Bob Gill

Dr Bob Gill   (physician, political activist, filmmaker)
Alma mater	University of Sheffield
Party	National Health Action Party, Workers Party of Britain

Dr Bob Gill is a British GP in Welling, Kent who campaigns against the privatisation of the NHS.

In 2019, he wrote and produced the film "The Great NHS Heist", which was re-edited in 2021.

Politics

At the UK/General election/2015, Bob Gill stood in the Old Bexley and Sidcup constituency for the National Health Action Party.

He joined the Workers Party of Britain in December 2023.

The Great NHS Heist

UK government is determined to complete the Americanisation of the NHS

"The Great NHS Heist" describes how a nation was robbed of its most treasured possession.

The British National Health Service is the nation’s proudest achievements, lifting burden from the sick, copied across the world, but it has been under sustained attack over decades by successive governments. Realising that privatisation would be unpopular, the Thatcher Government instead started a program of out-sourcing that was continued and expanded under the Blair New Labour Government and up to the present.

It required careful planning and a series of legal and structural changes spanning thirty years to bring it to the brink of American corporate capture; or as one former policy adviser put it, reduced to ‘a funding stream and a logo’.

A docile and complicit media have failed to hold power to account and inform the public about what is really happening to their NHS. Austerity and chaos over Brexit has provided perfect cover for the engineered failure of services, necessary to persuade the public to fall out of love with the NHS.

NHS land, patient data and tax-funded budgets are all up for grabs.

"The Great NHS Heist" documentary sets out how the nation and the NHS have been betrayed by our politicians and a complicit media, in assisting a US corporate capture of healthcare in England.

UK government is determined to complete the Americanisation of the NHS. In 2021 despite the catastrophic impact of the Covid-19, made significantly worse by preceding #privatisation and the outsourcing of the pandemic response, the plan to convert the NHS into the American Kaiser Permanente 'managed care' model is accelerating. This film produced in 2019 and now re-edited is more relevant now than ever.

Interviewees include David Graeber, Ken Loach, Yanis Varoufakis, Lucy Reynolds, David Whyte, Prof Danny Dorling, Prof Martin McKee, Prof Prem Sikka, Stan Brock and Dr Bob Gill.

The new edit includes the impact of the pandemic and the dangerous legal changes being rushed through under cover of the crisis.

Real Media

On 13 September 2022, Real Media wrote:

Bob Gill is a General Practitioner and NHS campaigner who directed the film "The Great NHS Heist" exposing how, over decades, our National Health Service has been packaged up and readied for privatisation by successive governments.

Real Media first interviewed Dr Gill five years ago, and much has happened since then to confirm his suspicions and validate his warnings.

Just two months ago, Boris Johnson’s government passed the new Health and Care Act which set up Integrated Care Systems, mirroring an American ‘managed-care’ model. Among its many shortcomings, it introduces greater power to Ministers to make future changes without parliamentary scrutiny, more barriers to face-to-face GP appointments, more private corporation influence over boards, and fewer legal requirements on standards of care.

In our new interview, Bob explains how the new Public Private Partnerships, with fixed budgets, will inevitably lead to staff exploitation and denial of care as well as the shrinking of unprofitable areas of the NHS like Accident & Emergency or mental health provision.

Dr Gill exposes how the media have failed to explain the real purpose of changes in NHS structures, and how they are scapegoating GPs, immigrants, the elderly and so on, rather than analysing the root cause of the crisis in the NHS, which is the government’s policy agenda.

The COVID-19/Pandemic response was costly, very heavily privatised, and according to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee a massively expensive waste of money, but it was also a major opportunity to maximise private profiteering.

Insurance companies, private medicine providers and pharmaceutical corporations all stand to profit from further privatisation, and we know that for natural monopolies like healthcare, this can only mean trouble. Bob Gill asks us to consider the water companies – they’ve not built a new reservoir in decades, nor new sewage treatment works, instead maximising shareholder dividends and pumping raw sewage into our rivers and seas. Translate that business methodology into healthcare, and you will have patients being denied care, as well as preventable suffering and death on a large scale, just as we see in the USA.

With the media, unions, and even charities such as Mind, Alzheimer’s Society and Age Concern, for a variety of reasons all failing to shout from the rooftops, Dr Gill is begging the public to wake up, educate your family and friends, get on national talk radio, and join grassroots movements to fight this utter betrayal by our politicians before it is finally too late.

Watch the full interview and act now.

Crispin Flintoff Show

Dr Bob Gill has made many appearances on "The Crispin Flintoff Show", the most recent being on Sunday 20 October 2024:

NHS campaigner and Welling GP Dr Bob Gill talks about Labour's brazen NHS sell off and the disturbing plan to vaccinate the unemployed with an anti-obesity 'vaccine'.

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