I posted an article yesterday about the resignation from UKIP of Jonathan Stanley, a Scotland-based surgeon. Mr Stanley was their candidate for Westmoreland and Lonsdale. He resigned citing racism and sectarianism in the Scottish party as his reasons for leaving, along with the party’s failure to publish documents he had written about the deaths of eleven babies and a mother in the University Hospitals of the Morecambe Bay NHS Trust.
The Guardian today published an article reporting Mr Stanley’s resignation as one of three blows and scandals to hit the party. The other two were the investigation of Janice Atkinson for fiddling her expenses from the EU, and the suspension of Stephen Howd, a barrister, and their candidate for Scunthorpe, over allegations of harassment at his workplace.
The Guardian’s report says little about this. Most of the article is about Stanley’s resignation and Atkinson’s fraud, adding a few more details about why he resigned. In addition to the sectarianism and culture of bullying, he also strongly objected to the party’s use of ‘the language of English nationalism’. He felt it was damaging and corrosive to the Eurosceptic and Unionist cause.
He also took issue with part of Farage’s plan to exclude migrants from state support for five years after they came here. Along with his other reasons, he stated he could not support the exclusion of migrant children from state education and medical care.
Stanley’s absolutely right. It is totally unacceptable that migrant children, in particular, should be punished and left vulnerable because their parents came here in search of a better life. It’s also a move that is absolutely certain to do immense harm. If you exclude children from state education, and they cannot afford the immense fees of private tuition, then automatically you create an unskilled underclass, who will have no other recourse but crime. Especially if they cannot claim dole or other benefits.
I’ve similarly reblogged material from Vox Political, where Mike has produced the opinions of doctors and social workers that if migrants are excluded from the NHS, then it could lead to more infectious disease going untreated. You think of the chaos and suffering that could arise, if someone contracted Ebola, because they came from or visited West Africa, and were excluded from state medical treatment and couldn’t afford to go privately.
Or more prosaic problems and deaths that could arise from more ordinary problems going untreated, like meningitis or appendicitis. And does anyone really want to see women left to give birth without proper medical care, especially after the rave reviews of the Beeb’s Call The Midwife? That programme showed exactly the problems women faced bearing children in the East End slums in 1950s austerity Britain. No-one should want that privation and poverty to come back.
Except, it seems, Farage, and the rest of the Kipper, Tory and Lib Dem goons, who crave to see the NHS carved up and sold off.
The Guardian’s article is at: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/20/ukip-faces-crisis-two-parliamentary-candidates-suspended-one-resigns
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