Scottish Labour candidates snub key pledge against NHS privatisation

We Own It, an organisation that campaigns for public ownership, asked every Scottish candidate at the start of the election to commit to its Pledge for the NHS that asked them to fight for significantly improved funding and stand against privatisation.

But while nearly 40% of SNP candidates and nearly a fifth of Scottish Green candidates have signed up, not a single Scottish Labour hopeful has given such a commitment.

The pledge - signed by more than 460 candidates across the UK - specifically asked candidates to commit to fighting for NHS Scotland to receive an extra £3.9 billion a year to catch up with equivalent European countries and bringing services outsourced to for-profit companies back into the NHS as their contracts end.

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It has been backed by several celebrities including Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle and Stephen Fry.

Johnbosco Nwogbo, lead campaigner at We Own It, has said he is disappointed with the lack of engagement from the party who he feels are being “kept under total control” by their UK bosses.

He told The National: “It is quite disappointing. We are quite keen to engage with every party. Labour has been, in the past, fairly receptive. We will continue to put pressure on them to get them on the right side because we think it matters.

“It does appear that Labour candidates overall have been instructed not to take pledges, regardless of what they believe personally.

“One of the things we’d been hoping to do is to challenge candidates who have not taken the pledge at local hustings. We’ve heard recently they’ve been told not to attend hustings in some places.

“So there is a sense that Labour candidates overall are being kept under total control by the national body and I would imagine that applies to Scottish candidates.”

The pledge has also received no response from Welsh Labour candidates but 10 Plaid Cymru hopefuls have put their name to it. We Own It has said a few English Labour candidates have signed.

Amy Callaghan (below), the SNP’s most recent health spokesperson at Westminster, is one candidate to sign the pledge who said: "The SNP are the party of the NHS, we are the only party committed to keeping the NHS in public hands, whilst Labour remain firm privatisation is the way forward.

“They want to go further than new Labour and even further than the Tories in terms of privatisation."

Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, has repeatedly argued for using the private sector to cut the NHS backlog while the party removed the phrase “the NHS is not for sale” from its manifesto, replacing it with a looser commitment that the NHS will be “publicly owned and publicly funded”.

Nwogbo said he hopes the lack of commitment to the pledge by budding Labour MPs clears up any confusion over which parties will stand up for Scotland’s NHS.

“We know that the Labour Party has not said very much that people in Scotland, who are opposed to NHS privatisation, would find satisfying and I was quite keen to address suggestions that there was a bit of confusion as to whether the SNP would be fundamentally different on the NHS than Labour will be,” he added.

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“Amy Callaghan, who is the SNP’s health spokesperson in Westminster, has taken the pledge. She’s incredibly supportive of the things we are asking for.

“Martyn Day, who is a former health spokesperson for the SNP in Westminster, has also taken the pledge. So the top people in the SNP that will hopefully make up the SNP group in Westminster are backing this pledge, whereas you look at the people who would be speaking on behalf of Scottish Labour MPs in Westminster - they’re not going to have a Scottish Labour health spokesperson for the Scottish MPs.

“They are going to be led by the Labour frontbench which will be Wes Streeting who has been quite explicit in his desire to open the door to private sector involvement in the NHS, when we know what we should be doing is building up capacity in the NHS which means funding it properly.”

Scottish Labour health spokesperson, Jackie Baillie, said: “Under the SNP, we have a two-tier healthcare system and the very founding principles of our NHS are under threat.

“Labour founded our NHS and we will always protect it.

“The NHS is fully devolved and the responsibility of the SNP government who have been in charge for the last 17 years.

“A Labour government will start the process of rebuilding the NHS by delivering a much needed funding boost, but to protect our NHS in Scotland we also need an end to SNP waste and incompetence.”