Tuesday 27th July 2021
Phil Booth, Stan Brock, Silkie Carlo, Tamasin Cave, Frank Dobson and Danny Dorling
The British National Health Service is the nation's proudest achievements, lifting burden from the sick, copied across the world, But it has been under sustained attack over decades by successive governments. Realising that privatisation would be unpopular. The Thatcher Government instead started a program of out sourcing that was continued and expanded under the Blair New Labour Government and up to the present. It required careful planning and a series of legal and structural changes spanning thirty years to bring it to the brink of American corporate capture; or as one former policy adviser put it, reduced to 'a funding stream and a logo' A docile and complicit media have failed to hold power to account and inform the public about what is really happening to their NHS. Austerity and chaos over Brexit has provided perfect cover for the engineered failure of services, necessary to persuade the public to fall out of love with the NHS. NHS land, patient data and tax-funded budgets are all up for grabs. How did we get here? This film reveals "The Great NHS Heist." "Even if you only care about efficiency the National Health Service should be preserved like a jewel"