Today, the Guardian has:

Compensation payments will rise for people affected by the infected blood scandal, including an extra £35,000 each for former pupils who were experimented on at school without their knowledge, the paymaster general has announced. The government has allocated £1bn for the payments.

The final report of the inquiry into what has been described as the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history was published in May 2024. The compensation scheme that followed has also been blighted by controversy.

People who were infected, and their relatives, had complained about delays, qualifying criteria, the size of payments and the complex application process.

Among those angry at the amount they were offered were former pupils at Treloar’s college, a specialist school in Hampshire for haemophiliacs, where they were infected in experimental trials.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/14/compensation-victims-infected-blood-scandal-rise

In October 2025, BBC Scotland covered the story of victims in Scotland with the image at the top and:

Between 1970 and the early 1990s, more than 30,000 NHS patients were given blood transfusions, or treatments made using blood products, which were contaminated with hep C or HIV. Some of the blood was from abroad, but in Scotland, the majority came from Scottish donors which included prisoners and drug users.

Nowhere in the extended reporting is it made clear which political parties were in Government, thus responsible for the tragedy.

Here is the necessary clarification:

On May 17^th, the head of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) apologised to the thousands of victims in Scotland who were infected by HIV or Hepatitis C through NHS blood products.

While I understand why he made that apology on behalf of the SNBTS and the victims fully deserve an apology, even if it’s nearly 50 years late, it’s not really those working for the blood transfusion service, 50 years ago or now, who should be apologising.

According to the Guardian, the commercial blood product Koate, given to haemophiliacs across the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, to enable their blood to clot, was based on plasma from paid US prisoners, among whom it was known that drug use and sexual infections were rife. [i]

In the same report, we read that the drug producer, Bayer, were aware, at the very beginning, that because a single batch could contain plasma from 20 000 donors it was then very likely that the entire batch would be contaminated.

In August 1976, the Labour Government of Jim Callaghan and with the Secretary of State for Scotland, Willie Ross in the Cabinet, seeing the papers, the deal with Bayer was signed. A Labour health minister at the time, David Owen, had warned of the risks but was told in 1987, when he asked for them, that his papers had been shredded because of the risk of litigation. [ii]

Shockingly, we now know that one year before the Labour Government signed the deal, the World Health Organisation had warned of the risk of transmitting diseases when blood products were obtained from paid rather than from voluntary donors and urged (in block capital lettering), member states such as the UK, to enact effective legislation to protect the recipients of blood products. [iii]

In December 2015, ITV’s World in Action TV show did a special on the risks. According to the Guardian, in April 2024, despite the WHO warning and the TV broadcast, the deal was done by the Labour cabinet in August 1976, in part, to cut costs.[iv]

While some will point, justifiably, to the role played by Conservative Governments from 1979 to 1997 in perpetuating this practice and then in attempting to cover it up, it must be remembered that, in Scotland, Labour which was utterly dominant at national and local levels including on health boards, did nothing.

We see this most clearly in the case of Yorkhill Hospital in Glasgow where children continued to be treated with infected blood products for years, until 1984, after other parts of the country had begun to use heat treatments to remove risk. [v] Virtually every MP and councillor, in Glasgow, in those days, was Labour.

Then, in 2002, as a Labour/Lib Dem coalition governed a devolved Scotland, the Labour Scottish Health Minister, Malcolm Chisholm, was warned by the UK Labour Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, to avoid agreeing to compensation for haemophiliacs in Scotland, because of the inability of the UK Labour Government to meet these costs for the larger population affected in England. [vi]

The above reluctance of Labour to help those in dire need reminds us, all-too-clearly, of how Glasgow Council’s Labour administration did its utmost to avoid compensating its own women workers, who had for decades been denied fair pay, comparable to men in similar work and, in the last few weeks, of Sir Keir Starmer’s instructions to his Scottish MSPs not to support compensation for the WASPI women.

Vote for Labour at your peril.

---

[i] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/27/revealed-government-was-warned-of-infected-blood-risks-in-1970s

[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/27/revealed-government-was-warned-of-infected-blood-risks-in-1970s

[iii] https://www.infectedbloodinquiry.org.uk/evidence/prse0003476-world-health-organization-assembly-resolution-utilization-and-supply-human

[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/14/contaminated-blood-inquiry-uk-cheaper-minutes

[v] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-48850969

[vi] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-62337002