Question Time Platforms Extreme Right-Wing Anti-NHS Group without Telling Viewers about Them

A day or so ago I put up a piece discussing how the right-wing Lotus Eaters on YouTube have decided that healthcare isn’t a right, thus showing their opposition to the basic principle underlying the NHS. But they’re not the only right-wingers, who despise the NHS in the name of absolute free trade and private enterprise. Another of these is the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has been promoting these policies since the 1970s. Northern Irish YouTuber Maximilien Robespierre posted this little video on his channel exposing how Emily Carver, a representative of the IEA, was a guest on Question Time. However, the Beeb did not deign to tell its viewers who the IEA was or what they stood for. And in fact, as the video shows, the IEA are very secretive about both their members and the organisation itself. They’re on a list of political organisations and think tanks ranked according to their transparency. And the IEA are in the red marked ‘highly opaque’.

Carver and her organisation’s secrecy was called out by the panellist representing the SNP. He pointed out that he and the other politicians on the show, from the Lib Dems and Labour, had no need to explain what their parties represented as everyone knew already. But Carver and the IEA were just introduced as ‘a think tank’. Carver blustered some rubbish in her defence about being willing to reveal their members’ identities if necessary, but were really just taking care to protect them. Robespierre also goes on to reveal just what the IEA stands for by showing their entry on Wikipedia. He also shows Carver’s own extreme private enterprise stance with a couple of articles she authored, including one asking if people were finally waking up to how dreadful the NHS was.

In fact the Beeb has form when it comes to platforming right-wing organisations on their news programmes without telling people about their connections. A few years ago a friend of mine pointed out how the right-wing Taxpayers Alliance were frequently invited onto the news to give their opinions on government spending and presented as an independent organisation. This is technically true, but the leadership were all members of the Conservative party, making them effectively a Tory front organisation.

Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis have an entire chapter in their book, NHS SOS discussing the way the Beeb’s coverage of the health service is biased and supportive of its privatisation. Academics from Glasgow and Edinburgh universities showed a few years ago that the BBC was biased towards the political right, though the Tories and their supporters continue to brand it as left-wing and liberal. The inclusion of the IEA without informing the public of what they stand for is just more proof of the Beeb’s right-wing bias and the supporting someone in the Corporation is giving to the NHS’ privatisation.

Tory Health Minister Matt Hancock Receiving Donations from NHS Privatisation Think Tank

On Monday Mike published a very interesting piece revealing that Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, has been receiving donations of between 2,000 and 4,000 pounds after his election in 2010. The donor is one Neil Record, a currency manager. Who is also the head of the board of the Institute of Economic Affairs. The IEA is one of the key think tanks behind Thatcher’s programme of privatizing everything that isn’t nailed down, and destroying the welfare state. All for the benefit of private industry, of course. It is very firmly behind the privatization of the NHS, and the IEA is campaigning to introduce a private medical service funded by private health insurance, as in the US. Where their system has broke down to such a level that 40,000 each year die because they can’t afford their medical care, and where 7 million Americans last year lost their insurance cover.

However, the IEA, according to Mike, has responded to critics of NHS privatization by saying that they’re opposed patients having a choice.

Ah yes, ‘choice’. That old Thatcherite canard. I can remember being told by one of the Tory students at College that private industry provided ‘choice’. It was one of the mantras of Maggie Thatcher. Someone once asked her what the essence of Christianity was. Her answer was simple: ‘Choice’. So, nothing about salvation from sin, the healing of a broken world, the moral duty to work for the public good and create a better society, provide for the poor, the sick, disabled and marginalized. No, nothing about that. Just ‘choice’. No wonder she fell out with Archbishop Runcie and the Scots Kirk. She had no idea.

Mike concludes his piece on Hancock with the words

In fact, privatisation would force patients into insurance schemes that are unlikely ever to pay out, meaning patients would end up with no choice at all.

The IEA is a firm fan of such insurance schemes.

And our Health Secretary takes its bribes cash.

We’ll need to watch this one carefully. Will he try to use Brexit to put through his real paymasters’ plan?

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/01/28/how-can-we-trust-the-tory-government-when-its-ministers-behave-like-this/

It isn’t just the fact that the private insurance schemes the Tories and New Labour would love to force us all into won’t pay out that makes all the claims of ‘choice’ a farcical lie. It’s the fact that under Blair’s introduction of private medical care in the NHS, costs still have to be kept down. Blair’s reforms were based on those of the private healthcare group, Kaiserpermanente in America, which he wrongly believed provided better value for money that state-managed healthcare. Under their system, there was a special office that looked into the comparative treatment prices of different hospitals, and the patient got sent to the cheapest, regardless of what he or she personally wanted. There was no choice.

I’m not at all surprised that Hancock has been receiving money from the privatisers. All the Tories and New Labour have. The privatization of the NHS was heavily pushed by private healthcare firms like Unum under John Major and his wretched health secretary, Peter Lilley, and then under Tony Blair. Who was surrounded by any number of private healthcare companies desperate for some of that sweet, sweet NHS action. Like BUPA, Nuffield Health, Virgin Healthcare, Circle Health and others.

As for the IEA, I found a slew of their pamphlets in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, and actually couldn’t believe how bad they were. There was one pamphlet arguing that the state can’t run industries, as shown by about 4-6 very carefully selected examples. One of them was Concorde, which did initially have a very difficult time selling the plane. However, while British aerospace companies have continued to be troubled, the French used the expertise they developed with the project to expand theirs. And Ha-Joon Chang in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism shows very clearly that the state very much can run private companies very successfully. The examples in the IEA pamphlet are obviously very carefully cherrypicked.

And I don’t think it’s just in the economic sphere that the IEA is a backward influence. Along with this pamphlet was one Liberating Women from Feminism, which I think was basically arguing that the ladies should give up any hope of having a career or equality, and go back to running the home. I’m sure some women would like to, and that’s fine if it’s their free choice and they find it fulfilling. But the majority of women these days want a career and economic parity with blokes. And the IEA’s campaign against that would leave many women without any choice, as it was until only a few decades ago. Which all shows how much they really believe in ‘choice’.

Get the IEA and the other privatizing think tanks out of politics, and Matt Hancock and Tweezer out of government. We need a real, socialist Labour government to restore the NHS. A government that has to be led by Corbyn.

Radical Balladry: Folk Protest Songs against the Credit Trap

On Thursday I published a post about the way the Bulgarian peasants’ party, BANU, attempted to provide reasonable credit from banks lent to peasant credit cooperatives as a way of destroying the moneylenders that had plagued Bulgarian rural society, as a result of whom hundreds of villages had found themselves in serious debt. I suggested that we needed something similar to act against usurers, such as Wonga and the other payday loan companies. Thousands of people in Britain have now also found themselves heavily in debt because of the way they have been forced to rely on such companies, as well as criminal loan sharks, because of low wages and the repeated slashing of benefits by successive governments. People have also been caught in the credit trap through the absurdly easy terms on which it was available during the boom years. Advertisers must share their responsibility for this, has the television adverts for the services of Wonga and the various credit cards suggest that this is all free money, which the borrower doesn’t need to worry about paying back. It’s a seductive message, and all too many people have been taken in and deceived by it.

Jess has also commented on this post with her encyclopaedic knowledge of the long tradition of radical British folk music. She notes that there was an outcry at the way many people were finding themselves in debt through hire purchase when this was introduced in the 1950s. Then as now, Right-wing think tanks attempted to justify the creation of easily available credit, which could lead the poor and vulnerable into a never-ending cycle of debt. This indeed occurred, and was bitterly criticised in song by Graham Gouldman and Jeff Beck. Jess writes

“Britain too in the 21st century has seen the return of the loan shark and moneylender as thousands, perhaps millions, have got into serious debt. Some of this has been through the absurdly easy credit that was offered in the boom years, ”

The availability of ‘absurdly easy credit’ was one of the cornerstones of the neo-liberal agenda.

Way back in 1958 the IEA published their apologia for the money-lending industry ‘Hire Purchase in a Free Society’ [Harris, Naylor & Seldon]

A typical IEA publication of the period, it contains a few gems;

“Social Impact;
Criticism of hire purchase has not come only from moralists who condemn the practice on the grounds that it ensnares people into debts they cannot afford to repay’ morphs into, with an aside from Walter Greenwood’s condemnation of ‘tick’ in ‘Love on The Dole’ to the assertion that;

“Harry [the character condemned by supposedly old-fashioned notions of debt as a weekly ‘mill-stone around the debtors’ neck’ got his new suit…”

Just how deeply the tally-man was disliked, generally, is suggested in this song from Graham Gouldman, (recorded with great reluctance by Jeff Beck)

“To our house on a Friday
A man calls every week
We give him a pound
When he calls on his round

To our house on a Friday
A man calls every week
We give and we get
And we’re always in debt

With his plan he carries all we’re needing
With his plan most anything is ours
He’s the Tallyman, oh yeah
He’s the Tallyman

Shoes and socks, hard wearing for the children
Village frocks all in the latest style
From the Tallyman, oh yeah
From the Tallyman

To our house on a Friday
A man calls every week
We’ve made him a friend
So he’s here to the end

From cradle to grave
We expect him to say
Here’s tick to the end
So we’ve made him a friend
Here’s tick to the end
So we’ve made him a friend”

[Beck objected to Mickie Most’s insistence on a ‘catchy’ follow-up to ‘Silver Lining’ and hated the production, rather than Graham Gouldman’s lyrics]

The debt problem is likely to become even more severe with the government’s cuts to the buffer amount of money allowed to families before they are considered to have been overpaid tax credit, and the use of private debt collectors to pursue the poor, who have been mistakenly overpaid. So this is another song that could reasonably be revived and adapted to suit the new conditions created by Wonga and the like, and now the Inland Revenue.

As for the latter, one of the experts on Japanese monster movies on TV – I think it may have been the great Phil Jupitus – once said that the only time you ever heard cheering during a Godzilla movie was when the epic fire-breathing radio-active dragon from the depths trashed the headquarters of their Inland Revenue in Tokyo. If only something similar would happen to the house of whichever vicious Tory apparatchik dreamed up this bill.

Godzilla: First the Japanese Inland Revenue offices in Tokyo, but will he trash Osbo? We live in hope!

Jess on Say’s Law and the Tory Denial that Increase in Food Banks Represents Genuine Demand

Jess, one of the commenters on this blog has posted a detailed critique of the economic law behind the Tories’ refusal to admit that the rise in food banks is due to a massive increase in poverty. The Tories cannot admit that there is mass starvation in this country due to their austerity campaign. They therefore claim instead that food banks are increasing simply because there are more food banks, and their mere existence attracts more customers.

In her comment to Mike’s post on Vox Political, ‘Food bank blow is new low for the Mail on Sunday’, Jess attacks this assertion, and shows that it is based on Say’s Law, an economic doctrine that has now been comprehensively refuted in the form it has been adopted under Lord Freud to justify the attacks food banks. She states

“Another claim – that “volunteers revealed that increased awareness of food banks is driving a rise in their use” is unsubstantiated, and is clearly an attempt to support the government’s claim that this is the case. But it is silly. Of course starving people will go to a food bank after they have been told it exists; that doesn’t mean they aren’t starving.”

The DWP appear to be pushing this line rather hard, as their response to the public’s growing awareness of the scandal of food banks. Their argument, based on Say’s Law, is utterly fallacious, and they must know it is.

Say’s Law, roughly formulated, is “”Supply creates its own demand”[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_creates_its_own_demand].
In the present context it seems to have been first invoked by Lord Freud, and then taken up by his department.

It will be familiar to most people through its mention by Keynes in his ‘General Theory’;
“From the time of Say and Ricardo the classical economists have taught that supply creates its own demand; meaning by this in some significant, but not clearly defined, sense that the whole of the costs of production must necessarily be spent in the aggregate, directly or indirectly, on purchasing the product.” [http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch02.htm]

But even the free marketeers regard Freud’s interpretation of Say as ridiculous;
“W. H. Hutt once referred to Say’s Law as the most fundamental ‘economic law’ in all economic theory. In its crude and colloquial form, Say’s Law is frequently understood as supply creates its own demand, as if the simple act of supplying some good or service on the market was sufficient to call forth demand for that product. It is certainly true that producers can undertake expenses, such as advertising, to persuade people to purchase a good they have already chosen to supply, but that is not the same thing as saying that an act of supply necessarily creates demand for the good in question. This understanding of the law is obviously nonsensical as numerous business and product failures can attest to. If Say’s Law were true in this colloquial sense, then we could all get very rich just by producing whatever we wanted.” [http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/understanding-says-law-of-markets]

How then, did this silly ‘aphorism’ creep into the language of the DWP?

One route may have been through the IEA and it’s then Director David G Green.. He wrote a couple of pamphlets in the late ’90′s advocating the demolition of Social Security, and a return to the Friendly Societies of Victorian England [Benefit dependency : how welfare undermines dependency.1998; An end to welfare rights : the rediscovery of independence 1999]

Most people, at the time, thought Green was ‘off his trolley’, It is tragic that Say, and Green is being used to attack food banks. The last refuge of the destitute.

This last paragraph, where she mentions IEA and its director, David G Green, is also important. I remember back in the 1990s the Daily Mail criticising the establishment of the modern welfare state for the way it sidelined the Friendly Societies. The Daily Mail had clearly been influenced by Green’s bonkers views, and it shows just how extreme and reactionary the Mail is.