Actually, despite his denials, I think Belfield, the self-proclaimed ‘Voice Of Reason’ was extremely bothered. I know some of you are sick of me giving him and his YouTube channel publicity, but this is hilarious. But there’s also a very serious point to be made here as well.
A few days ago Belfield put up a video about how he was fact-checked by Google or another group concerned with what it is acceptable to say on YouTube. They challenged him on his estimate of the number of deaths from Covid. Belfield consistently and loudly opposes the lockdown, arguing that’s it’s unnecessary and harming industry, children’s schooling and people’s mental and physical health, among other issues. The stats he cited, which he claimed came from the Office of National Statistics, were part of this argument. He then declared that this showed the ‘lefties’ devouring each other.
He then stated, firmly and loudly, that he was not bothered about it while, like Catherine Tate’s petulant schoolgirl, sounding increasingly extremely bovvered. It was doing him good, because all the people that hate watch him were nevertheless making him rich by clicking on his channel. He then began yet another rant about Guardian-reading, champagne-sipping, oyster-eating ‘Naga Manchushi’ types. And to show how not bovvered he is, he put up another video for days ago on ‘the factchecking scam’. Well, he’s certainly shown he’s not bothered as so far he hasn’t joined Alex Jones in ranting about the globalists. But it’s a moot point how far Jones himself believed the rubbish he spouted.
Now I’ll get to the serious point. On the same day that he posted this, Belfield posted yet another video calling for the NHS to be privatised because of Boris giving PPE contracts to his chums. They supplied duff equipment at well over-the-odds prices. If they were able to fulfil the orders at all. Belfield wants you to believe that it’s the fault of having a nationalised National Health Service.
He’s talking nonsense, malign, dangerous nonsense. The poor performance of the NHS comes from decades of Tory cuts and the piecemeal privatisation that sees NHS contracts given to private healthcare companies, who are less efficient and provide a poorer service. But hey, it’s all done for the profit-motive, so it must be better. NHS Test Trace, and which has also performed spectacularly badly, was NHS in name only. It was completely private, though the Tories didn’t want you to know that. But Belfield doesn’t want you to know how badly NHS Privatisation is failing and how badly we need it renationalised.
Now Belfield is, as far as I can make out, a lone YouTuber broadcasting by himself or with a bare minimum of people helping him. He’s not Fox News, GB News or whatever. But he has 300,000 viewers, which is, as he points out, larger than some of the news broadcasters he tackles and sneers at. He is therefore not without influence, and therefore deserves to be criticised. Even if that runs the risk of being counterproductive.
Much of Belfield’s output could be called ‘tabloid TV’. It consists of a fair amount of celeb gossip, much of it directed at the antics of Katie Price and her continuing attempts to make money from her body and her disabled son, Harvey. There are loud denunciations of woke ideology, as he attacks the TV companies for throwing experienced, quality, but White broadcasters of more mature years off in favour of minority ‘box tickers’. He also strong criticises some of the mad results of the transgender ideology, as when a Scottish law student was accused of transphobia and investigated by her university simply for saying that women have vaginas. And then there are his rants against the channel migrants or the ‘dinghy divers’ as he calls them, who he claims are being treated better than Britain’s own poor and homeless. Well if they are, it’s because of the Tory policies Belfield so loudly supports.
His audience appear to be the same demographic as those attracted to UKIP: older, socially conservative White people who fear immigration and the new morality. This isn’t exclusively so – when he came down to visit Bristol, among the people he met was a woman of east Asian ancestry. I don'[t doubt that some Blacks also watch his channel. There are Black Conservatives and not all of them by any means are supporters of Black Lives Matter, as you can see from the videos by Black American right-wingers making some very acute criticisms of the movement. And it’s these, largely older people Belfield is catering and lying to.
He’s lying when he gives the impression that everything would be better off if the NHS was handed over to private industry. It won’t. It will be worse run and the British public will have to pay for it through private health insurance. That includes Belfield’s audience, the working class people he appeals to with all the guff about being a working-class boy from a pit estate, sneered at and passed over by the BBC Guardian-reading etc middle class people. These are the people, who will find it especially difficult to get healthcare if the NHS was privatised.
And this is why I call out Belfield on this issue.
And I’ve no qualms about admitting that when it comes to NHS privatisation, I am very bovvered.
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