The authorities – and legacy media – in the UK are trying to deploy, and are promoting a number of initiatives that have an even more expansive forms of mass surveillance as one of their common denominators.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has declared that the National Health Service (NHS) will have to be “turned on its head” in order to be “saved” – and the Labour government has prepared a 10-year-plan to get this done.
Developing a digital health ID, referred to as a “single patient record” on the NHS app containing “all information” is one of the changes that will be proposed during the upcoming “national conversation.”
Another the current authorities aim for is not to build more hospitals, equip them better, train and employ more staff – as one might expect – but to get as many people to monitor their own health at home, by giving them devices tracking some health parameters, like blood pressure and glucose.
The plan is to make even recovering cancer patients track that recovery themselves. And to achieve it, millions of people will get smart watches and other wearable tech.
“Moving more care from hospitals to the community,” is how those behind the plan describe it.
Other than announcing that the NHS is “broken,” “in a critical condition,” etc., and therefore in need of being “saved,” Streeting distinguished himself recently by pushing for things like giving obese unemployed persons weight loss drugs “to help them get back to work.”
But Streeting’s not the only one apparently alarmed by the state of the NHS – or the only one trying to use the service’s infrastructure and reach to achieve other goals.
The Observer Economics Editor Phillip Inman has penned a piece calling for mass government surveillance, where the NHS is a potential “testbed for a national ID card.”
Other ideas Inman supports concerning highly invasive monitoring methods include taxing zero-emission vehicles via “satellite surveillance.”
Inman advises Streeting to make sure “everyone” has the NHS app on their phone.
“If UK households offer their information to the NHS in the way they do to Google et al, health service provision could be cheaper and more effective,” writes the Observer editor.
The cynical implication that people “offer” their data to Big Tech – while in reality most are genuinely unaware of the extent of Big Tech’s data harvesting – aside, but Inman has more thoughts about the usefulness of the NHS.
“The health service could be a testbed for a national ID card that allows for the digitization of more areas of government, reducing costs and tackling fraud,” he writes.
