Labour MPs Sarah Sackman and Wes Streeting have been gloating on social media that they’ve managed to get a Reform member to admit that he’s not opposed to switching the UK onto an insurance-based healthcare model, in place of the NHS.
We at the Canary suppose that’s what passes as a political coup for the likes of the health secretary. However, we see two problems here:
Firstly, Streeting is all-for selling off the NHS bit-by-bit to the private sector. He just doesn’t like the idea of an insurance based system.
Secondly, Farage and his ilk have been banging on about privatising UK healthcare for bloody years now. Why do we keep acting all surprised when the party of big-business acts true to its form?
The cat’s out of the bag!
Farage’s Tory turncoats would replace our NHS with an insurance system. We can’t let Reform UK anywhere near it.
Labour built the NHS. It’s now on the road to recovery.
With Labour’s NHS, whenever you’re ill, you’ll never have to worry about the bill! pic.twitter.com/tttv6DZkqc
— Wes Streeting (@wesstreeting) January 25, 2026
Privatisation is privatisation, Wes
First up, it’d be remiss not to point out that this is the most breathtaking hypocrisy imaginable, coming from Streeting. The health secretary is Labour’s own one-man privatisation army, and he’s bleating about the danger of Reform?
The Good Law Project have shown that over 60% of Streeting’s donations come from people and companies linked to private health.
In return, he’s repeatedly advocated to pay the private sector to do NHS work. Back in January 2025, he even backed an agreement to include the private sector in local NHS decision-making.
However, Streeting defends himself by stating that he wants to keep the NHS “free at the point of use”. It’s this commitment to ‘just a bit of privatisation…honest’ that the likes of Streeting think distinguishes them from Reform.
Privatisation, yes or no?
The clip Streeting posted on 25 January shows a segment from a BBC interview. In the video, Labour’s Sarah Sackman grilled recent Tory-turned-Reformer Andrew Rosindell on healthcare privatisation, asking:
the new party that you’ve joined, your leader believes in a private insurance model. You believe in the NHS?
The interviewer tries to wrap things up, warning “we’re running out of time”:
Interviewer: Private insurance, yes or no?
Rosindell: We need an efficient system that works.
Interviewer: Yes or no, private insurance?
Rosindell: I don’t object to that.
Sackman: You’ve heard it here first!
The problem is, ‘heard it here first’ is a bit of a stretch. Farage and his cronies have been gesturing vaguely toward a desire to privatise UK healthcare for years — while Streeting and others look on.
In fact, speaking at a meeting of supporters back during his UKIP days back in 2014, Farage said:
I think we’re going to have to think about healthcare very, very differently. I think we are going to have to move to an insurance-based system of healthcare.
Frankly, I would feel more comfortable that my money would return value if I was able to do that through the market place of an insurance company than just us trustingly giving £100bn a year to central government and expecting them to organise the healthcare service from cradle to grave for us.
Have we forgotten?
More recently, in January 2025 — now in his ‘totally new’ disguise as Reform leader — Farage repeated this sentiment. In an interview with *LBC,*the host asked if Farage would be open to “French-style insurance model for the NHS”:
Farage: Well, there are, there are… I mean the French have a mutual system where you pay in to effectively an insurance scheme.
Host: And the rich pay and the poor don’t.
Farage: Yeah, and that’s the mutuality. Now you know, I’m not saying we should absolutely mimic the French system, but let’s have a much deeper, broader thing.
Likewise, as independent journalist Adam Bienkov pointed out, Reform deputy chairman Paul Nuttall has also voiced pro-privatisation opinions:
I believe, as long as the NHS is the ‘sacred cow’ of British politics, the longer the British people will suffer with a second rate health service,” he wrote, adding that “the very existence of the NHS stifles competition, and as competition drives quality and chpice, innovation and improvements are restricted.
So, what is it with this collective cultural amnesia about Reform’s utter contempt for the NHS? These people have told us repeatedly that they want to make the people of the UK pay for their healthcare. Can we finally just believe them now?
Farage and Reform need keep their greasy paws of the NHS. And, while we’re at it, if Streeting could stop selling it off piece by piece, that’d be just great, too.
Featured image via the Canary
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