Fighting Pharma for the NHS & Fighting for Lives

There was a huge outcry late last year when the government changed legislation in order to give in to Trump’s blackmail over increasing the costs of drugs paid to large American pharmaceutical companies at a cost of over £3bn more per year, money that was needed within the Health Service to treat patients and deal with health inequalities.

Writing in Tribune magazine in April, Nick Dearden, Director of the campaign group Global Justice Now, described how the trade pact signed by Keir Starmer and Trump in 2025 stated that Britain would ‘endeavor to improve the overall environment for pharmaceutical companies.’ During subsequent secret talks between UK and US, Trump officials raised the prospect of crippling tariffs while pharma companies threatened to scrap major UK projects.

In December, the UK government signed a deal with Trump agreeing to lift the price cap on new medicines by 25 percent. and to substantially reduce the amount of claw back the government can claim from the industry. According to Dearden “all of this will raise the proportion of the budget spent on medicines and double the proportion of the GDP spent on new drugs.”

In a letter to the government in November 2025, two Health Economists from York University described how “ an offer effectively to increase the prices of new drugs and spend an additional £1 billion on … drugs, would be over 4,500 additional deaths and a loss of almost 120,000 years of life in good health each year”. They also said that this deal would almost certainly lead to an increase in health inequality and to negative impacts on the economy amounting to £6bn with larger long-term effects. They conclude that “the findings of this research simply reflect that fact that much of what the NHS does is extremely good value of money”.

In response to this unfolding catastrophe patient-led campaign groups Just Treatment and Global Justice Now have written to the UK Government setting out why they believe the government has acted unlawfully in pushing through these changes to the NHS drug price controls frameworks, in the first stage of a legal challenge to the US-UK trade deal.

The Workers Party opposed this deal when it was first agreed on the grounds that it would benefit no one in the UK and indeed would place a major financial burden on the NHS and cost lives. We offer our full support to the campaign groups and salute their tenacity in making this legal challenge.