UNITED KINGDOM
One of the UK’s most prominent commentators believes the mood of the country is turning against privatisation and towards greater public control of key services.
Writing in the Guardian newspaper, public policy analyst Richard Vize cited the report by the Chief Inspector of Probation, Dame Glenys Stacey that condemned the privatisation of the Probation Service as a “deplorable diminution of the probation profession”.
Mr Vize said the National Health Service (NHS) in England had abandoned a “bizarre scheme” to force cancer patients at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford to be loaded into an ambulance and driven 6 km down the road to use private sector scanners rather than be scanned on site by NHS staff.
“Now Lord Jim O’Neill, an authority on the policy implications of antimicrobial resistance, has massively escalated the debate about public control of vital services by arguing that a State-run pharmaceutical company may be the only answer to the private sector’s failure to invest sufficiently in new antibiotics,” Mr Vize wrote.
“There have been no new classes of antibiotics since the 1980s, and only three firms are believed to be in the game.”
He said that confronted by private sector lassitude in response to this impending disaster, the balance of risks and potential benefits was clear.
“Government needs to intervene, and intervene decisively,” Mr Vize wrote.
London, 1 April 2019
