Okay, I’ve tried to keep this light and fun as it’s the Easter Holiday, but there’s no way I can let this go past. GB News has put up yet another video in which their mouthpiece, Nana Akua, demands that the NHS be scrapped. Because it’s the No Help Service. She’s done this before, as have a number of other right-wing YouTubers, such as Alex Belfield, now enjoying a long and well-earned holiday at His Majesty’s Pleasure. GB News is, of course, a right-wing news broadcaster that seems to cheerfully break Ofcom’s rules against politicians presenting the news. At present they’ve got something like four Tory MPs as presenters, including Jacob Rees-Mogg. The head of Ofcom tried to excuse GB News’ breach of the rules by saying that the Tories weren’t actually presenting news programmes. No, they just comment on them and interview other Tory politicians. I can’t remember who, but one of them interviewed Johnson when he was prime minister. One Labour MP grilling the Ofcom head told her that the station broadcast two types of news, right and far right. As Nigel Farage is also one of their long-term presenters, he’s not wrong.
What you are seeing here is the Tory strategy in action. They’ve cut and cut the NHS until it’s in crisis, and their friends in the media are telling us all that it’s not because of Tory mismanagement. No! It’s because of the nature of the NHS itself, and everything would be better if it was privatised. Well, it would be for the top earners who don’t want their tax money to go on the welfare state and for those able to afford private health insurance. Such as possible Nana Akua. But for everyone else, it would be a disaster. Still, those private healthcare companies have to make a profit somewhere.
GB News itself is in dire financial straits. It has been forced to cut down on the amounts paid for guests. Apart from star presenters like Farage, there aren’t many people watching their material. In fact, if I remember correctly, some of them have zero viewers at all. And there is at least one person aiming to close it down. And if they continue to push for the privatisation of the NHS, that’ll be no bad thing.
CGTN News published a table this afternoon comparing America’s per capita spending on healthcare with the rest of the world. America tops it with over $12,000. The next most expensive is Germany with over $7,000. Britain is much lower down the list with over $5,000. Down at the bottom was Poland. Obviously, the list was confined to countries in the western, developed world. What is important is that America’s private healthcare system is far more expensive than the continental healthcare systems, which are either state-owned, like Britain’s and Sweden’s, or funded through a mixture of state and private insurance. The idea that somehow private healthcare systems are more efficient and less expensive, promoted by the Tories and swallowed whole by the Blairite right of the Labour party, is frankly a lie. One of my friends trained as a doctor. He told me that many American hospitals are being kept open because of discreet state funding. But you won’t hear that from the Torygraph, GB News, Tory MPs like Daniel Hannan and grubby right-wing internet hosts like Alex Belfield, now enjoying a well-deserved holiday courtesy of His Maj. This will not surprise anyone who’s read any of the great books against the privatisation of the NHS by people like Jack Davis and Ray Tallis.
Reject the lies. Defend the NHS, and stop the Tories.
With the NHS crisis the Tories the Tories have created, the sharks really are circling in the water. Nana Akua of GB News seems to be one of those plugging its privatisation, along with broadcaster, stalker and jailbird Alex Belfield. And now they’ve been joined by Our Favourite Internet (non)Historian, Simon Webb. He put up a post this morning with the title ‘What’s So Bad About Privatising the NHS?’ It’s short, but I haven’t watched it on the grounds that I’d find it too infuriating. Webb is, of course, far right, and seems to get most of his views from the Torygraph, which has also been pushing this nonsense. As someone who takes history seriously, Webb should know what an immense difference the NHS and the welfare state made to the lives of ordinary Brits. I’ve blogged about it, citing my sources. But some of those I’ve used were by social worker types, the kind of people the Tory party has been trying to discredit for donkey’s years, and so someone like Webb would simply ignore them out of hand. But I’ve also used books from the time looking forward to the foundation of the NHS, as well as Jackie Davis’ and Ray Tallis’ excellent NHS – SOS. In contrast to what the privatisers will tell you, private healthcare is not more efficient. It’s less. Private hospitals are smaller, and in order to make a profit private healthcare largely ignores the long-term sick in order to concentrate on people who are mostly well. When private healthcare companies have taken over doctors’ surgeries in this country, they’ve closed down those they consider unprofitable, leaving thousands without a doctor. Also, private healthcare spends a large proportion of their running costs on administration, so as a consequence these costs have risen in the NHS as a consequence of its privatisation.
At the moment there seems to be a trend among the political class to be looking at the continental healthcare systems, where medical costs are paid by a mixture of state and private health insurance. But this also neglects the simple fact that these countries also spend much more on their healthcare generally than we do. The privatisation of the NHS won’t improve healthcare, but it will give private healthcare firms the support of the state sector, which is what they want.
And it seems to me that what the Tories really want is a completely private healthcare system, funded by private health insurance, like America. And that really would be disastrous. Except for their corporate friends, of course, who would get all those great profits.
A few years ago I wrote a book and a pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. Here’s their description. The pamphlets are available from me, if you want one, while the book’s available from Lulu.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.
Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.
Here’s the video I made years ago for my book against the privatisation of the health service.
I also put up this video, which only four people have watched, asking people to vote Labour to defend the NHS. I hope people will, as some Labour MPs will defend it. But I’m not at all sure about Starmer.
Katie Hopkins has raised her head again. There was a video posted on YouTube last night of her talking to an ‘entrepreneur’ of some sort, which promised its viewers that she would reveal who was really controlling the world. Yes! We’re back to raving conspiracy theory paranoia of the time John Ronson explored a decade or so ago in his Channel 4 series, Secret Rulers of the World and accompanying book, Them! Adventures with Extremists. So, who did Katie think was secretly pulling the strings to establish the One World Satanic Communist superstate? Was it Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum at Davos? The Bilderberg group? The Trilateral Commission? International finance capital, in other words, the Jewish banking conspiracy? Reptoid aliens? I’m afraid I can’t tell you, because I didn’t get that far into the video before I’d had enough.
Hopkins started off by attacking the Covid lockdown, claiming that it was an opportunistic exercise in totalitarian social control using the Wuhan virus as a pretext. It was a test to see if they really could isolate people in their own homes. The NHS and socialised medicine was part of this conspiracy, because everyone’s concerned with their health. And this is why Joe Biden is so keen on introducing it in America. Really? I had no idea. It always struck me that Biden was a bog-standard American corporatist. The only trace of radicalism I’ve seen in the old boy is his support for the trans ideology through the appointment of Rachel Levine, a transwoman, as Surgeon General and a non-binary chap as head of the programme to dispose of nuclear waste. That’s it. I’ve seen no evidence he wants socialised medicine in the US. I’d have more respect for him if he did.
As for the NHS as an instrument of totalitarianism, this is pure Reaganite, libertarian twaddle. Way back in the 1970s Reagan gave a stirring speech about the need to defend freedom against state totalitarianism. This sounds all very well, but it was an attack on Medicaid, the state programme that provides medical care to elderly citizens that can’t afford it. I’ve also had American commenters state that the NHS must be against human freedom, because doctors are employed by the state, therefore they must have the same power as other state officials like the police or the government, and so you have to do exactly as they say. Um, no, you don’t. They don’t have that power. You don’t have to take their advice, and for serious treatment, like long term cancer care, you have to sign consent forms. Of course, you’d be daft if you ignored their advice, especially when it comes to serious illnesses like cancer. But you’re still a free individual.
This is, of course, the kind of crass stupidity Alex Jones peddles with his rants against the globalists, when he isn’t maligning bereaved parents of the victims of school shootings as crisis actors, screaming that the government is about to take away Americans’ guns, and that the government is about to call an environmental emergency and force everyone into refugee camps in order to establish a totalitarian state. Despite having been dumped by various media companies for her toxic views, particularly about race, Hopkins is still going the rounds. She was doing shows with Alex Belfield, the ‘Voice of Reason’, now doing time for internet stalking.
Despite her poisonous views, I don’t want to see her banned. There’s too much internet censorship, particularly of those on the left. I just want people to realise for themselves how nasty and toxic she is. I think she’s still making a nice living for herself, because she reflects some peoples’ fears of immigration and, like Belfield, attacks the bonkers part of the woke ideology. But beyond that there’s a general contempt for working people, regardless of colour. And it doesn’t matter how much they might agree with her about the threat of illegal immigrants, gay policemen and the transgender ideology, if she had her way the people, who go to see would be deprived of proper medical care. It would all be privatised and they’d be unable to afford it. Just as they wouldn’t have any employment rights or unemployment benefits, because she’d remove all the welfare legislation that they think is being exploited by chavs and benefit scroungers. If enough people realised that, hopefully stop supporting her and she might have to do a real job for once.
Just noticed a very short piece of about two minutes in length on YouTube from GB News, in which ‘broadcaster Johnny’ somebody declares that the NHS cannot exist in its present form. Indeed, it can’t. It needs to be renationalised. But it’s being run down and privatised piecemeal ready for its full-scale sell-off by the Tories. Broadcaster Johnny whoever’s piece is part of this, preparing the public psychologically for its privatisation, making them believe that it would be A Good Thing. This alternative to the ‘woke, wet BBC’ has a long history of doing this. I’ve blogged about one of their presenters, Nana Akua, banging the drum for the privatisation of the health service and I don’t think she’s the only one there in favour of it by a long chalk. Outside of GB News there was now-jailed mad right-winger Alex Belfield mouthing off about how it should be privatised. And we’ve just had one of the viler Tories calling for it in parliament the other week, ’cause why should only the rich have private health insurance.
Beware. GB News claims to be on the side of ordinary people against the ‘woke’ establishment. But in this case, it is very definitely not your friend.
More Alex Belfield. Well, he’s due to be sentenced tomorrow, and just to remind us how nasty he really is, the Truth Checkers channel on YouTube have created this video of his ten worst moments, which they subdivide into the following sections:
Belfield shows himself in these incidents to be callous, manipulative, bigoted and actually dangerous. He mocks people with genuine mental health issues, going on about how they’re weak and should pull themselves together and making the old mock crying actions about them. When it comes to the subject of suicide, he thinks it’s funny to cut off one woman who has reasonably objected to his sneering comments about it because her boyfriend took his own life. He then posts pictures of nooses. As regards racism, Black and the ‘dinghy divers’ are dangerous, feral savages. And he really is homophobic. He rants about transpeople and when a transman calls in to challenge him, he cuts him off. Now some of his views on some of the trans issues aren’t unreasonable. I think the gender-neutral toilets in the Barbican were installed to help trans identified people. And some of the criticisms of Drag Queen Story Hour are also quite valid, in my opinion. Modern drag is highly sexualised, and so it is highly questionable whether it is suitable for children. A few weeks ago, a video made by a drag queen, who said that it wasn’t suitable for kids, went viral among the right-wing YouTube channels. But Belfield here is extremely rude about it all. Helen Pluckrose, who’s a critic of postmodern theories like Queer Theory, which is behind some of Trans ideology, believes that there’s a middle ground on which Trans people and gender critical feminists can agree on. And many gender critical feminists complain that they have a problem debating the trans rights activists because they refuse to appear with them, sometimes making the excuse that they don’t feel safe. Well, Belfield had the opportunity to have a respectful dialogue with a transperson, and threw it away with snide remarks. Which makes the gender critical side look bad. Quite honestly, I can’t blame some transpeople not feeling safe if that’s the response they get from Belfield and people like him. The contempt he has for his audience is astonishing to behold. He shouts at them, tells them to hurry up with what they’re saying and generally insults them.
I dare say that Belfield probably sees himself as some kind of shock jock, provoking his listeners with his abrupt and outrageous behaviour. Well, he ain’t Howard Stern, who was genuinely shocking and outrageous, but wasn’t homophobic. Belfield, by contrast, is just rude and nasty. And watching his behaviour here, including the sneers about women’s football and his creepy behaviour towards his female fans, you can see why Radio Leeds sacked him after a year.
The collapse of Alex Belfield continues. I don’t mean this to sound homophobic, but I do find it funny considering the innuendo and sneers Belfield makes about various camp TV presenters and celebs. He describes them as being ‘light on their feet’, and the various remarks about his off-camera assistant, Tarquin. It seems to be based on some of the camp humour of the 1970s, and particularly Larry Grayson’s, and his jokes about Everard and Slack Alice and his punchline ‘seems like a nice boy’. There’s a big difference between him and Grayson though, quite apart from the fact that the humour itself is 40 or so years out of date. It’s that Grayson was genuinely funny and seemed to be a genuinely nice person. He never stalked or harassed anyone, did not con people out of money by claiming that he was going to sue the BBC or police, or that he needed it to pay a barrister and then defended himself. He was a gentlemanly host on the Generation Game, and my parents preferred him to his predecessor on the game show, Bruce Forsythe. And when Grayson made those camp jokes, it was genuinely meant in fun. Looking at Belfield’s sneers, it seems like a touch of real homophobia combined with jealousy that they have jobs with the Beeb and he doesn’t.
This is why this little snippet of news is quite ironic.
There is, apparently, a site on the net called ‘Gay or Straight’, where people go to vote about the sexuality of particular celebs. According to the utterly scurrilous Sir Jimmy Savile channel on YouTube, 77 people went on there to vote on the issue of Belfield’s sexual orientation. And they voted that Belfield, who will be sentenced tomorrow for his crimes, was 85 per cent gay. As the average percentage for people voted gay seems to be 69 per cent, this means that, by the standards of the site, he is very gay indeed.
And this is about a man who constantly criticised Pride parades and other gay stories, largely taken from the Daily Heil.
Well, as the genuinely nice and great Larry Grayson would say, ‘seems like a nice boy.’
More on the continuing collapse of Alex Belfield’s popularity, courtesy of the YouTube channel, ‘Latest News on Alex Belfield Stalking Court Case’. And the latest news on Alex Belfield is not good, well, not from his point of view, but from the perspective of everyone who feels ripped off and insulted by him, it’s brilliant. After problems with YouTube over his content, Belfield announced he was off to Ustreme to host a secret VOR – Voice of Reason – club there. Of course, Alex Belfield as the voice of reason is, to use Spock’s description of Klingon justice, ‘a unique perspective’. Mostly it was just sub-Daily Mail rants against the channel migrants, immigration in general, the NHS, the BBC, diversity quotas, the trans cult, Guardian-reading, champagne-sipping Naga Manchushi types and people ‘who are light on their feet’. So, just a bit of homophobia then. Mixed in with this were jabs at Carol Vorderman, who he sent up as ‘Carol Vordernorks’, and Diane Abbott. This was all delivered with very ’70s jokes about ‘jellywobblers’. I do wonder what he had against Manchetti and Vorderman. Some of this was undoubtedly general Tory hatred. They started going after her because she did an advert in contravention of BBC rules. But I think the real reason was that Manchetti had been too good at humiliating Tories with awkward question during interviews. But the from the way Belfield carried on, you would think it, and whatever animus he had against Vorderman, was personal. Did they turn him down for a date?
Belfield was charging his viewers a pound a month or something to watch his Ustreme channel. This has irked an awful lot of his critics and detractors. Former fans of his have stopped watching, and are now posting YouTube videos instead stating very clearly why they no longer support him. One man explained that he doesn’t like the way Belfield insults and sneers at the viewers to his show, nor the way he’s constantly begging for money while boasting about his luxury holidays to places like Vegas. He pointed out that many of Belfield’s viewers are genuinely poor, and so Belfield was exploiting them to make himself richer. As for the humour, it got old. He originally liked it, but now has got sick and tired of it. And I think this fellow’s complaints are the same as many of Belfield’s former viewers.
The video below states that the viewing figures for Belfield’s Secret Vor Club were leaked. He only has 320 viewers, and some of them have cancelled watching him after his conviction for stalking. He suggests that the mad right-winger may go back to YouTube to post there in the time he has left before the Beak sentences him. Others have started speculating whether he’ll be allowed to do the voice of reason from his jail cell.
Whatever happens, Belfield’s popularity is collapsing. And there’s nothing he can do about it.
I got this email from pro-nationalisation, pro-NHS organisation We Own It yesterday. It gives the polling figures for the proportion of the British public that wants the public utilities renationalised. It’s around two-thirds of the British public for industries like electricity, rail, and water, and rises to 78 per cent for the NHS. This figure, although healthy, does concern me, as I understood that previous polls put the figure at 85 per cent. This looks like a drop in popularity, possibly caused by the way the Tories have run it down combined with scumbags like Alex Belfield and Nana Akua on GB telling everyone how better these services would be if they were privatised. As for the Royal Mail, this was privatised by the Grinning Blair, against everybody’s wishes. I know working class Tories who actually voted Labour when the Tories were muttering about privatising it. They mistakenly believed that Labour wouldn’t sell it off. This is what happens with Blairite Labour: you get Hobson’s choice. The faces change, but the policies don’t, because Labour’s listening to the same corporate donors and the same newspaper barons, especially the voice of Mysterian Murdoch. But these figures together, and the chaos privatisation has caused, are a powerful argument for renationalisation. Here’s the email:
‘Dear David,
Everyone is talking about nationalisation, so we’ve been getting the word out in the press about how popular it is. A majority of the UK public support public ownership of key utilities like energy and water – including Conservative voters.
This week we released our biggest ever poll with Survation which shows:
💧69% want publicly owned water
💡66% want publicly owned energy
🚌 65% want publicly owned buses
🚄67% want publicly owned rail
🏥78% want a publicly owned NHS
📮68% want a publicly owned Royal Mail
If you agree with public services for people not profit, you’re not alone – and you can help spread the word about how popular public ownership is:
Your energy bill is going up and up – in January bills are set to hit £500 a month and 100,000 people have committed not to pay.
Sewage flows into our rivers and seas, making people ill and killing fish, but water companies return billions in dividends to shareholders.
Other countries’ state owned railways profit from our privatised system, while the government plans to close ticket offices at the same time as talking about ‘Great British Railways’.
Privatisation has failed and we’re all feeling the consequences.
But you are fighting back!
THANK YOU to everyone who’s signed the petition to Nationalise Bulb. Thanks to your support, the campaign got covered in the Express! Sign and share the petition if you haven’t already. Let’s make our demand as big as possible ahead of the energy price cap rise next week…
I don’t know if this video is satire or a homage to the duo. It’s a cartoon from Ryanonwifi’s YouTube channel of Belfield meeting Andy the Gabby Cabby after Belfield’s return from a luxury trip to Vegas. The speech in the cartoon sounds automated, but the dialogue really does skewer Belfield, with his jokes about ‘jellywobblers’, especially those belonging to ‘Carol Vordernorks’ and the way he insults people by calling them ‘shushi-shushi, champagne sipping, Guardian-reading socialists. Ryanonwifi is a fan of Andy the Gabby Cabby, whose relationship with Belfield is unclear. And I’m not sure if Ryanonwifi really intended to be so, but it really does seem like a biting spoof of the convicted stalker.
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