Let’s be quite clear. If the radical new government plans announced by Health Minister Andrew Lansley (above) today (details here and here) are carried out, it's goodbye to the NHS.
Do you want to see the privatisation of health care in Britain? No, me neither. But it's going to happen if we allow the neoliberals, who have always hated the very idea of socialised health care, get their way.
UPDATE: There's a great comment on the Mail website by 'ellie', which I think says it all:
If we can afford to bail out the sleazebag bankers with billions, we can afford to fund the NHS. The Tories are choosing their rich friends and private companies ahead of the welfare of the rest of us, just as they always have. This is what you get when you vote in a cabinet full of millionaires backed up by their lapdog LibDem colleagues. I bet even more people are rueing the day they voted Lib Dem.
3 comments:
The whole debate over austerity measures is dishonest. Much of the public debt in the world today is the result of the decline of government revenues caused by the recession, recessions and depressions being an integral part of capitalism.
While some governments have been profligate, in many cases this government profligacy was used to prevent total economic collapse, including bailouts to bankers and corporations. Now these same financial and corporate interests and their lapdogs in government have the gall to tell the regular people that they must accept austerity.
Stories like these make me more and more skeptical of State-led solutions to our problems. If governments are in the pocket of the wealthy, how much positive change can we expect to see?
Maybe we should look to examples like Argentina, where laid-off workers took over abandoned factories and ran them themselves, in a democratic fashion, pretty much making them worker's cooperatives.
In any event, I hope the British people can save the NHS from these vultures.
Yes, and the Labour response has been pathetic, along the lines of " Cameron's going to make a mess of it" as if that wasn't his intention. Give all the NHS money to GPs who are accountable to no-one, and haven't the time to do the administration anyway? Labour can't say much because they'd have done the same, and they hope for after-Parliament careers with much the same sort of people. Some democracy - practically the whole country supports the NHS but we can't vote for a party that'll keep it.
I have always rather liked Andrew Lansley.
But he is hot on the heels of Michael Gove's "If your local school is too prolie or darkie, then we'll cut the building of and repairs to schools for proles and darkies so that you can set up your own school, even though you could perfectly well afford to go private".
Lansley's variation is "You can have any treatment you like - heard on the radio, seen on the telly, read on the Internet, anything - and the taxpayer will pick up the tab, whether or not your doctor thinks that you, or anyone, should have it".
Gove's and Lansley's party has very limited contact with the public services, and it simply does not begin to understand them. Therefore, it ought not to be put in charge of them.
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