Critical: Why the NHS is being betrayed and how we can fight for it 
Dr Julia Grace Patterson
Mudlark, £16.99

RISHI SUNAK wants us to unite around ”shared values,” so here’s one – the NHS. An Ipsos Mori poll in August 2022 found that the NHS came out top when the public was asked “what makes us proud to be British?” 

The poll is cited in Julia Patterson’s excellent book, which provides a heartfelt introduction both to the strengths of the NHS as originally constituted and the disastrous process of the last 40-50 years by which the NHS has been privatised, fragmented and (part of the process of privatisation) starved of funds and trained staff. 

Julia Patterson is an NHS psychiatrist who now works full time with the campaign she co-founded – Every Doctor. I would urge everyone to go to the Every Doctor website, https://everydoctor.org.uk, for invaluable maps showing just how extensive outsourcing and PFIs are across Britain and the extent of MPs’ (Conservative and Labour) financial interests in private healthcare companies often through investment funds, such as Egerton Capital or Apax Partners LLP (linked with Keir Starmer and Teresa May respectively). 

Successive governments have created endless opportunities for vulture-capitalist style sweating of NHS assets: staff are low-paid, exploited and burnt-out; “surplus” land is catalogued ready for sale; PFIs extract debt repayments, which for one hospital Trust were double its spending on drugs; and contracts are awarded to private companies, like the CIA-linked Palantir, to hold patient data with no transparency as to what happens to it. 

Thus the NHS “is being transformed into a cash cow to create a steady stream of profit for private corporations funded by the taxpayer” and governments spend their time thinking not about how to sustain a future NHS but “finding new ways to mine the system for value.”

For her pains, she and her campaign have been trolled, smeared and hounded. Yet all the research is on Dr Patterson’s side: for instance Oxford University research in 2022 demonstrated that privatisation in England was linked to avoidable deaths.

Critical is another powerful weapon in the hands of campaigners, sitting alongside so many important works such as Stewart Player and Colin Leys’ The Plot Against the NHS, Youseff al-Ginghi’s 10 Steps to Dismantling the NHS, Bob Gill’s documentary The Great NHS Heist, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Www0cHLQulw, and Allyson Pollock’s innumerable articles and papers.

But Julia Patterson brings her own insider experience of current conditions for medical staff, tracking the disillusionment felt by herself, who began her training as a hopeful and dedicated medical student but increasingly experienced shortages of beds and staff and  a service which “has been crippled to the point that the science cannot be adhered to.” Her path is surely a common one and the root of the recent overwhelming support for further strike action by junior doctors.

In fact the critical situation facing the NHS is the result of a plot as well as of betrayal for, from the outset, the NHS faced powerful enemies who attacked the NHS as a socialist measure and sought its dismantlement in order to let in the private sector. Its popularity however meant that the privatisation programme had to be carried out ”by stealth” and the NHS has been boiled like a frog until its situation is indeed critical.

Nothing short of renationalisation will now do, and Julia Patterson adds her voice to that increasing recognition, calling also for immediate action on staffing and infrastructure.

Highly recommended.