Twelve months into Labour’s landslide sees non-violent protesters face proscription for opposing genocide and working people, the sick and the elderly having fear beaten into them daily in the name of profit, writes MATT KERR
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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
While Reform poses as a workers’ party, a credible left alternative rooted in working-class communities would expose their sham — and Corbyn’s stature will be crucial to its appeal, argues CHELLEY RYAN
The government’s retreat on PIP still leaves 150,000 new universal credit claimants facing halved benefits from April 2026, creating a discriminatory two-tier welfare system that campaigners must continue fighting, writes DR DYLAN MURPHY
Under current policy, welfare cuts are just a small downpayment on future austerity, argues MICHAEL BURKE
As the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia rebuilds support through anti-cuts campaigns, the government seeks to silence it before October’s parliamentary elections through liberal totalitarianism, reports JOHN CALLOW
The historic heartland of anti-fascist resistance and mining militancy now faces a new battle — stopping Nigel Farage. ANDREW MURRAY meets ex-Labour MP Beth Winter and former Plaid leader Leanne Wood, the two socialists leading the resistance
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.
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