Tories Waffle to Prevent Bill against Privatisation of the NHS in Parliament

Mike over at Vox Political has put up another important piece reporting a filibuster in parliament to ‘talk out’ a bill by the former leader of the Green party, Caroline Lucas. The four Tories, who waffled and blustered in order to prevent the bill being discussed or passed, were David Nuttall, Phillip Davies, Phillip Hollobone, and Sir Edward Leigh.

Mike writes:

It’s hard to think of Philip Davies without imagining that the people of Shipley were so disillusioned with Parliament that they sent a motion of the bowels to Westminster as a sign of their low esteem.

The sh*t from Shipley was one of four Tory MPs who waffled their way through the time allotted for Caroline Lucas’s Bill to stop the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service.

By their actions it is therefore easy to conclude that Davies, Philip Hollobone, David Nuttall and Sir Edward Leigh want to take free healthcare away from their constituents as soon as possible.

That’s very bad news if you live in Kettering, Bury North, Gainsborough and the afore-mentioned Shipley.

For more information, go to:

When Tories talk about ‘our NHS’ it means they think they own it already

The title to Mike’s piece is ‘When Tories talk about ‘our NHS’ it means they think they own it already’. This is exactly right at a number of levels. As I have been blogging about recently, I had a commenter on my blog criticise me when I claimed that Nye Bevan was the architect of the NHS. He was. The commenter maintained that the NHS was a policy of the National government during the War, which produced the Beveridge Report upon which the NHS is based. Also true. He also pointed out that Churchill also backed the NHS. Again, true, but Churchill was also very cautious in his support, and only broadcast his backing for it after the Labour Party had demanded a parliamentary debate about its early implementation now in 1942. The Tories turned this down, leaving the report to spend two years in committee. At which point the government realised that the Tories had shot themselves in the foot, and given the next election to Labour.

Now the argument over the creation of the NHS is important. It’s true that the Beveridge Report united Labour, the Liberals and left-wing Tories in its support. However, the Tories need to lay claim to it in order to assure the population that they have their best interests at heart, and won’t do anything to deprive them of it. In the 1980s and 1990s Thatcher’s and Major’s government declared that they weren’t going to privatise the NHS, and that it was only the Tories that knew how to run it efficiently and effectively.

This has been shown to be bunkum. It was either Thatcher’s or Major’s government that picked a fight with the dentists, causing them to leave the NHS en masse. The result has been the decline in cheap dental treatment for the poor and unemployed, and the corresponding decline in the health of the nation’s teeth. Well, the Americans have always made jokes about how we’ve got bad teeth. It’s even in Orwell. Possibly one of the public school wags in the Tories thought it would be a jolly good jape to play up to the stereotype, at least with the peasants. Make them all look like gap-toothed yokels, what? Spiffing! She also introduced fees for eye tests, and as a result fewer people saw the optician. She and her ministers solved this problem by lying about it, and so told the press that since charges were introduced, more people were actually going to have their eyesight examined.

Right. Pull the other one.

As for the statement that only they could keep the NHS in budget, this is a massive, sick joke. The Tories introduction of the internal market in the NHS has created more bureaucracy, along with Peter Lilley’s introduction of the Private Finance Initiative. This is a ruse by which the millions contracted by the government in debt for certain projects are kept off the record books, even though it’s immensely more expensive than normal procedures of funding infrastructure development. In a way, it’s ironic that it was Lilley that dreamed the scam up. He’s been compared on various satirical shows with Nazi officers, and something similar to the PFI was used by the Italian dictator, Mussolini, to finance infrastructure spending in Fascist Italy. Or perhaps it isn’t a coincidence at all, considering how well parts of the Tories got on with Gianfranco Fini’s ‘post-Fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale. And the results of the Tories’ latest mismanagement of the NHS has been to push it even further into debt, no doubt in preparation for its eventual sale.

And the commenter, who turned up here to criticise me for crediting the creation of the NHS on Nye Bevan also let the cat out of the bag there. He claimed that an opinion poll showed most people weren’t concerned if healthcare was private, so long as it was free. Well, that contrasts with the 85% of people in other polls, who definitely don’t want the NHS to be privatised. Presumably the people, who aren’t concerned if it’s private are all friends of Sam Cam, like the businesspeople who supposedly came out in supported of Cameron’s policy. This was later revealed to be not a spontaneous display of support, but due to Sam Cam ringing round their friends.

Don’t be fooled. Since Thatcher, the government has wanted to privatise the NHS. They are laying claim to it in order to sell it off.

Tags: Alleanza Nazionale, Aneurin Bevan, Beveridge Report, Bury North, Caroline Lucas, Churchill, Conservatives, David Cameron, David Nuttall, Dentists, Filibuster, Gainsborough, Gianfranco Fini, Green Party, John Major, Kettering, Labour Party, Margaret Thatcher, Mussolini, NHS, Opticians, Orwell, Peter Lilley, PFI, Phillip Davies, Phillip Hollobone, Privatisation, Public Schools, Samantha Cameron, Shipley, Sir Edward Leigh, Vox Political