Caring For Profit

Public services should never be run for private profit; not prisons, not armed forces, nor education or healthcare. Nevertheless capitalist vultures pay no mind to such humane advice and are working hand-in-hand with political elites to undermine the hard-won gains of the working class.

Taking his cue from New Labour, former Goldman Sachs merchant banker Ali Parsa is trailblazing the destruction (read: privatization) of the NHS. In these efforts Parsa is happy to rely upon uncritical puff pieces in the corporate media, like the Newsnight special feature which aired on BBC2 earlier this month.

For strictly public relations purposes, there is much talk of Parsa’s Circle Health being a partnership (much like John Lewis) with their web site boasting that it is “an employee co-owned partnership with a social mission to make healthcare simpler, better and smarter value for patients.” But this is just window dressing for Circle Health’s main purpose… attaining quick and ready profits from the public’s medical needs.

Circle Health may be run like a partnership, but in actual fact it is merely a subsidiary of the offshore firm Circle Holdings, of which 51% is owned by Parsa and his hedge fund buddies. Democracy it isn’t!

So far Circle Holdings run independent ‘healthcare’ facilities in Bath and Reading, clinics in Stratford-upon-Avon and Windsor, and as of November 2011 they became the first independent company to manage an NHS hospital, the Hinchingbrooke Healthcare NHS Trust in Huntingdon. On a more local note, Circle run the Nations Healthcare NHS Treatment Centre on the Queen’s Medical Centre campus, adjacent to the Nottingham University Hospital.

Current board members of Circle Holdings include Andrew Shilston (Finance Director of Rolls-Royce plc, and former board member of Enterprise Oil), Tim Bunting (a former vice-chair of Goldman Sachs International and governor of Wellington Academy), and board chairman Michael Kirkwood (a former Citigroup executive who is now chairman of Ondra Partners LLP).

It is perhaps noteworthy that Sir William Castell joins Circle Holdings’ chairman (Michael Kirkwood) as a partner of Ondra Partners. This is significant because Castell is the chairman of the pharmaceutical industry’s world famous Wellcome Trust (which is the world’s second largest charity after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), a recent board member of BP plc, and former president and CEO of medical technology firm GE Healthcare.

More odious still is that much of Circle Holdings is owned by major City of London investment firms like Lansdowne UK, Balderton, BlueCrest, Odey and BlackRock. Run by the infamous Larry Fink, the latter US-based asset management firm, Blackrock, had the dubious privilege of being the largest single sharehold of BP plc at the time of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April 2010. Of course this tragic ‘accident’ occurred because profits topped all other safety and maintenance concerns, and as Vanity Fair reported at the time of the incident:

“Fink’s influence is staggering. His firm, BlackRock, is far and away the largest money manager on the planet. With $3.3 trillion in assets under his direct management and another $9 trillion of clients’ money for which he provides various services, Fink watches funds equal to a little less than four times the current U.S. budget.”

With investors like Fink, Circle certainly need the best PR-people that their investor friends money can buy. In this regard, spin-connoisseurs with excellent connections to the government are a must, and so it is fitting that in 2010 Circle recruited Christina Lineen, a former aide to health secretary Andrew Lansley as their head of communications.

Lineen in turn replaced Nick Seddon who is the deputy director of the free market think tank, Reform – a group whose advisory board is chaired by Sir Christopher Gent, the chairman of GlaxoSmithKline plc. (Note: Reform cofounder, Patrick Barbour, is a current trustee of the Politics and Economics Research Trust, the charitable arm of the controversial Tax Payers’ Alliance.)

Circle also counts on the support provided by the private health lobby group NHS Partners Network of which it is a member. As unreported in the mainstream media, the head of the NHS Partners Network, David Worskett, noted in a leaked document written on May 20, 2011:

“[T]he whole sequence of Telegraph articles and editorials on the importance of the Government not going soft on public service reform, including some strong pieces on health, is something I have been orchestrating and working with Reform to bring about.”

As of June 2007 the NHS Partners Network became part of the NHS Confederation which is headed by Mike Farrar who serves on the advisory council of the King’s Fund, the old haunt of Liz Kendall (Labour MP for Leicester West); the King’s Fund serving as a dominant healthcare think tank pushing the privatisation agenda. Farrar likewise resides on the advisory panel of the Associate Parliamentary Health Group whose work is headed by fellow King’s Fund advisor Conservative Party life peer Baroness Cumberlege.

Joint co-chair of the Associate Parliamentary Health Group is Conservative MP for Boston and Skegness, Mark Simmonds, who it was recently determined was paid £50,000 a year (for 10 hours a month) as a strategic advisor to Circle Health. A fact that the former shadow minister for health was forced to apologise for in February when he noted that he had “inadvertently” failed to declare his interest in the private healthcare firm.

Here it is interesting to observe that NHS Confederation trustee Mike Parish is the chief executive of the tax-avoiding Care UK plc, whose role in privatising the NHS is very similar to that of Circle Health. In 2010, Care UK was purchased by the private equity company Bridgepoint Capital whose current advisors include former Labour MP for Darlington, Alan Milburn (who served as the Secretary of State for Health from 1999 to 2003), the recent chairman of Marks & Spencer, Sir Stuart Rose, and current BBC chairman, Lord Chris Patten.

Before its acquisition by Bridgepoint, Care UK’s board of directors was chaired by John Nash (1992-2010), a man who formerly served as the chair of the British Venture Capital Association. Nash knows exactly who to pay to grease the wheels of the care industry, and in November 2009 he gave £21,000 to fund Andrew Lansley’s personal office; Nash of course being a major shareholder in Care UK — a firm which at the time noted that 96 per cent of their business came from the NHS.

Appropriately, Nash like the aforementioned Circle board member (Tim Bunting who is a governor of Wellington Academy) is as committed to profiting from education as much as healthcare, as Nash is the chair of the board of governors of the Pimlico Academy (see Melissa’s Benn’s article “What kind of future is this?”).*

The super-rich clearly have no desire to support a government that redistributes taxes to benefit the majorities needs. Instead banksters like Ali Parsa, along with his cronies at Circle Holdings, are quite content to gorge themselves at our expense by driving down our living standards, while cynically professing to do just the opposite.

Evidently such capitalist vultures must be stopped in their tracks, and our health unions will play a crucial part in this fight back, whether their conservative leadership want to or not. Now is the time for staff and patients to unite to oppose the ongoing privatization of the NHS and the ongoing sickening attacks of the ruling class on our rich and plentiful society.

 

NOTES

* Another of the many big society programs supported by John Nash’s dubious philanthropic endeavors is the Social Mobility Foundation which apparently “exists to support high-achieving young people from low-income backgrounds into the top universities and professions.” Trustees of this project include the likes of Labour Salford MP Hazel Blears, and Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.