On 27th June 2012, the Press Association wrote:

‘South London Healthcare NHS Trust will be the first in the country to be put under the control of a special administrator tasked with putting it on a viable footing. A further 20 trusts are facing serious financial difficulties which could ultimately see them in the same situation….Mr Lansley sent a letter as the first step in the legal process towards installing a special administrator using the powers. The administrator will take over the board and recommend measures to the Health Secretary to put the trust’s finances on a sustainable basis.’

Here in Slogger’s Roost, none of this came as a surprise: Mr Lansley may wish to suggest that he was surprised, but that’s the last thing he is.

On September 10th 2011, The Slog wrote:

‘The NHS proposals offered by Andrew Lansley were a dog’s dinner in terms of the service’s real needs because Andrew Lansley had been heavily lobbied by pharmcos, GP associations, and private medical insurance companies.’

On May 19th 2012, The Slog wrote:

‘Since May 2010, the 23 private companies working with the NHS have made £1.4 billion in profit. Next year they will make even more, because the monies that should’ve gone into hospital updates and hardware budgets have been diverted towards primary care practitioners preparing to work with and/or hand over to big suppliers in the private sector. It’s perfectly obvious that, starved of funds, within the next eighteen months many local hospital Trusts will either go bust, or require increased private sector services which in turn point to the need for some form of private sector merger, takeover or joint venture.’

On June 16th 2012, The Slog wrote :

‘Two years into his mealy-mouthed plan to simply suck all the NHS’s hospital money out and then sell that infrastructure off, Andrew Lansley is on the verge of letting every Hank, Richard and Henri bid to take over larger group-practice primary care. Give it another year, and almost every Foundation Trust hospital-service provider will be in financial trouble…at which point the private sector will get what it wants – the massive taxpayer investment in hitech equipment and buildings – in a fire sale.’

So if The Slog saw through the plan, it seems almost surreally unlikely that Lansley didn’t see his scam coming to fruition.

There is in fact a wider issue to be debated here…one that’s primarily about the viability or otherwise of Friedmanite bollocks in a world whose growth is going backwards.

On May 2nd 2012, The Slog wrote:

‘How on earth does the Establishment think those on lower incomes are going to survive? Who does it think, among the better-off Silvers, is going to do the consuming? And WTF is Andrew Lansley on if he thinks that the result of Health privatisation is going to be anything other than a return to the 1920s?

The people at The Top are protected from this crap, but most people aren’t. This has nothing to do with Leftwingism, and everything to do with the current economic model not providing (a) enough employment and (b) the wealth required to run a reformed public health service. Attacking sick, old and debt-free consumers with pro-bank policies, frozen pensions, and increased taxes is just another form of Troikaism – viz, an excuse for ignoring the fact that the model is broken.’

Twas ever thus. But there is no reason why we have to put up with it now. We get the governance we deserve. If we plonk down onto the sofa and watch sanitised MSM news without doing anything, then we have only ourselves to blame.