The Conservative Party in Britain has been privatizing the National Health Service (NHS) one bit at at time, and now we are seeing the consequencesn.

Specifically, Virgin Care, a private management company running the NHS is Bath, instructed its staff to cover up health and safety at the institution:

Virgin Care asked staff in the Bath area not to report their safety concerns to the health watchdog.

Registered managers in health and social care have a legal obligation to report issues to the Care Quality Commission if they feel their service is unsafe.

But Virgin Care asked its managers in Bath and North East Somerset to “hold off” from contacting the CQC as they struggled with IT issues affecting community health and social care services.

Patients had appointments cancelled, letters and reports were not sent out, and nurses had problems updating patient records during Virgin Care’s first three months in charge of community care in B&NES.

……

Virgin Care said it had “shared comprehensive details with the CQC and they have not raised any concerns”.

The private company said it had IT issues under control in its first report to the council in July.

But two weeks earlier, a senior manager had emailed service managers asking them to help “manage the situation” by not reporting their concerns to the CQC.

For the Tories, this is not a bug, it is a feature.

Their goal is slowly make the NHS worse and worse until it loses its overwhelming public support, and can then be terminated.

It’s Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine writ slow, and Britain’s conservatives have created a constituency for this policy by allowing the malefactors of great wealth, including Richard Branson (Virgin Care), to profit from this.