Sargon’s Lotus Eater Deny You Have A Right to Healthcare

The attack on the NHS and the state provision of healthcare continues. A few days ago I put up piece from Private Eye the other fortnight, in which they reviewed Tory donor Michael Ashcroft’s and his pet journo, Isabel Oakeshott’s wretched little book on the state of the health service. They decided that it was in a mess because of waste caused by profligate hospital managers and recommended, along with a number of other ideas like people turning themselves into cyborgs, that some hospitals should be sold off. So to them, the state of the NHS has nothing to do with the fact that it’s been starved of proper funding for years and that administrative costs have written as a consequence of the piecemeal privatisation of the Health Service that’s been going on since the days of Thatcher.

But it’s significant that the Tories are now saying the quiet part out loud. Or at least their supporters are. Alex Belfield has also been telling his listeners that the NHS should be sold off, though he also tells them he doesn’t want people charged for treatment. But that would come in as a consequence of privatisation. A few years ago a group of right-wing Tories were pressing for the expansion of services for which the NHS could charge. And the whole point of privatisation is to transform our health service into a private one paid for by private health insurance.

And the Lotus Eaters seem to have the same attitude. They’re a right-wing YouTube channel with a team featuring Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, the man who broke UKIP. Much of what they put up is general culture war material against the trans cult and Critical Race Theory. Sargon denies that the Health Service is being privatised because he couldn’t see why anyone would buy it. Which shows that he’s wilfully blind to what’s been going on. But his little mate Callum said something that suggests that he doesn’t think that people have a right to healthcare.

It came up in a short I found on my mobile this morning. Callum and one of the other Lotus Eaters were discussing what they thought were the differences between left and right when it came to the concepts of rights. The right, they claimed, saw rights as innate, while the left saw them as something they had to be given for free. ‘Yeah, gib me dat’, says one of them, in what sounds suspiciously like a parody of Black speech. And then Callum added, ‘Like healthcare’.

Actually, I don’t see any difference between the right’s and left’s basic ideas about the nature of rights. Both, it seems to me, hold that rights are innate. Where they differ is the extent of fundamental rights. The political right believes that you have the right to do as you please with the bare minimum of state interference, because of the sacred right to private property and enterprise. But the left believes that capitalism, or at least neoliberalism, effectively prevents everyone enjoying the same rights, freedoms and opportunities, and so demand government legislation and interference to make society more equal.

And one of the fundamental rights, I’d say, was the right to healthcare. The provision of healthcare by the state has kept this country healthy since the NHS’ foundation in 1948. It isn’t perfect, and it’s being destroyed very deliberately by Boris and his minions, but it’s far better by far than what existed before. And much better than the American system, which Callum seems to admire.

Now that, thanks to the Covid crisis as well as decades of privatisation and cuts, only 38 per cent of the public are satisfied with the NHS’ performance, we can expect the demands of these chumps for its privatisation to get louder.

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Tags: Alex Belfield, Capitalism, Carl Benjamin, Conservatives, Corporate Donors, Critical Race Theory, Cyborgs, Human Rights, Isabel Oakeshott, Lotus Eaters, Michael Ashcroft, Neoliberalism, NHS, NHS Privatisation, Private Eye, Sargon of Akkad, Transgender People