TODAY the Queen awards the National Health Service with the George Cross on its 73rd birthday. 

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will attend a thanksgiving service in its honour at St Paul’s Cathedral and a celebratory tea party at Buckingham Palace.

But such recognition of the debt owed to health workers 16 months into a deadly pandemic rings hollow given ministers’ refusal to concede a proper raise after a decade of shrinking pay packets.

The official NHS anniversary celebrations are a propaganda stunt.

Some photo-friendly public ceremonies studded with royalty are meant to imply that this institution — possibly the last widely trusted institution in the country, given the way the reputations of Parliament, police, the City, the media and more have been shredded by successive scandals — is above politics, cherished by all, Conservative politicians included.

Actually the health service has been systematically undermined by successive governments. 

The march of the private sector into care provision long predated Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act of 2012: Tony Blair boasted in 2006 that welcoming 11 for-profit companies into the “NHS family” would drive up standards.

Blair looked ahead to the day when “NHS” would be an umbrella term encompassing any number of for-profit or charitable providers, when “40 per cent of acute operations done in the private sector [are] being done under the NHS banner.”

Lansley opened the floodgates to private provision and “competitive” tendering, allowing billionaires like Virgin’s Richard Branson to sue an underfunded health service for missing out on a lucrative health contract.

And the coronavirus crisis was seized on by health secretary Matt Hancock to accelerate the process, awarding huge contracts to the private sector without scrutiny or even publication, a move deemed unlawful by a High Court judge in February. The award of profitable contracts to Tory donors, friends and relatives has become a running scandal.

The government knows it. Sajid Javid indicates that he will rule out test-and-trace supremo Dido Harding — the failed TalkTalk executive, Jockey Club director and university pal of former PM David Cameron — as next head of the NHS.

Harding, who splurged £37 billion on a privatised test-and-trace system that was a total failure except for enriching repeatedly disgraced outsourcing firms like Serco, is too unpopular to reward further. 

Credit is due to those who made her appointment a political dilemma for the government, such as Labour’s Richard Burgon, who tabled a motion in Parliament on the subject. 

Yet the fight must now be extended to derailing the entire Health and Care Act planned by Hancock. This pernicious legislation seeks to exploit public anger at privatisation to accelerate it, claiming it is cleaning up the mess left by Lansley and ridding the NHS of wasteful internal markets when it places for-profit firms in the driving seats of the new “integrated care systems.”

To mount an effective campaign against this, Labour should acknowledge the disastrous impact of private-sector infiltration of the NHS on its own watch as well as the Tories’, and the need to bring all services back in house, explaining the risk posed to patients by outsourced cleaning and catering as well as care provision.

The threat to the NHS is not a future menace, one the Tories will laugh off with denials that they intend to “sell it off,” as if the brand was in danger.

It isn’t — the private health sector has long recognised the money to be made on the quiet by hiding behind those three beloved letters.

The privatisation of the NHS is actually far advanced. The battle is for renationalisation. 
 
Private-sector involvement in the NHS is extremely unpopular — but often invisible. It needs to be far more widely publicised and challenged.