Mad Tory internet radio host Alex Belfield is a staunch opponent of the NHS. He’s been posting a number of videos about its failing and pushing the line that the NHS should be privatised, as that will somehow magically improve service. Today he put up a video about the number of elderly patients, who have been failed by the NHS. The title of this wretch video is ‘Tues 23rd Nov NEWS š HOPELESS š¬š§ 130,000 OAPs Conveniently āGoneā & 100,000 Kids In Care’. I’m not going to post it up here, because I draw the line at posting anti-NHS propaganda. The video’s gathered a large number of comments, mostly supportive, from people who have lost loved one to what looks like incompetence and malpractice. Several of the commenters also express their hatred of socialism and the expectation that somehow the NHS would be better it wasn’t socialist and ‘colonised by the far left’. I kid you not. Here’s a couple of comments.
SteveB said: ‘The NHS needs to be completely reformed. It’s is a Left-Wing, socialist toilet, utterly unfit for purpose, and a money sink that generates very little return. My elderly neighbour was killed by NHS indifference and incompetence.’
Another individual, ‘Chamberpot’, replied: ‘Agree completely: it’s a sacred cow and it’s been colonised by the hard left and we have no choice if we don’t like it. The worst thing is that we know from looking at places like Denmark that government provided health care doesn’t have to be a socialist sink and we can remember that the NHS wasn’t like this.’
While I have every sympathy for the people, who have lost relatives and friends thanks to failures in NHS care, much of this is due to the reverse – Tory policies and specifically privatisation. So I left this reply to the comment:
‘No, the reason why it’s in such a state is due to privatisation and the Tories. It was set up in 1948 by the Attlee Labour government following the recommendation of the Beveridge report. The Socialist Medical Society had been campaigning for a socialised healthcare system since the 1930s. The Tories have been starving it of cash, while the outsourcing of services to private healthcare companies have increased costs. These have gone from five per cent when it was fully nationalised to around American levels of 20 per cent. The private hospitals Bozo is so keen to give contracts to are smaller and, in my experience, actually offer a poorer service than the NHS. I’m sorry for your neighbour, but the solution isn’t privatisation. It’s more nationalisation.’
I wonder if I’ll get a reply to my reply, or even if it’ll stay up. I’ve posted responses to some of the daft, pernicious nonsense the Lotuseaters have said in their videos before now, and my comment has mysteriously disappeared.
What is clear from these comments is how ignorant people are about the NHS and its history, and also how they’re easily misled by Belfield’s rants about the far left. Some of Belfield’s videos attacking the NHS are about recent affirmative action policies, like the demands that a certain number of staff must be BAME as well as gay. He’s put up videos attacking the introduction of administrative posts for such diversity, whose occupants are on tens of thousands of pounds. He sees it as a waste of money. For him, this is a ‘far left’ policy, but the fact is that his rhetoric about identity politics deliberately obscures the destruction of the NHS by Tory and Blairite privatisation.
A number of the great commenters to this blog have raised the issue about what Belfield has done with all the donations he’s been given by his supporters. Supposedly this has been to help him fight malicious prosecutions brought by envious rivals at the Beeb and the local rozzers. But it’s a good question, as Belfield himself is very keen on demanding to know where the donations to charities like Children in Need go. Despite his claims to be a mere working class lad from a pit village made good, Belfield is clearly wealthy. Not many people can afford to have a baby grand in their front room. I don’t begrudge him his money – I wish more people had the opportunity to do well. But I despise the way he uses it to advocate policies aimed at making the very poorest even poorer. And if he’s banging on about privatising the NHS, you can bet he’s got private health insurance, which I’m sure many of his supporters won’t be able to afford. And it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s also got connections to the private healthcare companies.
Belfield is pushing anti-NHS propaganda. and if he gets his way, people will be paying for substandard treatment by private companies after it’s gone. Just as Bojob wants.