How Labour diverted billions from NHS services to appease Trump – The Latest

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:12The most rapacious president in American history now has his little hands on our NHS. So that may well mean that you get fewer doctors and nurses than you'd like, fewer ambulances than you'd like, fewer cancer scans than you'd like. It could lead to something like 220 ,000 avoidable deaths. It's basically a massacre made in Whitehall to buffer the shareholder returns of multinational pharmaceutical companies. From the Guardians today on Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hough. Last December, we had the headline that there had been this deal signed between Donald Trump and Keir Starmer on medicine exported from the US that was going to come at some cost, although we knew very, very little information at that time.

0:58You, Aditya Shakurvati Guardian columnist, were hot on this, warning then that there were likely to be some problems. We'll come on to what we now know, but what was alarming to you at that point? You know, the thing that really struck me, Lucy, was Donald Trump doesn't give away trade deals for free, right? He wants his cut. And the health economists, I'm an economics guy, and the health economists I was talking to were pretty worried about it. Whether they were in think tanks or academia, they were worried. and there was all kinds of suggestions about what it might cost for the nhs right donald trump had already said that america was paying too much for its pharmaceuticals and he wanted essentially america to be paying less than other countries okay so there was quite a lot of signs that things were wrong but when i listened to what government ministers were saying whether it was patrick valance yeah who speaks in science or west streeting the health secretary it was more as It's been a tremendous triumph.

1:58Yeah. And I was really struck by the difference between the two because economists don't tend to make numbers up out of air. And politicians generally tend to have some kind of relationship with reality. And yet here we were with this weird situation in which West Streeting was going around saying he didn't recognise any of the figures that the various think tanks had put forward. And so what kind of figures were they? Because they're in the multi-billions, right? Yeah. Let's start with a government position. West Street went on Radio 4, actually, just after the deal was signed. And as a health secretary said, yes, it will end up costing an NHS more money.

2:32It will cost a billion pounds between now and 2028. He said two other things. He said beforehand, the NHS is not on the table in any trade deal. Well, clearly he's just accepted that now it is. The other thing he said was this money is not coming out of NHS budgets. He was emphatic on that point. So he said, I know other people are talking about it being worth three billion pounds or whatever. I don't recognise those figures. I don't understand where they got them from. He was very forceful on that one point. Now, Lucy, just to bring the story a bit up to date, two things happened. Yeah. The deal came into force in April this year.

3:11At that time, we still had very little in the way of detail. After the deal came into force, the government published some of the headline facts and figures around it. and they in themselves are pretty worrying. Bear in mind the government pushed this deal through without presenting it to Parliament. There was no debate between MPs. There were no awkward backbenchers. There were no caveats from the House of Lords. None of that, no readings. It just went straight into law through what they call a statutory instrument. They rubber-stamped it basically into law and we only had our first debate on it in Parliament this week.

3:46Which is unbelievable. And so let's talk about some of the concerns from MPs who've now had the opportunity to scrutinise the details of this, but also medical experts, because they are enormous about effectively how this goes against those three promises from the former health secretary. This is very, very sensitive stuff because it's about the NHS, which is one of this country's greatest achievements brought into effect by a Labour government. And we're now in the Labour government again, obviously. And this is also about the kind of health care that you and I and our families and our communities get.

4:21Right. So this is about this directly affects the medicines and the health care that you get. Yeah. So what's been said about it? I'm going to concentrate to begin with on what the experts have been saying about it. Yeah, and it's all a bit technical. I'll try and keep the jargon out. What the experts say is two things. One, West Streeting's figures are wrong. In fact, they're wrong to the point where you actually have to ask yourself whether the government's been misleading on some of this stuff. They say that the billion pound figure that he talked about between now and 2028 is completely wrong.

4:55In fact, it's more likely to be almost triple that. Close to the three billion that he said he didn't recognise. And then over 10 years, it's worth something close to£45 billion. £45 billion. And, Lucy, the money for this, certainly upfront, is all coming from within the NHS budget. So to pay Donald Trump for the trade deal that he forces to sign, we are going to effectively be losing. We have to lose services elsewhere in the NHS. So that may well mean that you get fewer doctors and nurses than you'd like, fewer ambulances than you like, fewer cancer scans than you'd like, all sorts of mental health support that you might like.

5:36And what the academics say is that has a direct health cost. And the health cost estimate is it could lead to something like 220 ,000 avoidable deaths over the period, which is more, almost double what we saw over the COVID period. now remember Lucy when Covid happened and afterwards there was an awful lot from Keir Starmer West treating and Labour politicians at the time this must never happen again we must learn the lessons there's no way we should be having that amount of avoidable loss of human life well now you have academics say as a result of a treaty signed between Whitehall and Washington you have the possibility the prospect of a huge amount of human life being lost and a huge amount being drained out of our health service as a result.

6:27I write in my column in today's paper that it's basically a massacre made in Whitehall at the behest of Donald Trump and to buffer the shareholder returns of multinational pharmaceutical companies. Gosh and so you will have gone to the government on this you've spoken to the Department of Health what do they say to your reporting? You're completely right. I went to the Department of Health and what really strikes me is how little information they'll give you. The Department of Health has conducted something called an impact assessment on this trade deal. However, it will not share the details of that impact assessment.

7:07It will not share with MPs. Is that unusual? It's unusual for that amount of secrecy about something that affects all of our lives. Yeah. Now, every now and then, yes, government departments do try and keep impact assessments away from the public. They say, oh, there's commercial sensitivity. I would just ask you to consider, Lucy, think about your own family in this case. Which matters to you? Finding out how it affects your lives and lives of your family or whether or the commercial sensitivity of GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis and other very well funded pharmaceutical companies. You make that choice.

7:42People watching can make that choice, right? It's a very simple choice to do. So I find it really unusual to be in a situation where you have very well-respected, world-leading experts warning about the impact, the possible impact this could have. And on the first go-round, ministers have been shown that they were wrong. They said the NHS was not on the table. It was on the table. They said it would cost far less than it now looks like it's going to cost. and they said the money would not be coming from the NHS. On all three counts, completely wrong. And now they're saying, well, we don't recognise these figures.

8:18We don't understand where these guys got it from. The analysis is published in something called the British Medical Journal. Very well established, very well respected journal. It's been conducted by three world leading researchers, one of whom has got an intimate association with a body which actually sets the medicines that we get through the NHS. These are not like guys after a quick headline. These are people who've been working it for decades. Right. So I tend to take their analysis very seriously, especially when the Department of Health is not able to give me any serious answer to the charges they make.

8:54So just to get this straight, Aditya, 45 billion in NHS funding over the next 10 years will be heading overseas to the United States in a deal done with the most profiteering brazen, you've called him rapacious US president. The most rapacious president in American history now has his little hands on our NHS. How on earth has a Labour government justified a deal of this nature? What is their justification? Pharmaceutical companies operating this country, multinational pharmaceutical companies operating this country, have been saying for some time that they find the NHS doesn't allow them to make enough return for the drugs they sell.

9:36They do say that. Two, the government would say, well, look, Trump wanted to sign a trade deal with us. You have to do some give and take. We thought it was worth us signing this pharmaceutical deal with him if it means that we get this guaranteed reduced tariffs on other areas, right? That's what they would say. Against all that, I would just say one thing. Trump is quite capable of reneging on trade deals when he likes, right? He signed a deal on AI with us, which he then decided, because he hated our online safety stuff, I don't want to do that. I'm welching on that. He constantly rips up bits of paper, throws it to the wind and says, right, you deal with it.

10:13So we're not doing a deal with a very stable, ordered, rational, safe actor here. We're doing it with a very tempestuous guy who seems to be running, I would say, American politics for the benefit of him and a select group of cronies and business people that he likes. Right. And this looks like a classic trade deal along those lines. So a deal signed with a very unpredictable president, to say the least, that will be in the intray of the likely successor to Keir Starmer, Andy Byrne. Let's hope he has some choice on whether he can reverse it. We've got three weeks to find out what he's going to do about it.

10:52We certainly do, and you'll be right across that. Thank you, Aditya. Thank you, Lucy. That's it for today. My huge thanks again to Aditya Chakraborty. I really recommend reading his column on this story over at theguardian.com. And do head over to our sister podcast, Politics Weekly. Today, Pippa Creera and Kieran Stacey will be rounding up the week's news, including the five billion hole in the defence investment plan. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Latest. Today, I'm focused with back in your feeds as usual tomorrow morning. The latest will be back tomorrow night. This episode was presented by me, Lucy Hoff.

11:24It was produced by Hannah Williams, Leo Schick and Sam Gray. The senior producer was Ryan Ramgobin.

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