‘Labour serves private health sector, but if you fight you can win’, says NHS doctor from ‘legendary’ campaign

Dr Jackie Grunsell fought in a now “legendary” campaign to keep a local NHS hospital open. And she told the Canary that, for her, it’s clear today that “Labour is serving the interests of the private sector in healthcare”. She insisted, however, that:

If you fight, you can win. If you do nothing, then they’ll just get away with whatever they want.

Fighting for the NHS

Her own experience, she stressed:

shows that where people are prepared to fight back, that’s hugely popular

The largely successful Hands Off HRI campaign was a mass public campaign reacting to a 2016 announcement “that Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and its A&E would close”. According to the author of a book telling the story of the town’s resistance, this was “the biggest continuous civilian mobilisation in the town in well over a century”. As “organisers often repeated”, Cormac Kelly told Huddersfield Hub:

it’s only a done deal if you do nowt

Grunsell is a GP, and she was at the heart of Hands off HRI. She has long fought to protect the NHS. And after a previous campaign, people had voted her in as an independent councillor on an anti-austerity platform (during Tony Blair’s time in government).

‘Local achievements can inspire hope nationally, providing lessons and empowering others to fight back’

Grunsell told the Canary:

We have to link up with others on a national level. And the thing is, when we do have victories and when we do have achievements here, that’s a good example, and we can help others to learn from that… I think it gives inspiration to people and, hopefully, one victory can really quickly lead to others feeling empowered to actually fight back, because I think one of the problems over recent years has just been people feeling completely powerless.

Because the NHS is ultimately a “national system”, however, she stressed that uniting campaigns nationally is essential.

She said we need to be demanding health assets return “back into public ownership”, because “we lose a lot of money in interest payments on buildings and things like that”. At the moment, she asserted:

that is diverting huge amounts of money into the private sector and away from publicly funded health services… where it’s needed to provide care

Jeremy Corbyn has long called for a National Care Service, highlighting in 2022 that “corporations now own and run 84 percent of beds in care homes in England” and saying “where there is profitability, there is exploitation”. And Grunsell agreed. As she stressed, Keir Starmer’s Labour government (like previous Tory governments):

do not have a plan for social care

The ongoing crisis, as a result, will continue to “put pressure on the NHS”. People who are “medically well” simply “don’t have anywhere to go” or “can’t afford the care that they need”. Therefore, they “end up bouncing back into hospital”.

Overall, Grunsell argued that renationalising the NHS, creating a national care service, investing in health education, and looking at developing a national pharmaceutical organisation would be key ways to get things running in the public interest:

I think it’s also about having a long-term plan and not just a constantly very short-sighted vision of what we can do.

To solve the health and care crises, we need to defeat the private health lobby

As a GP, Grunsell has seen the absurdity of the current system first hand. She said:

Most practises can’t afford to employ more GPs. And so there are new GPs coming through the system and [are] unemployed, or unemployed in general practice. They’re having to go and find non-medical jobs in ALDI and things like this, which is totally crazy. We’ve been training these people for years and then they can’t get jobs in general practice when we’re desperately in need of more doctors.

She added:

They’ve increased the number of training positions and encouraged people to go into general practice, because there’s a shortage. But they’ve not given practices the funding to be able to employ these people once they have qualified completely.

And she’s clear about why there’s not enough NHS funding. It’s because Starmer’s Labour has received four times as many private healthcare donations as every other party. So there’s:

huge lobbying pressure and huge pressure on the back of those fundings for people to… get some payback. And so Labour is serving the interests of the private sector in healthcare. And private insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are definitely going to be looking for some payback for any donations that they’re giving. They’re not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. It’s clear that they want something back for that.

To reduce waiting lists, she stressed,

the nice, easy, relatively risk-free operations are being done in private sector, independent hospitals, and the difficult, tricky, riskier procedures are having to be done in the NHS. The NHS has to bear the burden of the increased cost of that, providing things like intensive care, and crash teams, and all the other resources that are needed when those riskier procedures are done… and yet they don’t get paid more for doing those procedures.

In short, it’s an extension of the old elitist philosophy of ‘privatising the gains and nationalising the losses’.

With all this in mind, she shared her hopes for the new mass party on the left that is in the making. The level of crisis today is, she insisted:

why we’re calling for a new party on the left – a party of struggle that’s gonna fight as well as stand in elections, but actually campaign for what people want and what will improve people’s lives.

Featured image via the Canary