UK
Editorial:The Mone scandal underlines the importance of NHS workers' battle over pay, investment – and public ownership
Baroness Michelle Mone in the House of Lords in June 2017
LABOUR will feel they have PM Rishi Sunak on the ropes over his delayed-reaction decision to withdraw the Tory whip from Baroness Mone.
The Conservatives may have hoped they had moved on from Covid after ousting Boris Johnson — but the wounds still fester and even had Sunak acted faster he could not stop this scandal running.
Baroness Mone denounces a “witch hunt” against her, denying she benefited to the tune of millions from contracts awarded to a company she recommended (PPE Medpro). Her decision to take a “leave of absence” from the House of Lords is supposedly to clear her name.
Sunak’s problem is that the Mone case is neither isolated nor surprising.
It comes after former health secretary Matt Hancock’s self-serving serialisation of his unconvincing pandemic memoirs has returned attention to the government’s awful conduct during the crisis.
The disgraced minister prompted outrage by seeking to evade blame for spreading Covid through care homes, though this was a direct consequence of his decision to release NHS patients into care without testing them for the virus.
But the Mone case will remind people of other gripes about Hancock — the dodgy allocation of health contracts, including one awarded to his pub landlord and another to a firm run by his sister in which he had a 20 per cent stake.
It highlights the huge sums of public money squandered on “PPE that was either unusable, overpriced or undelivered,” in Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner’s words — with reports emerging in 2020 that PPE Medpro supplied over £120 million of materials that were never used.
The fact that Hancock, like Mone, no longer holds the Tory whip hardly matters.
The entire approach to PPE procurement stank of sleaze: government pleas now that they were forced to cut corners to obtain protective equipment in a hurry only shunts the problem back to the cause of the shortages.
That was the decision to allow stocks to run low or expire despite the findings of its own Exercise Cygnus drill that PPE shortages would be among the biggest problems when a pandemic hit.
A decision linked to austerity spending cuts that left the NHS ill-equipped to handle an epidemic, and one taken on the watch of another former health secretary — the current Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who is now seeking to impose another round of crippling cuts.
This is not a good story for the Tories. It underlines the betrayal of front-line healthcare workers by ministers who provided inadequate protective gear and diverted huge sums of public money to enrich their friends in the process.
It does so just as many nurses and ambulance workers are readying to strike over a significant real-terms pay cut imposed by many of the same ministers who clapped them as heroes back then — not least Sunak himself.
This will reinforce health workers’ determination to secure pay justice and increase already high public sympathy with their action.
But we should also insist that the deeper lessons are addressed.
The orgy of profiteering and waste that accompanied health contracts was an inevitable consequence of the privatisation of NHS Supply Chain.
Yet Labour is not pointing to the role of privatisation and outsourcing in undermining the NHS, and Keir Starmer even claims that private provision has improved public services.
The fragile state of the NHS when Covid struck was down to years of underfunding in the name of austerity — yet Labour is accepting Tory calculations that more rounds of cuts are needed and refuses to back health workers’ pay demands.
A few theatrical denunciations of Tory sleaze won’t cut it. The whole left needs to unite around a better deal for our health service — proper pay, proper investment and an end to private-sector infestation.
These demands will be made at solidarity and strike rallies. But every Labour politician should be forced to address them too.
Baroness Michelle Mone in the House of Lords in June 2017
LABOUR will feel they have PM Rishi Sunak on the ropes over his delayed-reaction decision to withdraw the Tory whip from Baroness Mone.
The Conservatives may have hoped they had moved on from Covid after ousting Boris Johnson — but the wounds still fester and even had Sunak acted faster he could not stop this scandal running.
Baroness Mone denounces a “witch hunt” against her, denying she benefited to the tune of millions from contracts awarded to a company she recommended (PPE Medpro). Her decision to take a “leave of absence” from the House of Lords is supposedly to clear her name.
Sunak’s problem is that the Mone case is neither isolated nor surprising.
It comes after former health secretary Matt Hancock’s self-serving serialisation of his unconvincing pandemic memoirs has returned attention to the government’s awful conduct during the crisis.
The disgraced minister prompted outrage by seeking to evade blame for spreading Covid through care homes, though this was a direct consequence of his decision to release NHS patients into care without testing them for the virus.
But the Mone case will remind people of other gripes about Hancock — the dodgy allocation of health contracts, including one awarded to his pub landlord and another to a firm run by his sister in which he had a 20 per cent stake.
It highlights the huge sums of public money squandered on “PPE that was either unusable, overpriced or undelivered,” in Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner’s words — with reports emerging in 2020 that PPE Medpro supplied over £120 million of materials that were never used.
The fact that Hancock, like Mone, no longer holds the Tory whip hardly matters.
The entire approach to PPE procurement stank of sleaze: government pleas now that they were forced to cut corners to obtain protective equipment in a hurry only shunts the problem back to the cause of the shortages.
That was the decision to allow stocks to run low or expire despite the findings of its own Exercise Cygnus drill that PPE shortages would be among the biggest problems when a pandemic hit.
A decision linked to austerity spending cuts that left the NHS ill-equipped to handle an epidemic, and one taken on the watch of another former health secretary — the current Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who is now seeking to impose another round of crippling cuts.
This is not a good story for the Tories. It underlines the betrayal of front-line healthcare workers by ministers who provided inadequate protective gear and diverted huge sums of public money to enrich their friends in the process.
It does so just as many nurses and ambulance workers are readying to strike over a significant real-terms pay cut imposed by many of the same ministers who clapped them as heroes back then — not least Sunak himself.
This will reinforce health workers’ determination to secure pay justice and increase already high public sympathy with their action.
But we should also insist that the deeper lessons are addressed.
The orgy of profiteering and waste that accompanied health contracts was an inevitable consequence of the privatisation of NHS Supply Chain.
Yet Labour is not pointing to the role of privatisation and outsourcing in undermining the NHS, and Keir Starmer even claims that private provision has improved public services.
The fragile state of the NHS when Covid struck was down to years of underfunding in the name of austerity — yet Labour is accepting Tory calculations that more rounds of cuts are needed and refuses to back health workers’ pay demands.
A few theatrical denunciations of Tory sleaze won’t cut it. The whole left needs to unite around a better deal for our health service — proper pay, proper investment and an end to private-sector infestation.
These demands will be made at solidarity and strike rallies. But every Labour politician should be forced to address them too.
MORNINGSTAR
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