HEALTH SECRETARY Wes Streeting adopted Labour’s “warfare over welfare” approach by inviting US General Stan McChrystal, a key player in the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to give advice on NHS “reform.”

Papers I recently obtained under Freedom of Information show Streeting sought out McChrystal for the meeting, which took place last November. Streeting’s office wrote to the Ministry of Defence saying he “would like a contact for General Stanley McChrystal as he’d be interested in hearing more about his experience in mobilising change” to “inform” his “10 Year Plan for Health.” With Ministry of Defence help, Streeting invited McChrystal to London.

McChrystal now runs the McChrystal Group, a sort of management consultancy offering advice to corporate executives on “leadership and team dynamics” lessons he learned by fighting wars.

The Department for Health briefing for the meeting is clear: they want to draw on his military experience. The briefing says McChrystal “is best known” for leading the US “premier military counter-terrorism force” Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and “developing a comprehensive counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.”

McChrystal led JSOC from 2003–8, battling the al-Qaida insurgency in Iraq, which followed the British-US invasion. McChrystal is credited with success through the 2006 killing of al-Qaida’s Iraqi leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. However, defeating al-Qaida only led to the rise of the more vicious group Isis.

Human Rights Watch and the Washington Post detailed abuses by troops under McChrystal’s command in Iraq in this conflict. JSOC ran an interrogation base, Camp Nama, where Human Rights Watch says detainees were “beaten” and “regularly stripped naked, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme cold, placed in painful stress positions.” Maybe Streeting thinks McChrystal being in charge of physical abuses gives him some kind of medical knowledge.

It’s certainly hard to see how Streeting can believe McChrystal is somehow a model for good and lasting change. McChrystal’s Afghanistan success was also short-lived: the Taliban is back in charge of Kabul.

The Department for Health briefing says McChrystal’s “relevance to the NHS” is showing how “we have to reform and challenge the norm” by learning “from a radically different approach.” According to the departmental brief, McChrystal’s “hypothesis” is realising he had to “combine the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network” to create a ‘team of teams’ — faster, flatter and more flexible than ever.” The NHS should also combine its might with this “agility” to create a JSOC-style “team of teams.”

To add more military flavour, McChrystal said he’d “like to invite a British colleague of mine (former 22 SAS Squadron Commander) to the meeting” with Streeting and top Department for Health officials.

The department agreed to invite this unnamed SAS officer to Streeting’s meeting. A seven paragraph “readout” of the meeting summarising the talks said McChrystal provided “food for thought,” but every paragraph of the summary was “redacted” because Department for Health said it referred to “development of government policy” so should remain confidential.

Blatant state censorship of HS2 failures

In mid-June Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said building the HS2 rail line was marred by a “litany of failure” causing missed deadlines and ballooning costs, which rose by £37 billion. She based her judgement on an in-depth investigation of HS2, called the Stewart Review.

But if you watched the BBC report on this “appalling mess” — which means HS2 won’t be completed by 2033 — there is no mention of the firms actually building the railway. Their ghostly lack of presence gives the impression that somehow the huge cost overruns have happened without any of the companies that actually dig the ground or lay the rails being involved.

There is a reason for this: the government censored all mention of the HS2 companies from its own report.

If you do a word search for the companies involved — the largest being Britain’s Balfour Beatty, along with France’s Vinci — in the main text of the report, it comes up zero. The companies’ names only appear in an illustration at the end of the report.

This investigation into HS2 was prepared by James Stewart, a management consultant who worked for the Blair government as chief executive of its pro-PFI body, Partnerships UK. PFI was a scheme which wasted money by giving private corporations inflated long-term payments in return for building and running public services like hospitals or schools.

But even with his record, Stewart’s review does not exonerate the private corporations building HS2. Far from it. HS2 is managed by a government-owned company, called HS2 Ltd. But the actual building work is done by four consortiums made up of some of Britain’s leading civil engineering companies. These are referred to in the report as the “Main Works Civils Contracts,” or “MWCCs.”

The Stewart Review very directly says: “The failure of The Main Works Civils Contracts has been a persistent problem for the Programme.”

Stewart argues HS2 Ltd is to blame for failing to manage the “MWCC” consortia. But he also says the private sector “supply chain” has “to take its share of the responsibility as it has largely failed to deliver under the partnership agreements and contracts it signed up to.”

The big contractors are part of the failure. Why are the companies not named? Stewart actually wrote a whole chapter on the failure of “Main Works Civils Contracts,” Chapter 9. But if you turn to Chapter 9, all the words have been removed. They have been “redacted for commercial confidentiality.”

Any blame he gives to the companies has been hidden. We know from one of the appendices that the main text did refer to the actual companies building HS2, so late and so over-budget.

For the record, they are Balfour Beatty, Vinci, Eiffage, Keir, Ferrovial, BAM Nuttall, Skanska, Costain, Strabag, Bouygues, Robert McAlpine, and VolkerFitzpatrick. But any possible criticism has been hidden for “commercial confidentiality.” The names of the companies appear in one illustration, a map of the scheme, but there is no explanatory text.

This in turn meant the firms avoided all blame — or even any mention — in media coverage of the damning HS2 report. If the government hasn’t the courage to name the firms building this huge, over-budget, late railway, will they have the courage to try and stop them charging far too much to take far too long to complete HS2?