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RMTnews :: may 2005 26 I nearly fell out of bed recently when I woke up with John Reid. My clock radio alarm goes off, and on comes Today on Radio Four for a while before its time to get up and get the kids out to school. ‘What the National Health Service needs most’ said Labour’s Health Minister, ‘is greater entrepreneurial spirit.’ At first I wasn’t sure if I had heard him right as I had just woken up. But like all government spokesmen programmed to return to his ‘on message’ mantra it was just a few seconds before I heard him say it again. He was chastising GPs and dentists for their lack of ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ in the way they run their small businesses. Now, to me, the NHS is based completely upon a simple formula – ‘If you are ill, you get treatment.’ As soon as anyone starts to talk about ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ I begin to hear the ‘ting-ting’ of cash tills and the compromising of an ideal. The formula is suddenly amended to ‘If you are ill and can afford £6.50 for a prescription; to see a private dentist; to consult a health entrepreneur- you can get treatment’. I know the terms of this debate inside out. For 50 years the same entrepreneurs have been trying to rip off our NHS. They occasionally succeed. Just take a look at the profits of the pharmaceutical companies over the decades for examples. Yet here was John Reid with proof plain that the same ‘entrepreneurs’ and businessmen we had been striving to keep at bay for half a century were now past the NHS security gates and sitting in the head office. To me this episode also began to answer an apparent new Labour conundrum on the NHS. Labour repeats again and again that ‘spending on the NHS is at record levels’ and that ‘we [new Labour] have embarked upon the most ambitious hospital building programme the NHS has ever seen’. If this is the case, then why are worries about the state of the NHS not at the top of their list of concerns right now? Could it be that their experiences are at odds with Labour claims? After all finding an NHS dentist, for example is proving more difficult that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Or could it be that people are furious that all these new hospitals are owned, not by the NHS, but by ‘entrepreneurs’ who rake in a fortune over the lifetime of the contracts? Edinburgh’s new flagship hospital, the Royal Infirmary, is a case in point. Owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, it was built for less than £300 million, yet will cost the NHS nearly £700 million over its 25 year life. If Labour is spending record sums on the NHS it is shameful that so much of it is wasted on profits for those with ‘entrepreneurial spirit.’ “ENTREPRENEURS” AND THE NHS A health service nightmare from SSP leader Colin Fox