What is being proposed is obviously a terrible deal for NHS patients. But could the Tony Blair Institute’s biggest donor benefit handsomely?
Tony Blair may have left political office almost two decades ago, but he has most definitely not retired from political life. The British public are reminded of this fact every few months or so when the former British prime minister suddenly reappears on TV channels calling for some drastic new change in government policy, usually involving artificial intelligence or other forms of digital technology. As the FT reported last June, his TBI think tank has in effect become a global consultancy to the UK government.
In January 2021, Blair made one of the most Orwellian statements of the COVID-19 pandemic. “In the end,” Blair said in an interview with ITV News, “vaccination is going to be your route to liberty.” At one point he called unvaccinated people “idiots” and repeatedly urged the UK government to introduce vaccine passes. What he didn’t say was that his foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, or TBI, had received millions of dollars in donations from pro-vaccine organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
A year later, he joined forces with his erstwhile rival William Hague to call for the introduction of a digital identity system as part of a “fundamental reshaping of the state around technology” — which, as luck would have it, is exactly what the UK government is trying to do. Last week, the Hague-Blair double act was back in the news, this time calling for the UK’s struggling National Health Service (NHS) to sell off its patients’ health data, “to fund cutting-edge treatments” and raise much-needed money for the health system.
From Sky News:
Writing in The Times newspaper, Sir Tony and Lord Hague hailed the beginning of “extraordinary age of gene therapies, new antibiotics and molecular factories”.
“Nothing will be more important to British jobs, living standards and security in the coming years than leading the world in science and innovation,” they wrote.
“We will have to keep moving quickly if we are to be one of the main homes of changes so dramatic that they will alter forever the way we live and restructure much of the global economy.”
They believe data from millions of NHS records could provide a key platform for AI to monitor patients via wearable technology and alert doctors of problems.
The report also proposes patients have access to a “personal health account” via the NHS app to book appointments and manage treatment.
This will create a laboratory of biodesign – a process to identify and find solutions to unmet healthcare needs – helping biotech companies scale up and creating strong international biosecurity.
“Biotech is promising a future of new cures and treatments for many diseases, more personalised and effective healthcare, and many new materials and transformed manufacturing processes,” Sir Tony and Lord Hague added.
A Bad Deal for Patients
What is being proposed may provide significant benefits to the UK’s burgeoning biotech sector but it is almost certainly a bad deal for NHS patients. Their most personal (and most precious) data is now being hawked by a couple of retired politicians in return for some vague promise of future economic development, which most of the patients will probably not benefit from. By that time, the NHS will probably be even more of a shadow of its former self, with even more of its vital functions harvested out to the private sector — something Blair himself has repeatedly called for in recent months.
Will patients be able to consent to their data being used in this way? Presumably not, since in that case most would presumably opt out. Blair and Hague insist that the patient data sold on to private companies will be anonymised and de-identified. However, as Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a recent article, such a promise is almost impossible to guarantee:
In an attempt to justify this pervasive surveillance ecosystem, corporations often claim to de-identify our data. This supposedly removes all personal information (such as a person’s name) from the data point (such as the fact that an unnamed person bought a particular medicine at a particular time and place). Personal data can also be aggregated, whereby data about multiple people is combined with the intention of removing personal identifying information and thereby protecting user privacy.
Sometimes companies say our personal data is “anonymized,” implying a one-way ratchet where it can never be dis-aggregated and re-identified. But this is not possible—anonymous data rarely stays this way. As Professor Matt Blaze, an expert in the field of cryptography and data privacy, succinctly summarized: “something that seems anonymous, more often than not, is not anonymous, even if it’s designed with the best intentions.”
“Best intentions” are presumably the last thing on the minds of either Blair or Hague. In the case of Blair, this is a man who in government helped to intensify the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS by opening the institution up to increasing commercialisation and saddling it with crippling debts through the Public Finance Initiative, as Bob Gill documented in an excellent 2022 article for Consortium News:
Private Finance Initiative schemes were used by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government to fund the building of new hospitals. The NHS was saddled with £11 billion of private debt which would cost £88 billion in public repayments.
Private Finance Initiatives destabilized hospital finances, creating a funding problem for which the solution was more contraction of bed capacity rubber stamped by the Clinical Commissioning Groups.
At the end of the loan repayments, ownership of the assets remained with the private investors. Just imagine buying a house with an extortionate mortgage and not owning the house when the mortgage was paid off. That’s the scam of Private Finance Initiatives.
A Curious Example
Bizarrely, in their report for TBI Blair and Hague even cite UK Biobank as a “strong precedent for giving controlled access to anonymised data to third parties.” Yet as The Guardian reported in November, UK Biobank actually shared some of its data with insurance companies without permission and despite making repeated public commitments not to do so.
When the project was announced, in 2002, Biobank promised that data would not be given to insurance companies after concerns were raised that it could be used in a discriminatory way, such as by the exclusion of people with a particular genetic makeup from insurance.
In an FAQ section on the Biobank website, participants were told: “Insurance companies will not be allowed access to any individual results nor will they be allowed access to anonymised data.” The statement remained online until February 2006, during which time the Biobank project was subject to public scrutiny and discussed in parliament.
The promise was also reiterated in several public statements by backers of Biobank, who said safeguards would be built in to ensure that “no insurance company or police force or employer will have access”.
This weekend, Biobank said the pledge – made repeatedly over four years – no longer applied. It said the commitment had been made before recruitment formally began in 2007 and that when Biobank volunteers enrolled they were given revised information.
A Potential Conflict of Interest?
Even if you believe that selling off patient data to fund NHS investments and future economic development is a worthwhile cause, allowing Britain’s biotechnology sector to thrive while also feeding back vital knowledge gleaned from the data back into the NHS, one thing is clear: Tony Blair is not a neutral, disinterested voice on this issue…
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Nick Corbishley 