Vote Leave’s Lies about the EU and the NHS Funding

I just caught a bit of Vote Leave’s referendum broadcast earlier this evening. It was broadcast around about 7 O’clock, just before the One Show. I didn’t see all of it, as I was busy here, putting up article, but just managed to catch a snippet where they claiming that the £350 million they claim we spend every week on Europe could be used to build hospitals in the NHS. They then claimed that the EU therefore was undermining the Health Service.

They then went on to scaremonger about immigration, raising the dire spectre of what might happen when Albania, Macedonia and Turkey all join the EU. There were large, scary arrows from those countries running across Europe to Britain, rather like the diagram of the Nazi advance in the titles of Dad’s Army. Which is actually what I’d much rather be watching, even in the recent film version, than the Brexiteers and their wretched propaganda. But they made, the claim, so let’s filk it.

Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Farage (and Johnson, Gove and Ms Patel)

First of all, the claim that Britain spends £350 million every week on Europe has been refuted again and again. Yes, we do spend that money, but we get over £100 million or so of it back. So in net terms, no, we certainly don’t spend that amount. See Mike’s articles about this over at Vox Political.

Then there’s that guff about funding the EU diverting money away from the NHS. This is rubbish. What is undermining the NHS is the stealth privatisation carried out by Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care bill of 2012. This has opened up the NHS to further privatisation by private health care firms, such as Virgin, which under law must be given contracts. This has frequently gone against the wishes of the patients using the NHS. The reforms included forcing local authorities responsible for some NHS provision to contract out at least 3 medical services from a list of eight sent down by the government. Furthermore, the remaining state-owned and managed sectors of the NHS are being deliberately starved of funds as part of the campaign to privatise the whole shebang. See Jacky Davis’ and Raymond Tallis’ NHS SOS, particularly the chapters ‘1. Breaking the Public Trust’, by John Lister; ‘2. Ready for Market’, by Steward Player, and ‘7. From Cradle to Grave’, by Allyson M. Pollock and David Price.

It’s a lie that the NHS is being starved of funding due to Europe. It’s being starved of funding due to Lansley and the rest of the Conservative party and their purple counterparts in UKIP. If Vote Leave were serious about the funding crisis in the NHS, then Johnson, Gove, Patel and the other xenophobes and Little Englanders would have voted against Lansley’s bill. They didn’t. They supported it.

‘Bloody Foreigners, Comin’ Over ‘Ere!’

Let’s deal with the threat of people from Turkey, Albania and Macedonia all flooding over here in the next few years. This too, is overblown and pretty much a lie. Turkey would like to join the EU, but the chances of it actually qualifying to do so are presently remote. Critics have suggested that it’ll only reach the point where it has developed sufficiently to be admitted in about 30 years’ time. So the Turks are hardly likely to come flooding up from Anatolia in the next few years.

As for Albania and Macedonia, I’m sceptical about the numbers that will come from those nations due to the open borders policies. Mike’s posted up pieces reminding us all how millions of Romanians and Bulgarians were supposed to be ready to inundate Britain, and in the event only a small number arrived. Mark Steel, the left-wing activist and comedian, in one of his newspaper columns, republished in Colin Firth and Anthony Arnove’s The People Speak: Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport, attacked the inflated claims of the threat of uncontrolled immigration by pointing out that many of the Poles, who were supposed to flood in, had in fact gone back to Poland. So while it’s certainly possible that a vast number of Albanians and Macedonians may want to come to Britain, it’s also possible that few in fact will.

And in any case, why would they all want to come to Britain? The impression given by the Brexit video tonight was that Britain was a tiny island under siege, and that the first country that the Turks, Albanians and Macedonians would all head for was Britain. But why? Britain’s social security system and welfare state – or what remains of them – are much less generous than some parts of the rest of Europe. Britain does have more cache, apparently, than some of the other nations, but Britain is by no means the sole destination for migrants, as we’ve seen.

Vote Leave’s video tonight was little more than right-wing scaremongering. What I saw was mostly speculation, and when it wasn’t speculation, as on the piece on the NHS, it was a distortion compounded with lies. There are problems with Europe and immigration, but leaving the EU isn’t the solution. Indeed, voting for Johnson, Gove, Patel, Farage and their cronies will only make the situation worse. They want to privatise the NHS, just as they want to remove the EU human rights legislation and social charter that protects British workers. The anti-EU campaign is part of this programme to grind down and deprive working people of their hard-won rights at work and for state support in sickness and unemployment. Don’t be taken in.

Ancient Greek Medicine vs the Tory Privatisation of the NHS

As with so much of western culture, western medicine has its basis in that of ancient Greece. One of the greatest of the ancient Greek medical texts is the Hippocratic Corpus, the bulk of which were written sometime between 430 and 330 BC. The authors of these treatises were not only concerned with the physical, technical aspects of their profession – the structure of the human body, the nature of disease, and methods of healing. They were also concerned with moral status of the doctor and correct ethical practice. Until a few decades ago, doctors were bound by the Hippocratic oath, which amongst other things forbade them from practising surgery, performing abortions, administering poisons and using their position as a doctor for sexual exploitation. They were required to be chaste and religious, and to do no harm.

‘I will use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment; I will abstain by harming or wronging any man by it.’

Although there was no state provision of health care in the ancient world, and doctors charged fees for their services, nevertheless the Hippocratic authors condemned greed and stated that there should be occasions when the doctor should be required to treat patients for free. Furthermore, the doctor should not withhold treatment simply because he has not agreed a fee with the patient, nor to upset his patient by discussing the cost of treatment before treating him or her.

The Hippocratic Oath itself contains the pledge

I will pay the same respect to my master in the Science as to my parents and share my life with him and pay all my debts to him. I will regard his sons as my brothers and teach them the Science, if they desire to learn it, without fee or contract. I will had on precepts, lectures and all other learning to my sons, to those of my master and to those pupils duly apprenticed and sworn and to none other.

Thus there is the beginning of the notion that medical education should be free.

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the Hippocratic writings, G.E.R. Lloyd writes

Several of the Hippocratic treatises that deal with questions of medical etiquette and ethics warn the doctor against avarice. Precepts (Ch.6) recommends that the doctor should consider the patients’ means in fixing fees and, as already noted, suggests that the doctor should be prepared, on occasion, to treat a patient for nothing. The same work also says (ch.4) that the doctor should not begin a consultation by discussing fees with his patient. This may well cause the patient anxiety, for he may believe that the doctor will abandon him if no agreement over fees is reached. As the writer puts it; ‘It is better to reproach patients you have saved than to extort money from those in danger of dying.’ Decorum (ch5), too, mentions lack of the love of money as one of the qualities a good doctor should show.

This contradicts the spirit of the Tory privatisation of the NHS, as this is very much driven by the greed of private contractors, a fair number of whom employ or are headed by Tory MPs, and their desire to exploit the sick for their own profit. Indeed, Private Eye ran a detailed article on the origins of Private Finance Initiative a little while ago, showing that it had its origins in a scheme by Peter Lilley under John Major to allow private industry access to income from the N.H.S.

Yesterday I posted a piece about Mike’s article, over at Vox Political, on Keith Willett’s suggestion at a conference by one of the private health contractors, Urgent UK, that the government should pay doctors to sign clients back to work early. Yet in the sections ‘Aphorisms’, the very first piece of advice in Chapter 1 is

Life is short, science is long; opportunity is elusive, experiment is dangerous, judgment is difficult. It is not enough for the physician to do what is necessary, but the patient and the attendants must do their part as well, and circumstances must be favourable.

This suggests, amongst other things, that regardless of the skill of the doctor, the healing process will take as long as it takes. It can’t be forced. Which clearly goes against Willett’s apparent view that with a bit more money, doctors could force people back to work earlier. Presumably before they had got properly well.

The Tories are, of course, trying to introduce the American system of private medical care, and so make it fee paying. As I said, medicine in ancient Greece was private, although some doctors were employed by a few of the ancient Greek city states, probably in order to keep them there, as well as receiving fees from their patients. However, the sheer greed behind the Tories’ reforms contradicts much of the ethical spirit behind ancient Greek medicine. They are not just dragging us back to the period before the foundation of the NHS, but even into the most rapacious aspects of medicine in the ancient world.

Source

G.E.R. Lloyd, ed., and J. Chadwick, W.N. Mann, I.M. Lonie and E.T. Withington, trans, Hippocratic Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973)