Make no mistake: people who voted Conservative and Ukip in May are about to get what they voted for. The beginning of the end of the NHS and the destruction of the BBC. All the warm, flowery words about the two greatest British institutions were just that: warm, flowery words. The truth is that to the Tories, the NHS an and the BBC represent socialism and they have to go.
The NHS cat is well and truly out of the bag in today’s Independent where the health secretary Jeremy Hunt says it will take a “huge effort” to maintain the NHS as a fully taxpayer funded service days, after a fellow health minister said the NHS funding system should be “questioned” if economic growth does not keep up with patient demand. Taken in isolation, the statement sounds harmless enough, but with David Cameron and the Tories, you should never take any comment in isolation because the one long term plan they have is to end the NHS. For months, the line from the top has been that in order to have a strong NHS, you need a strong economy. You might be nodding along to that, but wait: read a bit deeper. What if the economy stalls, goes into recession? What happens then? Quite simply, the logical consequence is to axe the NHS and move to a US style insurance system. Only a fool would say that is not what would happen. Margaret Thatcher brought the NHS to its knees and by the time Labour was elected in 1997, it was not just patients who were on life support.
The Tories want a low tax society, whatever that means, so if you want better services, how do you pay for them? You go private, that’s how. This works well if you are a high earner because you will be able to afford private medical insurance, which will eventually be the only way to ensure you get medical treatment. Is that really what you want because that is what 36.9% of you voted for when casting your vote for the Tories and what those of you who voted for the even more right wing Ukip.
So don’t forget what Cameron and co are really saying when they say in order to have a strong NHS, you need a strong economy. They mean that they are just waiting for the day when the economy tanks and they get rid of the NHS, announcing that “we told you so”. The current drip-drip of privatisation will soon turn into the wild rapids because the business world will be all over the carcass of the NHS like vultures. There’s money to be made from cancer.
And the BBC – well, I would suggest it has no future at all. The leaks that are appearing in Rupert Murdoch’s Times and Sun, the full frontal assault on the corporation from the Mail and Express are not a coincidence. They are preparing the ground for the end of the finest broadcasting organisation on the planet.
The Sun says neither the NHS nor the BBC are “sacred belief systems”. It’s editorial comment compares those who defend the BBC as it currently exists with those who do not want to see change in the NHS. And laughably adds, “Labour needs to stop thinking of the NHS as their child and the BBC as their cheerleader.”
It’s hard to know where to begin with that lot. Put simply, the NHS is the mark of a civilised society. Most people I know love their NHS and value the fact that their treatment in the event of illness will be free at the point of delivery. Most of us do not begrudge the fact that our taxes go to pay for the NHS. I would willingly pay more tax for the NHS. The only change I want to see in the NHS is continuous improvement. I do not want a single part of it flogged off to the government’s friends in industry. You cannot trust the Tories with the NHS, simple as that, and you certainly can’t trust anything that appears in any of Murdoch’s rags. Labour is still entitled to look at the NHS as its baby because Labour gave us the NHS whereas the Tories opposed its very principle.
As for the BBC being the “cheerleader” for Labour, I treat the Sun’s comment with the utmost contempt. During the last election campaign, the BBC avoided asking the awkward questions of the Tories. It gave them the easiest ride possible, probably and rightly terrified of what the election of a Tory government would mean for its continuing existence. It dwelt entirely on the tactics of George Osborne and Lynton Crosby to paint the Labour Party as financially illiterate and under the spell of the SNP and the leader of the opposition appeared to be Nigel Farage, so frequently was he on the airwaves. The BBC needs to have a long, hard look in the mirror to see what went wrong. But despite that, the Sun pretends the BBC is run by lefties, comrades like Cameron’s pal Nick Robinson for example. This, let’s be very clear, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s aim of getting shot of the BBC. And by continuing to further weaken corporation, he knows that soon people will agree with him and say, “What’s the point of the BBC?”
My guess is that the licence fee will go and be replaced with a form of subscription, which will be voluntary. There will be one channel, perhaps with regional variations, broadcasting almost nothing that you would normally see on the BBC. Have a look at a typical PBS America schedule to see what you will get in its place. You might not like EastEnders, Strictly, David Attenborough’s wildlife shows or its coverage of Wimbledon but millions do. You might not listen to any of the BBC Radio stations, but again millions do. Murdoch’s mouthpieces argue that commercial and subscription TV, as well as commercial radio, would be happy to produce these types of shows. They are not part of a public service remit.
Murdoch speaks as if the BBC is some kind of groaning monopoly that is strangling the life out of commercial broadcasting. This is the same Murdoch whose Sky TV now owns the rights to most of the major sporting events in the land and charges us a fortune to watch it. He wants to own more rights because he can make more money and bump up the price of his subscriptions. TalkSport could do what BBC Radio Five Live does, so get rid of 5 Live. Who needs Radios 1 and 2 when you can listen to Heart, Kiss and Jack? And 6 Music, all that arty farty avante garde stuff? Who cares?
George Osborne wants to destroy the BBC website because it threatens other organisations. Of course, he does. He’d rather people got their politics from the Sun, Mail, Times, Telegraph and Express where it comes with a favourable nod in his direction.
Now here is an inconvenient fact about the BBC. 97% of the public uses the BBC. And here’s another: the average use of the BBC is 18 hours a week. And how much do we pay for that? A grand total of 40p each per day.
We are in a very difficult place at the moment. The BBC and the NHS are both under huge fire under a new Tory government. I have no doubts at all that the BBC as we know it is under immediate threat and the NHS would not survive a two-term Tory government.
My friends and family abroad cannot believe that we would want to axe both the NHS and the BBC because both highly regarded and with great envy. Neither are broken, so why try to fix them? The answer is simple: ideology. The Tories and their media cheerleaders disagree in principle with the very existence of both organisations which do not fit in with the politics they stand for. There is a strong element of socialism as regards the NHS because its users are all regarded as equal. Some people really can’t deal with that and that’s why they want to make you pay for your cancer operation or your heart by pass. They believe in self-reliance, the very pillar of the Thatcher era.
The NHS and the BBC should be red lines for all of us. If we believe in everyone having access to the best medical treatment, funded by taxation, then the NHS is the only way forward. Free at the point of delivery is non-negotiable. If we believe in public service broadcasting, on the basis of Lord Reith’s founding principles of the BBC, then we cannot allow the politicians to destroy it.
We are living in a country where big money, and often big foreign money, owns much of our infrastructure, where the words public service are being painted as bad words. As ordinary people, we have less and less say in how the country is run because we own so little of it and if we allow the murder of our two finest public organisations, without putting up a fight then we will get what we deserve.
