Hello and welcome to this special TF segment. It is myself, Riley, and I'm very lucky to be joined today by Alison Pollock, the clinical professor of public health at Newcastle University and author of NHS PLC, the privatization of our care.

And Peter Roderick, who is a trained barrister and the principal research associate at the Population Health Sciences Institute, also at Newcastle.

Alison and Peter, how's it going?

Hello, thanks very much, Riley, for inviting us.

Yeah, very pleased to be here.

Yes, it is. It is indeed a pleasure.

And if you couldn't guess by the nature of these sort of salutations up front, we are trying

to talk today about what we mean when we talk

about the privatization of the NHS, where things like this are going in the future, where they're

located in history, and all of that stuff. So I'll turn to you guys and ask, when we say

privatizing the NHS or selling the NHS out from under us, these phrases that we hear quite often.

What do we mean when we say it versus what is the common sense vision of privatization

as understood in the media or on the labor right?

Well, I can start, which is actually our concern today is about a bill that's going through

Parliament, through Westminster in the House of Lords, the Health and Care Bill, and why we feel very strongly that it needs to be opposed. Because this bill really is a culmination of three decades and more of incremental steps to break up, dismantle and destroy our NHS.

And our NHS, the founding vision for it, was based on public funding through taxation,

public ownership, public control and public accountability.

So it was really the idea behind it was that it would be a

health service that was there for everybody and it would be truly public. But over the last

three decades, what we've actually seen is increasingly the public ownership has been

increasingly transferred to large corporations with increasing privatization and the

sale off of hospitals, the closure of beds, the closure of services. Public accountability has

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