What will be the cost of Keir Starmer’s new medicines deal with Donald Trump? British lives | Aditya Chakrabortty

Ohf Arthur Scargill, it was said that he started each day with two newspapers. The miners’ leader read the Morning Star of course, but only after consulting the Financial Times. Why did a class warrior from Yorkshire place such importance on the pinstriped Londoners’ diary? Before soaking up opinions, he told a reporter, he wanted to “know the facts.”

With this in mind, let’s analyze the agreement just reached by the governments of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer. You may not have heard much about this medicine deal, but it is hugely important, both financially and politically – and Downing Street couldn’t be more proud of it.

An “unprecedented agreement”, praises the Minister of Science, Patrick Vallance. It “paves the way for the UK to become a global life sciences hub,” says business secretary Peter Kyle, while the government press release adds: “Tens of thousands of NHS patients will benefit.”

Presented with such triumph, Her Majesty’s press is on its hind legs. “Happy pills” published a glowing editorial in The Times, while the Daily Mail sportingly thanked Donald Trump for his “American lifeline to the British pharmaceutical industry”.

Britain 1, America 0! Except that’s not Washington’s point of view. “A major victory for American workers,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Luttnick, which “ensures that tomorrow’s advances will be built, tested and produced on American soil.” Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr hails “results that put Americans first”.

One agreement, two diametrically opposed readings: who is right? The answer, I regret to inform you, is the Trumpets. Take this headline from the liberal New York Times: “To Avoid Tariffs, U.K. Accepts Trump’s Demand to Pay More for Drugs.”

Starmer and his team not only suffered a costly defeat; they are misleading you and me about what this means for our NHS, our future treatment, our lives.

Because the modeling suggests it will almost certainly cost British lives. Ahead of a deal being signed, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated last month that branded drugs could soon cost the NHS an extra £3 billion a year. This extra £3 billion doesn’t buy us anything: it’s more money for the same medicines.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting denies it will cost that much, but when I asked the Department of Health how it made these calculations, I got no answer. I’ve also spoken to independent experts who think this brilliant deal will cost more, not less. For the sake of argument, let’s start with a cost of £3 billion per year.

Reading between the lines of Streeting’s statements, this money will have to come from the NHS’s own budget. This £3 billion will have to be found each year by granting fewer cancer scans, longer waits for ambulances and emergency departments and delaying surgeries.

There appears to be no government assessment of what this means – and again neither the Department of Streeting nor the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology have been able to provide an assessment. So I went to see Karl Claxton, a professor at the University of York and an expert in the economics of NHS medicines. Its modelling, based on years of evidence on the impacts of cuts to health budgets, suggests that this deal, celebrated across Whitehall and praised in the Times and the Daily Mail, will lead to 15,971 extra deaths each year. (If Streeting’s estimate is correct, then the number of excess deaths will decline, but only to 6,192 – a comparative bargain.) They won’t know that they died in service of a deal that provides extra profits for some of the world’s richest companies, but Claxton’s view is that the link is “causal.” This deal, he says, is “a catastrophe for all patients in the NHS”.

This is probably the first time you’ve heard about this deal and what it means. Just like the AI ​​deal Starmer struck a few weeks ago, there is no document, no official evidence, no vote attached to it. All you have is a press release from Whitehall. While national newspapers have rushed to cover the dispute over resident doctors’ salaries, with 76 articles in the past month according to the Guardian’s research department, they have devoted only 13 articles to the deal, which is far more important in financial terms.

It also poses a greater threat to our medical system. Unlike the disaster capitalism that rules much of US health care, the NHS closely regulates approved drugs, to ensure that they are good value for money and that manufacturers do not make too much profit. The result is that pills and injections are on average three times more expensive in the US than in the UK. For an object lesson in how to use the power of the public sector to reduce the cost of essential goods and tackle profits, look no further than the NHS drugs regime. No wonder the pharmaceutical industry hates this.

His best chance to shake him came with Trump’s return to the Oval Office. After promising voters he would lower the cost of living and create more jobs, he demanded that pharmaceutical companies invest more in the United States and charge Americans less for their medicines. He also imposed tariffs on products that the rest of the world sells to the United States, including British-made serums and tablets worth billions of pounds. So Downing Street is on a collision course with AstraZeneca, Merck and other billionaire companies.

Things come to a head in mid-September, with an extraordinary sequence of events. First, Merck abandoned plans for a research center at King’s Cross, north London, even though it was already under construction. The same day, the industry’s main lobby group warned of the relatively low prices paid by the NHS for medicines, saying that “in many global boardrooms, the UK is now seen as a risk of contagion with practices which, if adopted by other markets, would threaten the sector’s ability to invest and innovate globally.” In less than 24 hours, Eli Lilly, maker of Prozac and Mounjaro, appeared in a trade journal outlining plans for a laboratory already agreed with the government. His boss then called the UK “probably the worst country in Europe” in terms of drug prices. The next day, AstraZeneca suspended a project in Cambridge expected to create 1,000 jobs.

These announcements “appear very coordinated from the outside,” a senior government official told journalists. “I’ve never seen anything like this before, it’s actually quite spooky.” The British Pharmaceutical Industry Association denies any allegations of collusion.

So we are left with a deal that has barely been explained to the people who will suffer most directly from it. Meanwhile, we have a Government that is hailing as a victory what is in reality a singular and costly capitulation, and clinging to lame promises that these drugmakers will invest in the UK. As Sally Gainsbury of the health think tank Nuffield Trust says, it is now “part of a Ponzi scheme, buying treatments that are not the best use of money”.

An organization dedicated to saving lives is now being used in trade deals, its valuable resources and structural integrity traded for the benefit of multinational corporations and foreign bullies. Labor keeps reminding voters that they gave them the NHS, but in chasing the unicorn of fabulous economic growth, their leaders are now changing the very goal of their proudest creation.