Re: NHS -v- TTIP
Memories are very short on here. In the 1980s Thatcher detached all GPs from the NHS and made them into private businesses, where patients had to re-register and become customers. Anyone who hadn't registered with the surgery they had been under since birth could no longer seek medical help there.
She shut down and sold off hundreds of hospitals and reduced the size of many others while giving cash and planning concessions to private companies to build new ones. Calculating the cost of every bed shut, she added that to the NHS annual budget as extra government money paid in from the public purse, rather than stolen from it.
She also banned prescriptions of the more expensive drugs and enforced GPs to substitute cheaper and less effective drugs, even when it was know they would very likely kill the patient.
It amazes me that so many people have forgotten the damage the Thatcher era cause and the many unneccessary deaths that resulted. Apart from her election campaign in the Falklands islands, of course, that won her the next election and destroyed many more lives and brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy when the Monetarist system adopted from the Bush cabal allowed the banks to implode and our credit disolve overnight.
I hold no brief for Blair but to give him credit, it was he who brought back GPs into the NHS and started to rebuild our hospitals. His greatest mistake was using PFI to do it but, unfortunately, the Tories had left him with nothing in the bank to pay for it.