The contaminated blood scandal - another example of how the UK has failed Scotland
Published in the Edinburgh Evening News, May 24th, 2024.
Politico reports that the £10 billion compensation the UK government will be paying to victims of the contaminated blood scandal will “be classed as capital spending, funded by borrowing.” Capital expenditure is spending on plant, property or equipment which is classed as an asset. But the £10 billion won’t add to the nation’s stock of assets. Instead, it’s a revenue cost incurred because of government negligence that borders on criminality.
Already politicians are hinting that to ‘pay for this’, tax cuts must be foregone and public spending reduced, another excuse to push a severely underfunded NHS over the cliff-edge.
The Tories and English Labour don’t want us to know that the government can always find the money they claim they ‘don’t have’ when they need to. They found it for bank bailouts, Covid, wars, and now this. They own a central bank so anything they want to fund, they can.
It’s just that spending enough on a service that keeps people, a nation’s most valuable asset, healthy, isn’t a priority. We know it’s not English Labour’s, since Streeting has said he’s committed to further NHS privatisation.
And we must remember that it was a Labour government that signed the deal to purchase American Factor VIII contaminated blood which was sourced from prisoners in the US state of Arkansas despite being warned by experts that the blood was likely to be contaminated with viruses. But it was cheap. Successive Tory governments kept the bad blood flowing.
The Scottish victims were haemophiliacs who received transfusions at Glasgow’s Yorkhill Hospital and subsequently contracted HIV and hepatitis C. The then Labour Secretary of State for Scotland, Willie Ross, was aware of the warnings yet still allowed the infected blood to be used in Scotland. He took his orders from London, just as English Labour does today.
Scotland knows what it needs to do to protect its people and their health - end the union.
What really pisses me off in all of these scandals is that no-one ever goes to jail for what are obviously criminal actions.
It wasn't just haemophiliacs Leah my father was given a contaminated blood transfusion in 1978 in the Glasgow Royal infirmary, he became a Hep C carrier from those transfusions died in 1981 a shell of a man looked very much what we later learned as an Aids victim. I am sure he was not the only one, only problem is the NHS only keep medical records for 3 years after the death. We were told it had to be a closed coffin, we were not allowed a traditional Irish wake, again were were advised to have a cremation even though there was a family plot at St Kentigern's cemetery in Glasgow. I'm sure there will be many people who have lost a family member but never questioned why