‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind’, as Sergeant-Major Shutup from It Ain’t ‘Alf ‘Ot Mum used to say. Mad Brexiteer Mahyar Tousi put up a video yesterday gloating over the continued demise of GB News and boasting about how his own YouTube channel now has more average viewers than the ‘old media’ TV stations. People are continuing to switch off GB News, and so Angela Frangopoulos, the station’s chief Dalek, has ruled that guests will no longer be paid fees for appearances. Regular guests will be paid a flat rate, which sounds like it’s basically just expenses, but it looks like they’re expected to find their own transport and be prompt and prepared for their appearance. Tousi points out that this isn’t a good idea, as guests and contributors should be paid for their expertise and broadcasters are in competition for them. This included GB News, which used to pay them well.
He then talks about the poor average ratings of these channels. The BBC is at the top with 100,000 average views. Next highest is Sky News. GB News is below them, and right at the bottom is Talk TV, which Tousi describes as only half a station that’s only on for part of the day. His channel has 300,000 views or followers, which shows how YouTube channels are eating the old media alive. Which is true, but I wish it didn’t include right-wing channels like Tousi’s.
As for GB News, I think this was supposed to be a rival to the ‘woke, wet BBC’. Their ratings have been steadily going down since they were launched. Many of their programmes have zero people watching. They tried to improve matters by bringing on Farage, and he did boost their rating – but only for his show. Once Farage’s programme had ended, people went back to not watching. This dire situation probably explains why they’ve now hired Lozza Fox and are hiring Jacob Rees-Mogg. Speaking personally, Mogg is one of the last people I want to see on TV, but for some reason the man who comes across very much as wanting to send small children back up chimneys is a great, molten hero of the Tory voters. And I definitely do not want to see any video with Nana Akua complaining about the health service and subtly hinting that it should be privatised.
And this isn’t all of the channel’s problems. Libertarian Islamophobe Mark Steyn left/ was given the heave-ho because of his remarks about the Covid lockdown and vaccination, and the channel is ordering its staff to keep any anti-vaxxer views they may have to themselves. This has outraged all the right-wingers who think that it should have been better to have kept Britain open, risking more people catching the disease and who think that there’s something in the vaccine itself that’s harmful. I think the YouTuber Paz 49 is one of these, as he threw a strop when Reform’s Richard Tice advised people to get the jab.
The internet is taking over, but rather than people watching GB News or Tousi’s right-wing rants, I’d rather people looked at left-wing YouTubers like A Different Bias, Novara Media, Maximilien Robespierre and so many others. As they are presenting a genuinely different view of this country and its politics, which is far more informative than the nonsense spouted by the privileged individuals spouting populist nonsense against the NHS. welfare state and the Channel migrants.
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.
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…
Okay, yesterday I flicked through the Daily Mail. I’m not proud of it, but there was precious little else to read and I was in the barber’s waiting for a haircut. The Heil was there as one of the newspapers put there for the customers to peruse while waiting. There was, as you’d expect, a great deal about the war in Ukraine. But what struck me was a little article at the bottom of a page further in. The headline of this little piece announced that, according to polls, 85 per cent of Brits would consider paying for private treatment to jump the queues in the NHS. I didn’t read any further, as I was feeling a bit rough already from the anticancer drugs, and didn’t want to feel worse. I don’t know what polls these were, who was behind it or even how accurate they were.
But I bet the Tories and the Heil were delighted.
The Tories and the Labour successors have been pushing for the privatisation of the NHS ever since Maggie Thatcher. She wanted to sell it off and replace it by an American-style for-profit system, financed by private health insurance. She was prevented from doing so by a massive cabinet revolt and the information from her secretary, Patrick Jenkin, of how terrible the American system was in practise. So she satisfied herself by aiming to get at least 10 per cent of the British public to take out private health insurance. The Tories also went on to try and get the NHS opened up to private healthcare companies, firstly through the Private Finance Initiative, in which new hospitals were supposed to be a joint project between the state and private industry, but which largely results in the state having to shoulder all the costs. This was then followed by Blair’s NHS reforms, in which the new health centres and polyclinics were supposed to be built and run by private firms for the NHS and the introduction of the Care Commissioning Groups of doctors within the health service, which were empowered to raise funding through private means as well as buy in services from private health companies. Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, wanted the NHS to be sold off completely and become nothing more than a kitemark on services provided by private healthcare companies. And private healthcare companies were to be allowed to compete for NHS contracts. These reforms were taken over and extended once again by the Tories under Dodgy Dave Cameron, Tweezer and now the blonde abomination occupying No. 10. At the same time, NHS budgets have repeatedly been cut as part of an efficiency scheme which has left the health service which lower levels of funding than other first world countries. And this is all part of pattern.
Mike has repeatedly quoted the awesome Noam Chomsky, who has said that the right’s strategy for gaining popular support for privatisation is always to run it down through repeated cuts before finally privatising it.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing here, and I doubt it’s a coincidence this story emerged just as the House of Lords was prepared to go through a reading of the government’s Health and Social Care bill which will push the NHS’s privatisation even further.
The Tories will no doubt blame the queues on Covid. The disease is part of it, but the queues and the problems of the NHS in coping with it were due to over ten years of Tory cuts and privatisation, which has seen the bureaucracy and consequent administration costs increase as service has declined. it’s been remarked that the Tories never waste a crisis to make things worse. And that’s what they’re doing with the Coronavirus and the delays it’s caused in routine health treatment.
And right-wing internet media hosts are all too keen to help the Tories privatise the NHS.
Alex Belfield, who says he’s about to depart YouTube for Ustreme and a paywall at the end of the month, has posted numerous videos demanding the health service’s privatisation. So has Nana Akua on GB News, Calvin Robinson and Nigel Farage. The latter should be no surprise, as when he was head of UKIP he’d made noises about it being possible that Britain would have to turn to a system of funded by private health insurance. But these people are only saying what the Tories believe secretly.
Don’t believe that the Tories even remotely care about the NHS. Many of them, including the owners of the right-wing rags, will be delighted by this story.
Get them out, and get their collaborators the Blairites out of Labour.
Yesterday I put up a piece about a couple of videos attacking the NHS and preparing for its privatisation from GB News, featuring Nana Akua and Calvin Robinson. GB News is, you will remember, the right-wing alternative to the ‘wet and woke’ BBC. The channel has had a troubled history. It’s main personality was supposed to be Andrew Neil, formerly of the Beeb, and chair of the company that owns the increasingly Alt Right Spectator. That’s the Tory magazine that publishes Taki and his rants against the Jews and praising the Greek neo-Nazi outfit, Golden Dawn, as just good, patriotic Greek boys. Well, I’m sure there are any number of good patriotic Greek boys, who, unlike the Golden Dawn, don’t go around beating up immigrants and murdering left-wing journalists. Neil, however, departed for pastures new, and has been replaced by Nigel Farage as the broadcaster’s leading personality. This has improved ratings in that many more people are watching Farage. They aren’t, however, staying to watch the broadcaster’s other videos or programmes. But at least the production quality has improved so that it doesn’t look like they’re filming in a darkened shipping container.
After Akua and Robinson had done their bit pushing Tory falsehoods, along came the deputy leader of Laurence Fox’s Reform Party. Fox set it up as a response to what he considers to be the woke attack on British culture and history, and it’s been duly criticised because of this. In the video, Fox’s deputy began by criticising the health service for spending £49,000 painting various crossings on its premises in the trans colours. Now I have to say that I don’t think that’s the best use of funding myself, but all the government services including the police are under pressure to show they’re inclusive and welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community. Hence there have been police cars painted in the gay flag, accompanied by gay police officers, and even what looked like a cop in a gay bumblebee outfit as part of this public relations exercise. These were criticised by the right and YouTubers like Belfield, but the cops’ reasons for staging these campaigns are entirely understandable. Even after the decriminalisation of homosexuality c. 1968, public prejudice against gays was very high and many policemen were violently prejudiced. There were ironic jokes at the police’s expense in the ’80s by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones about police beating up gay men. There’s also a clip from the 1970s of a senior police officer, who states quite openly that he tries to arrest gay men at every chance he can get. In the 1980s there was James Anderton, the head of Manchester police, who provoked widespread outrage when he described gay people as depraved and said that AIDS was the Almighty’s judgement on them. Other organisations that have tried to reassure the gay community that they are perfectly welcome to use their services included the railways with the gay train. This was painted in the gay colours, and crewed by gays. I don’t know how many ordinary gay people were impressed by this display. I read comments by some gay people, who felt uneasy about it. They feared that what could start out as a positive statement could easily become negative through the special treatment and segregation of gays. Other gays have also commented on various vlogs that they now find the Pride marches somewhat ominous and intimidating, now that the tolerance of homosexuality and gay people is now an official policy and that the Pride marches come with sponsorship and endorsements from the big corporations. What once was genuinely radical and countercultural has now become mainstream and co-opted by the political and corporate establishment. But to come back to my main point, the NHS is merely one of a number of institutions and businesses, who feel that they have to make a gesture to reassure marginalised sections of the community.
And then came the slide. The Deputy Reformpartiefuhrer then moved on to claim that the NHS was being mismanaged. Now I agree, but for very different reasons than the Reform party bloke. There is waste in the NHS, but it’s due to the increased bureaucracy that has come with a quarter century and more of Thatcherite privatisation. The private healthcare companies, who’ve been given NHS contracts aren’t more efficient than the NHS. Indeed, in many instances they are less so – private hospitals are smaller. And administration costs have risen so that they’re now approaching the levels of the American private healthcare system of 24 per cent. The health service also receives far less funding than that of other companies, including America. But the Tories and their press are still lying to us about how it’s wasteful, inefficient and so needs more privatisation and less funding. And the Reform party, as a party of the right, are pushing that message.
Be careful, then, about Fox’s crew. They’re trying to attract followers with their opposition to ‘woke’ policies, but behind it comes the usual Tory demands and ideas. These will result in the privatisation of the NHS, with worse service, poorer health and the threat of a complete absence of care for those unable to pay.
This is what the Reform Party and GB News stand for, whatever their social conservative message. Don’t be taken in.
One of my criticisms of mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield is that he’s a supporter of NHS privatisation. He seems to believe that selling it off will somehow make it cheaper and more efficient. He doesn’t recognise, nor at least he doesn’t admit to recognising, that it’s the piecemeal privatisation of the health service and its opening up to private healthcare providers that has, with over a decade of Tory cuts, made the health service less efficient and increased administration costs. Nor does he tell his viewers that if the health service is privatised, it will be funded instead the American way – through private health insurance. Which 20 per cent of Americans couldn’t afford until Obamacare lowered that percentage. Every year, 50,000 Americans die because they can’t afford their medical treatment. And medical fees are either the leading cause or the second leading cause of bankruptcy in the Land of the Free.
Well, Belfield got suspended for a fortnight and has now vanished behind a paywall over at Ustreme after being factchecked about Covid and one or two other complaints. But now it seems that GB News, the Murdoch alternative to the ‘wet and woke’ BBC is getting in on the act of pushing for the health service’s privatisation.
Yesterday their presenter Nana Akua posted a video with the darling title ‘The NHS Is A Total Rip-Off’, in which she started with the claim that the health service wasn’t free and that, per month, private healthcare was probably cheaper. She then went on to say that there were six NHS executive earning over £150,000. Her video was accompanied by a similar one in which Calvin Robinson declared that the NHS was full of ‘bloat and waste’. Of course it all comes from the time-worn Tory playbook. This maintains that the health service, like every other nationalised industry, is wasteful and needs to have its funding cut in order to make it lean and efficient. As part of this drive for increased efficiency, it must be opened up to private industry, who are automatically better than state run enterprises. Except they’re not, and this is all a pack of lies and half truths.
Britain actually spends less on its health service than many other countries, including Germany and America, which is why it’s in such a state. In fact the privatisation has increased administration costs so that they’re heading up to the level of private American companies at 24 per cent. Private healthcare isn’t better – it’s worse. It’s fine for those, who are in reasonably good health, but it is not set up to treat the disabled or those with long term conditions. They are not profitable patients. As a result, private hospitals are smaller than NHS. Blair believed that the system adopted by the American healthcare giant, Kaiser Permanente, was more efficient and tried to remodel the NHS on it. Kaiser Permanente weren’t, and rather than increasing patient choice, the need to send patients to the cheapest hospitals and clinics for treatment has resulted in less choice, contrary to Thatcherite dogma. But the privatisation of the NHS is backed by big donations given to the parties by the companies seeking a bit of NHS action. And it has the full backing of Rupert Murdoch. Hence Akua and Robinson now coming out in favour of it.
As for the salaries of senior NHS staff, there’s a double standard going on here. We are deliberately not being told the salaries of the executives and managers of the healthcare companies seeking to take over after the NHS is privatised. This is common Tory practice. They deliberately made it easy for the private companies to bid against the NHS by forcing the health service to publish its accounts and costs while keeping those of the private companies secret. Because it’s ‘commercially sensitive’ you see. How convenient.
If GB News and the Tories have their way, Brits will end up having to pay for their healthcare with all consequent poverty, ill health and hardship attendant with the American for-profit system. But it’ll make Murdoch and the chief executives of the private healthcare companies rich, along with venal politicians looking for their donations.
Don’t believe the lies. Back a nationalised NHS and get rid of GB News.
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