It seems that the citizens of Britain are having to work overtime to protect the country from the potentially anti-democratic actions of the government elected to represent us.
Last week came the latest example which on the face of it appeared to be attempts to further privatise the NHS without parliament’s say so.
The grand plan is to introduce so-called Accountable Care Organisations. Accountable is a bit of a misnomer, I think.
These ACOs would reportedly allow commercial, non-NHS bodies to run health and social services. They could be awarded huge contracts to manage and provide whole packages of care, allowing the ACOs to either provide the NHS service themselves or sub-contract it.
This means ACOs will have control over the allocation of NHS and taxpayers’ money but their accountability for spending it and their obligations to the public will be under commercial contracts, not government statutes.
Apparently the origin of these organisations lies in the Five Year Forward View plan for NHS England published by chief executive Simon Stevens and colleagues in 2014.
It said: “The traditional divide between primary care, community services and hospitals - largely unaltered since the birth of the NHS - is increasingly a barrier to the personalised and co-ordinated health services patients need.”
The fact that Hunt is behind it and thinks it represents the future of the NHS is enough for alarm bells to clank very loudly. The only thing co-ordinated in the NHS these days seem to be the calls for Hunt to go.
I’m with the campaigners who see ACOs as a form of backdoor privatisation. Some might go further and describe it as just privatisation.
Fortunately there are people out there fighting it. They include Professor Allyson Pollock, who works at Newcastle University, who is part of a campaign group which includes Prof Stephen Hawking.
They say the change is so fundamental to the way th NHS is supposed to run, it needs an act of parliament to implement it.
They have launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance their legal action which last week successfully won the right for a judicial review of the plan.
The health department harrumphed about the decision, denying suggestions the plan is to turn the NHS into a public/private enterprise based upon the US private health insurance-based system, describing it as ‘scaremongering’.
Well, fortunately the public will get to hear the arguments in public.
It all has echoes of the Gina Miller court case. Gina became the figurehead of the legal fight to get Parliament to vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU. And won of course.
It does seems extraordinary on two of the most complex and important issues of our time - the future of the NHS and Brexit - it has been up to members of the people to ensure the matters are properly debated in parliament despite the best efforts of the ruling government.
