We need to talk about Wes Streeting
While nurses queue at food banks and patients die in corridors, Wes Streeting, the slick, grinning face of Blairite revivalism, is busy auctioning off the NHS to the highest bidder. All while posing as a progressive reformer.
His actions so far do not demonstrate a curator and champion of the legacy of Bevin, rather a heavily funded facilitator of back-door privatisation, and in the case of the Procurement Act and the waiting lists, not so back door.
Don’t be fooled: this man is not saving the NHS. He’s paving a glitter-strewn runway for its final dismemberment.
WHO IS WES STREETING REALLY?
Streeting likes to paint himself as a 'local boy done good' story: born and raised on a council estate, won a place at Cambridge, now the people’s champion in Westminster. But scratch the surface, and you’ll find a career defined less by conviction and more by corporate compromise. His political origin story begins in student politics, where he was president of the National Union of Students, a role that quickly became a springboard into centrist think tanks and New Labour networks. It wasn’t long before he found himself cosying up to Blairite grandees and lobbying groups that see the NHS as a lucrative investment opportunity.
Streeting's career trajectory mirrors that of other political climbers whose ambition far outweighs principle. He cut his teeth at Stonewall and then worked for the Blairite policy unit Progress, before entering Parliament in 2015 as MP for Ilford North. From day one, he’s styled himself as the heir to Blair – a 'moderniser,' a 'reformer,' a PR-savvy politician with one eye permanently on the camera lens and the other on his next donor. In Parliament, Streeting was quick to distance himself from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, becoming a loud critic of the left while quietly courting the City. He positioned himself as a safe pair of hands for Labour’s right flank, a future leader who would never rock the corporate boat. His rise within the party has been greased by powerful Blairite factions and an army of think tank spinners who long for the return of market-friendly Labour. His loyalty to private interests over public ones has never wavered, and he’s become the darling of private health donors precisely because they know he won’t stand in their way. And make no mistake, Streeting’s ideology is pure Third Way revivalism. He believes in 'choice' and 'competition' as drivers of efficiency, a delusion that Thatcher sold in the 1980s and Blair repackaged for the 2000s. What he calls reform is little more than managed decline, setting the stage for wholesale sell-off.
THE TIES THAT BIND: 55 TUFTON STREET
Streeting’s ideological proximity to 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster home of libertarian and neoliberal think tanks like the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Institute of Economic Affairs, should set alarm bells ringing. While he may not be a registered tenant of the Tufton Street cabal, his policies read like a wishlist of their agenda: deregulate, privatise, shrink the state, and turn public health into private wealth. The influence of Tufton Street on British politics has been widely documented. These are the same organisations that championed austerity, lobbied for Brexit deregulation, and cheered as public services were flogged off to offshore vultures. Streeting’s rhetoric on “efficiency,” “choice,” and outsourcing echoes their playbook line for line. And it’s no coincidence that many of the same donors propping up Tufton-aligned causes are also filling Streeting’s coffers. When a politician’s policies align so neatly with the think tanks that have long sought to dismantle the NHS, we’d be naive to chalk it up to coincidence.
PRIVATISATION DRESSED AS MODERNISATION
Streeting loves to dress his agenda in buzzwords like "modernisation," "efficiency," and "choice." But behind the marketing gloss lies the brutal reality: this is the same tired Thatcherite poison, just in a new bottle. He’s been pushing so-called "patient passports", digital medical records designed to be accessed by both NHS and private providers. That sounds helpful, until you realise it opens the door for tech companies and Big Pharma to hoover up your health data under the guise of innovation (The Guardian). And what’s his big idea to fix waiting lists? Not properly funding the NHS, not reversing staff burnout and attrition, no, it’s "making full use" of private hospitals. That’s right: your tax money flows to for-profit clinics, while NHS trusts crumble (Financial Times).
THE PROCUREMENT ACT: PRIVATISATION WRITTEN INTO LAW
But perhaps the most insidious tool in Streeting’s arsenal is his uncritical embrace of the new Procurement Act. This legislation, supposedly designed to streamline public sector contracting, does nothing short of opening the NHS up to a feeding frenzy of private profiteers. Under the Act, NHS procurement decisions are no longer bound by the 'best value' or 'public good' standards that used to prioritise publicly run services. Instead, it’s a Wild West of contracting, where slick PowerPoint presentations and corporate 'partnerships' win the day. It strips away protections that once kept the vultures at bay.
Crucially, the Act removes the requirement to tender publicly-funded contracts exclusively within NHS bodies. This means private companies, including those with offshore accounts, can compete equally, or even be prioritised, for services that should be part of a publicly funded health system. The same sharks that gutted probation, test and trace, and social care are now being handed the keys to core NHS services. The end result? Fragmentation, rising costs, collapsing accountability and private firms draining public money while dodging scrutiny.
CREATING THE BRAIN DRAIN: STREETING’S SELF-FULFILLING COLLAPSE
Streeting bangs the drum of "investment" in the NHS, but the reality is far darker. While claiming to modernise and rebuild, his policies are creating the conditions for a massive brain drain of medical professionals. Burned out by unmanageable workloads, pitiful pay, and the slow suffocation of public service ideals, thousands of NHS nurses, doctors, and allied professionals are fleeing abroad to countries where they’re valued and supported. Australia and Canada are actively recruiting NHS-trained staff, staff that we, the taxpayers, funded to train. That’s a net loss to the UK, but Streeting doesn’t seem to care. By underfunding the NHS and relying increasingly on private outsourcing and temp contracts, he is creating a working environment so toxic that it drives its best people away. That isn’t reform. That’s sabotage. And let’s be blunt: a broken NHS makes it easier to sell the lie that public healthcare “doesn’t work.” It’s the classic disaster capitalist playbook, run it down, break it, and flog it off under the guise of rescue. Streeting isn’t investing in the NHS, he’s discrediting it, hollowing it out so he can hand it over to his donors’ friends.
BOUGHT AND PAID FOR – BY PRIVATE HEALTHCARE
You’d think a Labour shadow health secretary would take a stand against privatisation. But Wes Streeting isn’t just passive , he’s personally up to his slicked-back scalp in donations from those who stand to profit off our NHS.
The Dirty Money Trail
- Peter Hearn – recruitment executive, donated £144,900 via companies MPM Connect and OPD Group, plus £40,000 personally. (Good Law Project)
- John Armitage – hedge fund tycoon with major stakes in United Health, contributed £95,000. (Good Law Project)
- Others – Sir Trevor Chinn (also the bagman for the Israeli Government), Kevin Craig, and Lord Mendelsohn collectively added £71,500. (Public Square)
That’s over £311,000 from individuals and firms who profit from NHS outsourcing and collapse.
INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE: BIG PHARMA’S FINGERPRINTS
Direct evidence of US.pressure on Streeting is scarce, but this is by design. Big Pharma’s influence is unmistakable. The patient passport scheme is a data goldmine for pharmaceutical and tech firms such as Palantir, hungry for scalable medical datasets. Meanwhile, American pharma lobbies are pushing across Europe for market dominance under the guise of "health sovereignty" (The Times).
STREETING’S REAL LEGACY: NHS IN NAME ONLY
Let’s not sugarcoat this: if Streeting gets his way, the NHS will become a branding exercise. You’ll still see the blue logo, but behind it will be Serco, McKinsey, UnitedHealth, and Babylon. Your GP? An app. Your hospital? A 'centre of excellence' in Dubai. Your health records? Monetised. This isn’t health reform. It’s a hostile takeover. And Wes Streeting is the lobbyist-in-chief. And of course what does it finally do - it hands a rump NHS to Reform Ltd when they win the next election on a silver platter to introduce US style health insurance, where half a million die every year because they can't afford healthcare. Slow-hand clap.
THE RESISTANCE
Not everyone’s fooled. The Socialist Health Association, EveryDoctor, and grassroots campaigners are pushing back. Real Labour members, not the Tory-Lite corporate lobbyists, are demanding a return to public provision and democratic control. Streeting is not the future of the NHS. He is its executioner, the smiling assassin as he backhands the private healthcare donations and signs the contracts.
FINAL WORD:
Irvine Welsh, the author puts is quite succintly, the Far Right is only growing popular because the centre has been radicalsed by neoliberalism which offers nothing to the citizen. And he is bang on the nail. Wes Streeting is the absolute epitome personified of this type of politics: politics that is careerist rather than a service to the electorate. I'm absolutely sure his choice to join the Labour Party was done on the flip of a coin because he is absolutely a fag-paper level of indistinguishable from the Oxbridge educated PPE degreed MP's that sit on the benches opposite. This complete contempt for the electorate and journeyman approach from the sold called centrists is handing the the keys to 10 Downing Street and the countryto the far-right and we will see this next week, just as Starmer with his second referendum BS handed the country to the Brexit Party, a party with NO POLICIES in the Euro elections in 2019. These people are odious, vacuuous, and only in it for themselves.
If you care about the NHS – really care – then treat Wes Streeting like the danger he is. This man isn’t fit to run a pop-up flu clinic, let alone the entire health service. He is a Blairite Trojan horse for corporate pillage, and every second he remains in post is a second closer to the end of a publicly owned, publicly run NHS. Strip away the branding, and what you’ve got is a snake in a suit. And the NHS deserves better than this. I hope the elections next week will be a wake up call for Wes Streeting and the Labour Party, but seeing as they've had their pockets filled by vested interests I sincerely doubt it.
