How Labour diverted billions from NHS services to appease Trump – The Latest
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What are the implications of the US-UK trade deal on NHS funding?
This is The Guardian.
The most rapacious president in American history now has his little hands on our NHS. So that may well mean that you get fewer doctors and nurses than you'd like, fewer ambulances than you'd like, fewer cancer scans than you'd like. It could lead to something like 220,000 avoidable deaths. It's basically a massacre made in Whitehall to buffer the shareholder returns of multinational pharmaceutical companies.
From The Guardian's Today In Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hough. Last December, we had the headline that there had been this deal signed between Donald Trump and Keir Starmer on medicine exported from the US that was going to come at some cost, although we knew very, very little information at that time. You, Aditya Chakraborty, Guardian columnist, were hot on this, warning then that there were likely to be some problems. We'll come on to what we now know, but what was alarming to you at that point?
You know, the thing that really struck me, Lucy, was Donald Trump doesn't give away trade deals for free, right? He wants his cut. And the health economists, I'm an economics guy, and the health economists I was talking to were pretty worried about it. Whether they were in think tanks or academia, they were worried. And there was all kinds of suggestions about what it might cost for the NHS. Donald Trump had already said that America was paying too much for its pharmaceuticals and he wanted essentially America to be paying less than other countries. So there was quite a lot of signs that things were wrong. But when I listened to what government ministers were saying, whether it was Patrick Vallance, who speaks on science, or Wes Streeting, the health secretary, it was more as if it's been a tremendous triumph.
And I was really struck by the difference between the two because economists don't tend to make numbers up out of air. And politicians generally tend to have some kind of relationship with reality. And yet here we were. with this weird situation in which West Reading was going around saying he didn't recognise any of the figures that the various think tanks had put forward.
And so what kind of figures were they? Because they're in the multi-billions, right?
Yeah. Let's start with the government position. West Reading went on Radio 4, actually, just after the deal was signed. And as the health secretary said, yes, it will end up costing the NHS more money. It will cost a billion pounds between now and 2028. He said two other things. He said beforehand the NHS is not on the table in any trade deal. Well, clearly he's just accepted that now it is. The other thing he said was this money is not coming out of NHS budgets. He was emphatic on that point. So he said, I know other people are talking about it being worth three billion pounds or whatever. I don't recognise those figures. I don't understand where they got them from. He was very forceful on that one point.
Now, Lucy, just to bring the story a bit up to date, two things happened. The deal came into force in April this year. At that time, we still had very little in the way of detail. After the deal came into force, the government published some of the headline facts and figures around it. And they in themselves are pretty worrying. Bear in mind, the government pushed this deal through without presenting it to Parliament. There was no debate between MPs.
How does the Labour government justify the trade deal with Donald Trump?
There were no awkward backbenchers. There were no caveats from the House of Lords. None of that. No readings. It just went straight into law through what they call a statutory instrument. They rubber stamped it basically into law. And we only had our first debate on it in Parliament this week.
Which is unbelievable. And so let's talk about some of the concerns from MPs who've now had the opportunity to scrutinise the details of this, but also medical experts, because they are enormous about effectively how this goes against those three promises from the former health secretary.
This is very, very sensitive stuff because it's about the NHS, which is one of this country's greatest achievements.
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