JEREMY Corbyn will up the ante in the Labour leadership race tomorrow by pledging to renationalise in full the NHS should he become prime minister.
In a campaign speech, the party leader will set out plans on how he would work towards removing all private sector involvement from the health service south of the border, securing a totally free-at-the-point-of-use NHS.
Mr Corbyn has already pledged to renationalise the railways and called for a debate on increasing nationalisation but has shied away from seeking to resurrect Labour’s original Clause Four, ditched by Tony Blair, that would bring industry back into public ownership.
One of his 10 campaign pledges is “secure our NHS and social care” but on Wednesday in a speech at the University College Hospital in London he will go further and commit Labour to:
*ending the privatisation of the NHS, “bringing public services back into public hands”;
*ending PFI contracts, which are “leaking money away from front line services and instead placing our NHS on a secure financial footing” and
*restoring bursaries for nurses “to secure the skills our NHS needs”.
The Labour leader will say: “The Tories have run our treasured National Health Service into the ground and we need to get serious about stopping them.
"The next Labour government would go further than reversing Tory cuts; it would deliver a modern health and social care service that is fully publicly provided and fully publicly funded.”
He will argue that PFI contracts continue to take money away from patient care while job and bursary cuts have crippled the NHS and disproportionately affect women who make up 77 per cent of NHS staff.
“It’s disgraceful that your life expectancy and standard of care can change so dramatically depending on your class, your job, your race and gender or the area you live in. Health, health financing and health inequality is a matter of paramount national importance.”
Mr Corbyn will add: “The Labour government I lead will ensure that money goes to patients not contractors and that our NHS is given the resources to provide a top quality service as part of a programme to rebuild and transform Britain so that no-one and no community is left behind.”
His campaign pointed out that the NHS Support Federation had noted how in February this year some 411 NHS clinical contracts, worth more than £16 billion, had been awarded through the market since April 2013.
Last week, Mr Corbyn’s rival for the Labour crown Owen Smith accused the Conservatives of having “secret” plans to privatise the NHS, noting how public spending on private healthcare providers had more than doubled since the Tories came to power in 2010.
His early campaign was dogged by claims that, during his work at the pharmaceuticals company Pfizer, he lobbied for more private-sector involvement in the NHS – a charge he has strongly denied.
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