McKinsey, who charge up to £1,000 a day for their services, published its report with the proposal of cutting the workforce by 10% across the board with the loss of 137,000 clinical and admin posts, as well as a freeze on recruitment, to save £20bn by 2014. Further proposals put forward were to limit medical school places and implement an early retirement programme. The confidential report, published in March, was publicly leaked at the end of August forcing the government into an embarrassing position last week of openly rejecting the ideas.

McKinsey has a notoriously poor history of advising public services, having previously aided the collapse of Railtrack by encouraging the company to reduce spending on infrastructure and instead return cash to its shareholders.

The relationship between New Labour and McKinsey is a long and very close one. Both the head of the Downing Street policy directorate and head of the Delivery Unit in Blair's government were ex-employees of McKinsey, and the firm was secretly drafted in by the then Prime Minister to restructure the Cabinet Office behind the backs of government and party officials. Another government official Lord Birt was forced to resign his position with the consultants over his involvement in securing lucrative Mckinsey contracts when the ministers were forced to admit the Ministry of Defence alone had handed the consultancy firm £40m worth of contracts since 2001.

Another of Blair's cronies to benefit from New Labour's decimation of the health service is the consultancy firm The Campaign Company. Made up of ex-New Labour spin doctors, advisers and party members they are currently employed by various NHS foundation trusts to make the gradual privatisation of the health service manageable and more palatable to the general public. The Campaign Company, headed by two senior New Labour officials during the Blair years, is committed to ensuring all NHS trusts are eventually transformed into foundation trusts, essentially privatising the service by the back door.

The NHS currently employs over 1.3 million people with an annual budget of £92.5bn.


- the latest edition of Freedom newspaper, the oldest regular anarchist newspaper is available now.