Monday, 24 Jun 2024

General election: Corbyn produces ‘evidence’ NHS is ‘up for sale’ under Tories

Labour has documents which show that the NHS will be “up for sale” in a post-Brexit US trade deal under Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn has claimed.

The Labour leader said his party had obtained an unredacted version of a 451-page document which lays out the details of talks involving UK and US officials.

Mr Corbyn said the papers contradict the prime minister’s claim that the health service would not be a part of any trade talks with Washington.

“The uncensored documents leave Boris Johnson’s denials in absolute tatters,” he told a news conference.

“We have now got evidence that under Boris Johnson the NHS is on the table and will be up for sale.

“He tried to cover it up in a secret agenda and today it has been exposed.”

But the Conservatives accused Mr Corbyn of “out-and-out lying” about the contents of the documents – misrepresenting what they say and quoting sections out of context.

Mr Johnson said Labour’s claims were “total nonsense” and he could give an “absolute cast-iron guarantee that this a complete diversion and that the NHS under no circumstances will be on the table for negotiation, for sale”.

International Trade Secretary Liz Truss said: “This sort of conspiracy theory fuelled nonsense is not befitting of the leader of a major political party.”

Mr Corbyn said the documents cover six rounds of talks from July 2017 to “just a few months ago” and show that discussions were at a “very advanced stage”.

“We are talking here about secret trade talks for a deal with Donald Trump after Brexit,” the Labour leader said.

“These reports pull back the curtain on the secrecy that’s being plotted for us all, behind closed doors, by the Conservative government.

“This is what they didn’t want you to know.”

On medicine pricing, Mr Corbyn said the document showed discussions on lengthening patents had already finished.

“Longer patents can only mean one thing – more expensive drugs. Lives will be put at risk as a result of this,” he said.

The Labour leader used the drug Humira, which is used to treat Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis, as an example.

This costs the NHS £1,409 a packet, compared to £8,115 in the US, he said.

In a summary of the second meeting, UK officials noted that “patent issues” around “NHS access to generic drugs will be a key consideration” in talks.

By the fourth meeting, officials from the two sides were ready to “exchange text” and “really take significant further steps” for “patents in pharmaceuticals/health”.

Mr Corbyn said this was evidence that the trade talks were at a “very advanced stage”.

Another document notes that the US approach “makes total market access the baseline assumption of the trade negotiations and requires companies to identify exclusions, not the other way round”.

In a separate text, the UK side said it had a “very open” services sector and “the US should expect the UK to be a liberalising influence” and that together they could “fly the good flag for services liberalisation”.

Mr Corbyn cited this particular passage as evidence of a “green light for breaking open Britain’s public services so corporations can profit from [them]”.

But Sky’s economics editor Ed Conway said the documents do not, at first reading, “contain any smoking guns”.

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