Sir Keir Starmer hints he would BAN private healthcare if he were PM

Sir Keir Starmer has hinted that he would phase out private healthcare and implement a ‘ten-year plan’ for the NHS if he were Prime Minister.

Speaking to the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast, the Labour leader described how his mother – who worked as nurse and regarded the health service as her ‘lifeline’ – feared a move towards privatisation if ‘things got really bad’.

Sir Keir’s mother Josephine died in 2015 just two weeks before he was elected for Holborn and St Pancras, following a long battle with Still’s disease, an incurable autoimmune condition. 

Her passion for the NHS ran so deep, Sir Keir told host Nick Robinson, that she even held her son’s hand as she lay dying in an intensive care unit and urged him: ‘You won’t let your dad go private, will you?’.

How the health service should be organised, and how to cut massive waiting lists, has become a hot button issue in public life. 

Tony Blair’s methods of cutting these lists – by bringing in the private sector so that people could have operations – proved controversial within the Labour Party and led to allegations that he wanted to ‘sell off’ the NHS.

Asked what he would do to cut waiting lists if he were Prime Minister, Sir Keir told host Nick Robinson: ‘I would listen to my mum in this, and that’s why we need a better plan for the NHS which is about money.

Sir Keir Starmer has hinted that he would phase out private healthcare and implement a ‘proper ten-year plan’ for the NHS if he were Prime Minister

Speaking to the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast, the Labour leader described how his mother Josephine (pictured) – who worked as nurse and regarded the health service as her ‘lifeline all her life’ – feared a move towards privatisation if ‘things got really bad’ 

‘But it’s also about a lot more than money, it’s about using technology in a different way.

‘Of course, we have had the private sector providing operations that people have now had at no cost to them, and you’ve got to have a practical answer to this. But that sense of public service of the NHS ran very very deep in my mum and runs very very deep in me.’

Pressed on whether he would ban private medicine, the Labour leader said: ‘I don’t think you can just stop it in one go like that, but you do need more resources, you actually – we actually need to rethink health.

‘We’d be a better country if we dealt with health upstream, preventative measures in the community, much better use of technology in our hospitals and a proper ten-year plan for the NHS with appropriate funding. That would be a much better discussion about the NHS than the extent to how much needs to be private or not.

Pressed on whether he would ban private medicine, the Labour leader said: ‘I don’t think you can just stop it in one go like that, but you do need more resources, you actually – we actually need to rethink health’ 

‘This is almost like the discussion about private schools. I want the NHS and I want our school system to be so good that nobody feels that they need to go private in the first place.’

Sir Keir previously talked about his parents in a wide-ranging interview with Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV earlier this year.

He said of Josephine’s condition: ‘It’s a disease that attacks your joints. For some people it comes and goes. For mum, it came and it came and it came again.’

The illness meant she spent many years in and out of hospital and by 2015, Sir Keir said: ‘You have to understand, she was so ill by then. That was the stage of her life where she’d had her leg amputated. She couldn’t move really. She couldn’t use her hands, she had to be fed, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t communicate.

‘And I’d have loved her to have been there, but she was in a terrible way by then, a terrible, terrible place. One of my biggest regrets is that our kids never knew her, because by the time they were born, she was incapable of moving, speaking, or being who she was. And she was broken by then.’

Speaking through tears, Sir Keir said he did not get the chance to say all he wanted to say to his mother before her death. Asked what he would have liked to have told her, he said: ‘I love you.’