Our MPs must vote to protect the NHS in Trade Bill - YEP letters

The Trade Bill will be voted on in the House of Commons on Tuesday January 19 or Wednesday 20 , but it is shocking that it does not include specific protection for the NHS.

Although Boris Johnson has said that the ‘NHS will not be on the table’ in future trade negotiations and my own MP, Mr. Alec Shelbrooke, is confident that the NHS will be excluded from the Trade Bill, the House of Lords voted for both scrutiny and protection amendments to the Trade Bill.

Without these amendments, future trade deals will intensify privatisation of the NHS through imposing a market model, where service users pay for health care and those who cannot afford to do so will find their access to health care limited.

Currently, the NHS competes internally with private health care and US owned health firms currently operate in the UK. In England, the privatised ‘track and trace’ system has probably contributed to the UK having one of the highest numbers of corona virus deaths in the world.

Having laid the basis for privatisation, it would be easy to ‘forget’ to exclude the NHS from the Trade Bill.

A survey conducted by Survation in July of last year found that 75 per cent of respondents want Parliament to amend the Trade Bill and almost half of those polled said that they did not trust Boris Johnson’s assurances that the NHS will not be included in negotiations,

Its time that our views are represented, so on Tuesday or Wednesday, I urge MPs to vote to protect the NHS.