NHS strikers demonstrate outside UCLH [David Woolfall]

“INSANITY is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” Albert Einstein is said to have said.

I wonder if shadow health secretary Wes Streeting agrees with the definition?

Successive governments have, since early New Labour unleashed the beast, tried NHS privatisation over and over again.

We were told how the system introduces competition that would improve the patient experience and bring an end to waste.

Is there a single person out there who feels that 20 years of NHS outsourcing has created an improved service?

Rather, what we got was fragmentation and the undermining of a safe service, along with many already-rich business people becoming far richer from the process.

Reducing funding and increasing private sector involvement has led to the worst crisis and worst performance in the NHS’s history, which has been pushed to the brink of collapse.

And yet Mr Streeting is intent on soldiering on.

I know this because he recently wrote an article in The Sun saying he would fight the “middle-class lefties” who oppose expanding the NHS’s use of private health providers.

Last week, after Jeremy Corbyn announced he was standing as an independent candidate in our sister paper the Islington Tribune, he spoke about the influence of big business on the Labour Party he was leaving.

Mr Streeting’s register of interests have been under scrutiny in recent years with campaign donations from wealthy people, including a hedge fund manager with a $500million stake in UnitedHealth.

That US healthcare giant is well known to Camden patients after it scooped various GP contracts, and then sold them on a few years later.

The NHS is no longer always free at the point you need it. Patients now have to pay to access dozens of procedures that have been removed from provision over the past 14 years. Many sections of it are hived off to private-sector companies, operators that are hard to scrutinise.

So what can people do about this?

Well, for starters you can come along to the “Restore the People’s NHS” campaign at the London Irish Centre in Camden Square on June 22.

The Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) conference is billed as a “vital opportunity for experienced NHS activists, newcomers and all those passionate about ending the NHS crisis and saving it for future generations”.

As the general election looms, NHS activists, health workers, and experts will be talking about the campaign for “a full restoration of the founding principles of the NHS”.

There will be workshops about how to go about influencing the decision-makers in the run-up to the election, including campaigning on the streets.

“The NHS needs a sea-change in policy from a new political leadership in government,” says the KONP campaign literature. “This requires a fundamental change in perspective, one that regards funding of public services as an investment in human wellbeing and an underpinning of a productive economy.

“Good public services maximise the ability of people to participate in society and a productive economy, they are not simply a cost to be grudgingly accepted.”

How to raise the money to get things back in order?

KONP is proposing a 2 per cent wealth tax, on assets worth more than £10m, could bring in the £20bn needed. This would bring the UK in line with spending by comparable economies, for example, in Germany or Holland. Health spending in the UK from 2010-2019 was £3,055 per person – almost 20 per cent lower than the EU average.

KONP’s People’s NHS calls for an end to private involvement in the health service; for improved pay and conditions for NHS workers; to scrap charges for dentistry and eye care; and to end the sickening system of forcing migrants have to pay to use the NHS.

KONP, set up in 2005 in response to New Labour privatisation policy, has organised marches and demonstrations. Anyone who has been to watch an NHS management board meeting, you can bet one of its members will be sitting in the corner, asking some tough and informed questions.

Its statement said: “The Conservative party has wrought unprecedented devastation on our NHS over the past 13 years.

“It was shocking to note the lacklustre NHS policy announcements at their 2023 conference. They buried the NHS knowing how their sorry record speaks for itself for most voters.

“Sadly, we are also disappointed by the solutions on offer from the Labour Party.

“Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting’s statements that the NHS doesn’t need more funding because it is wasteful and inefficient, and his position on increasing privatisation have been especially troubling.

“By doing so, Streeting mirrors arguments made by the Conservative government that the NHS is irreparably flawed. They are wrong.”

There will be a range of speakers at the June 22 event with information about tickets on the KONP website.