he is experienced at arranging paid-for meetings between corporate executives, ministers and NHS officials.

His move to commercial lobbying company Cratus is part of a pattern which Cameron — in a 2010 speech — described commercial lobbying was “the next big scandal waiting to happen.”

Cameron said this lobbying led to “crony capitalism,” adding: “we all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way.”

Substitute lunches for breakfasts and this sounds like Dorrell’s work.
 

Cratus said Dorrell will be supporting its work on health and social care alongside Clare Whelan, Dorrell’s former parliamentary assistant who also works for Public Policy Projects Ltd. Whelan was also a leading Tory councillor in the London Borough of Lambeth.

Cratus has a long record of hiring council leaders and leading councillors to help their developer clients win planning permission and other local government backing.

However, it looks like potential changes in health and social care are making Cratus look at national political figures as well. It also has one backbench MP — Bob Neill, Tory MP for Bromley and Chislehurst — working as a director for £20k/year.

Jeremy Hunt, the buy-to-let landlord

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt might be busy trying to get NHS staff to accept a 3 per cent year pay award that is below predicted inflation rates. But not so busy that he didn’t have time to become a major buy-to-let landlord on the side.

According to the latest register of MPs’ interests Hunt has started a new “property holding company” with his wife.

In February the company, Mare Pond Properties, bought seven Southampton apartments, with loans from Swedish bank Handelsbanken. The company paperwork says the flats are in Southampton’s  “Ocean Village.”  

Southampton is a big, down-to-earth city, but it does have some bits that attract London-style property investment and Ocean Village is one of them. The city has many docks, some still working, some closed and Ocean Village is a closed dock transformed into a Marina with “luxury” flats and yacht berths.

Hunt’s  flats appear to be in the new Alexandra Wharf apartment block at Ocean Village, where 2-3 bedroom flats went on sale for £450,000-£1 million — two-bed Flats in Alexandra Wharf  currently rent at around £1,750-£1,950pcm, which is expensive for Southampton and certainly above what a nurse in Southampton General could afford.

Anti-semitism & Labour

Two things can be true at the same time. Lots of opponents want to pick on Labour’s weak policing of anti-semitism among members because they want to bash Jeremy Corbyn, not because they are serious about fighting racism.

Lots of newspapers that have ignored or even encouraged racism are picking over Labour looking hard for anti-semitism. But they are sometimes finding it, because your opponents do sometimes find your weak spot.

Councillors sharing Holocaust denial material or Ken Livingstone going on about Hitler in a crass and offensive way are real and really unacceptable.

A belief that there is an Israel-directed secret plot involving well-off Jewish people to promote financial and/or Israeli interests is central to nazi ideology. But it also seeps in to some parts of the left. It turns any discussion of economics or foreign policy into something about race, in a very sinister way.

The left has been correct on some of the big issues of the century — the Iraq war, the failures of “the war on terror,” the need to regulate the banks. But ironically it is those areas where the left was right that the small number of racist, anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists have crept into the cracks.

Unfortunately there has been a broader naivety, a failure to recognise these cranks, that we need to do better on.

Labour ‘s left have only very recently been in charge of the party’s disciplinary machinery. The failure to expel some of those using  anti-Jewish racist language, the failure to implement the Chakrabarti report, are actually the responsibility of the old guard. 

However, Corbyn’s supporters are now in charge of discipline. I think Corbyn’s rank and file supporters need to help them, by recognising anti-semitism and  being sensitive enough to spot anti-Jewish bigotry.

Corbyn’s success is remarkable. Getting Labour away from the pro-war, pro-privatisation policies of “New Labour” is a hard-won achievement. So it is doubly hard, having fought through some pretty endless unfair criticism from the right, to be genuinely self-critical of our own faults. But nobody said doing the right thing was easy.