Several thousand people helped close off Whitehall near Downing Street yesterday in the demonstration against the Department of Health’s proposals to impose new doctors contracts, cutting their pay by as much as 30% and putting the public at risk. It was an amazing story, or at least it would have been if the media had bothered to report it.
Another example, methinks, of the nonsensical idea that we have anything like a free press in this country, where much of the coverage is political opinion and tittle-tattle. Whilst our NHS is under threat like never before the media looks the other way. I wonder why.
It is too simple, and simply wrong, to suggest there is a conspiracy between the government and the media to bury news items like this. The red tops in particular are savvy enough to know that our NHS is an emotive subject and don’t need to be told by some spin doctor now a story like this would play out. So why bother to cover it?
The BBC’s complete failure to cover the event is another matter altogether. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Cameron government’s strategy to diminish and eventually get rid of the corporation is causing it to hold off on certain stories. The admittedly nonsensical “Piggate” story was all but absent from the airwaves when even the Daily Mail was running with it (admittedly because of their long term wish to see Boris Johnson succeed Cameron and not the PM’s leader of choice, Gideon “Call Me George” Osborne).
All this is interlinked by the government’s ideology. It does not approve of the state doing or providing anything and the NHS and the BBC are long term targets. Note the words of every Tory spokesman or woman when qualifying any comment about the NHS. “A strong NHS exists because of a strong economy.” Say that over and over again and then imagine an NHS where the economy was not strong? “It’s too expensive to maintain,” they will say. “We need to move to a private model.”
It’s the non reporting of things like yesterday’s march which disturbs me. I appreciate there are other news stories that need to be reported but given the esteem in which our NHS is held by so many people I find it slightly sinister that the BBC in particular barely covered it all.
