Keir Starmer has pronounced Public Healthcare DOA for his Labour Government in waiting.

Most of us weren't alive when the NHS was born in July 1948. However, when it dies, at the hands of neoliberalism, we will be at its bedside.

Assisted suicide for public healthcare in Britain and Canada has already begun. Governments have starved it of funding which has created inhumane wait times for consults with specialists. Treatment and surgeries for life threatening illnesses are delayed and screening for diseases haphazard. So desperate people complain less when privatisation is offered as a remedy to ease the healthcare burden. Capitalism is famous for creating a crisis to profit it from it later.

Healthcare employees are demoralised by being underpaid- as well as overworked.

Cleaners, porters, nurses and doctors all have legitimate grievances that their quality of life is being ignored by governments who rather than investing in keeping citizens healthy shift billions towards subsidising capitalism's giant corporations.

Instead of paying fair wages to healthcare workers, the government prioritised feeding the military-industrial complex by funding NATO's wars. No political party with a chance of forming a government has committed to anything substantial to saving public healthcare. Ideologically expecting a dramatic change between the politics of Keir Starmer's Labour and the Conservatives is like expecting to radically alter the taste of a rum and cola cocktail by switching from Coke to Pepsi.

It will be a Labour government- that smothers the last vestiges of socialised medicine within the NHS when it forms government following the July 5th General Election.

Keir Starmer and his Shadow Secretary of Health Wes Streeting have never been coy about their affection for private sector intervention to maintain and improve state infrastructure, including- the NHS.

So, no one should be surprised when hedge fund CEOs are brought into discussions on how best to deliver healthcare to the people by 2025.

In the months following Labour's assured election victory, citizens will be softened to the NHS's demise through a barrage of propaganda, enabled by the news media. It will tell them not to worry because the problem isn't capitalism shortening their lives but migrants and the idle.

A decade ago, I actually thought the NHS could be preserved. But I got that optimism from my father.

After all, in 2014, at the Labour Party conference, he gave, perhaps, the best speech by a non-politician- about why public healthcare is the bedrock for a functioning democracy and society.

In 2024, my dad's speech about the need to save the NHS from the cloying hands of capitalism would never be allowed at a Labour Party Conference because it espoused socialism. It was a speech that championed a working class that saw itself as part of a struggle to make society a better place for every resident.

It was a speech that repudiated neoliberalism as an evil that only benefited those who had the most wealth.  It was a speech that championed more taxation for Britain's entitled class. And it was a speech that didn't patronise today's younger generation but acknowledged they had been short-changed by neo-liberalism.

Harry Leslie Smith, the man who in 2014 was lionised by Britain’s political news media as giving Labour its voice back- was erased from its political memory- as is anyone who believes society is more than just its top income earners.

Were he alive- my dad would have told Starmer and the current Labour Party to get stuffed. My father would have stood with those who were driven from the party because their politics were for the many rather than the few.

Keir Starmer is no political genius or deep thinker. He was a cometh the hour, cometh the man- during a moment when journalism stopped fact checking politicians ,if they represented the interests of the entitled.

Starmer’s arrival onto the political scene feels so much like the fortunes of an ambitious, malleable soviet apparatchik during the dying days of the Russian Empire. Putin was elevated to great power, for one purpose- to do the bidding of oligarchs who lived in the shadows because he was a loyal servant to power.

Today, the Labour Party isn't controlled by anyone who comes from the ordinary classes. It’s managers and bosses, who call the shots. They have better homes, vacations, generous healthcare benefits and retirement plans that are golden. I guess we should take it as a compliment that they didn’t sell us out for cheap because they live very well indeed.

There are a few who represent our interests in parliament. But they are too few to change the momentum that has us at or just past the threshold to dystopia. Despair is a penny a plate because of this abandonment by the political class. But I am not buying any of it. As long as we are prepared for the years ahead of resistance, repression and defeats, we can win this eventually. In the mean time- as saying goes, “Gather ye rosebuds…”

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John