Starving the nation for profit – debt slavery – Fear and Loathing in Great Britain

05_june_2016

A letter a day to number 10. No 1,455

Sunday 05 June 2016.

Dear Mr Cameron,

Grossly unfit for purpose PFI deals firmly established the principle of profits before people and health.

Debt financing under PFI is a scam of eye watering proportions, leaving the public holding the baby for repayments in excess of 500%. In some cases we, the public, will be left with nothing to show for this heist of public wealth where PFI agreements are lease only.

As of April 2015, on supposed assets of £56.5 billion, the total bill to the public was in excess of £310 billion and rising. It would have been cheaper if I’d got a credit card and put a hospital on that, which I would end up owning with the added bonus that the public would have paid every last penny for me.

It is fantastically diabolical that anyone would think that a massive transfer of the nations wealth into private hands was a better idea than keeping people healthy and alive. Whoever dreamed this up in John Major’s government should be on the most wanted list of public enemies, along with Tony Blair whose government fully embraced PFI and took us into an illegal war to boot.

Of course, for successive chancellors of the exchequer, these Wonga like never-never deals could be spun as investment in public infrastructure, disguising the fact that eventually they would devour public finances and form a huge part of the crisis facing our NHS right now.

The latest news that Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust is to shed 250 full-time jobs and 200 temporary jobs from this autumn in order to meet PFI payments shows how utterly bass ackwards everything is. We are forced to serve the interests of finance at the cost of our health and well being. Money has ceased to be any kind of public good as we slavishly feed the self serving greed of the markets.

This is Britain’s hidden debt where every ‘man, woman and child in Britain is more than £3,400 in debt’ to private finance. This on top of the debt being heaped on people by your government, students and nurses being saddled with funding their education regardless of all the benefits education brings to the nation and the economy over the long term. We are being mugged by private finance to fill offshore accounts with our ever decreasing hard earned cash, whilst in excess of 1 in 5 parents struggle to feed themselves and their children. Cases of malnutrition are soaring with 2,000 cases recorded by 43 NHS hospital trusts in a single year. People and public services starve for profit and successive governments have not only allowed this, they have pursued it as policy, at which your government brutally excels.

http://www.independent.co.uk/money/loans-credit/crippling-pfi-deals-leave-britain-222bn-in-debt-10170214.html