Not just Hannan: Tory links with NHS-bashers
Posh boy “progressive” David Cameron has acted swiftly to distance himself from the anti- NHS views of Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, poster boy of the hysterical Republican anti-Obama and anti-health reform loonies.
Unfortunately for Cameron, who has denounced Hannan as an “eccentric”, it turns out that a significant number of senior Tory front benchers also have links to the US loony right. The Daily Torygraph has once again shown itself to be a proper newspaper, by breaking the news that George Osborne, William Hague, Michael Gove and Chris Grayling, are all advisory council members of ‘Atlantic Bridge’ , the US organisation spearheading the present assault on Obama’s modest health care proposals, by comparing them with the British NHS. Even more embarrassing for the posh boy, are the facts that Atlantic Bridge is chaired by Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary and has Thatcher as its patron.
And Hannan is not the only prominant Tory willing to publicly question the desirability of the NHS. According the The Times, “Last night Roger Helmer, another Conservative MEP, said that his colleague should be congratulated for reopening the debate in the party. ‘If the Americans came to me and said, “Would you recommend us taking a system just like the British NHS?”, I think I would have to say “No”, ‘ he told the BBC.”
Here’s Mr Hannan in full flow:
Shiraz Socialist 
Jim Denham said,
August 15, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Thanks to Hak Mao (link on the right) for this priceless example of racist moonbattery on the subject of healthcare, from Fox News:
“Not just Hannan:Tory links with NHS-bashers” and related posts - BeWell Buddy said,
August 16, 2009 at 12:35 pm
[…] "Not just Hannan:Tory links with NHS-bashers" and related posts Read The Full Article…"Not just Hannan:Tory links with NHS-bashers" and related posts […]
‘The stupid is accelerating’ « Max Dunbar said,
August 16, 2009 at 7:07 pm
[…] on the NHS. No British rightwing pundit would dare to say in a UK conservative publication what Hannan said on Fox News. British conservatism derives its success from Voice Of The People politics. Tory politicians and […]
‘The stupid is accelerating’ « Shiraz Socialist said,
August 16, 2009 at 7:10 pm
[…] on the NHS. No British rightwing pundit would dare to say in a UK conservative publication what Hannan said on Fox News. British conservatism derives its success from Voice Of The People politics. Tory politicians and […]
Rosie said,
August 17, 2009 at 8:51 am
When the National Health Service began in this country there were similar reactions from Conservatives about trading off liberty for free false teeth and specs, and that the NHS was the first step to the Gulag. Here’s an example of that thinking I found from Wyndham Lewis, who had been a fascist sympathiser in the 1930s:-
“… I hope you have followed what I have said—but I am bound to disagree with the communist philosophy when it implies or contends that economic and social rights are all that is required. No ‘rights’ are worth having without political rights. There is no right you could give me I would exchange for the right to speak freely and to move about freely. Remove these rights from me, which are called political, and I certainly should not be consoled by being tucked up in bed every night by a state-nurse, given perpetual employment; being examined weekly free of charge by a state-doctor and state-dentist, given state-pills and state-teeth, and finally by being buried in a state-grave. Those by themselves are slave-rights. The man who barters his liberty for a set of false teeth and a pair of rimless spectacles is a fool. In the slave days of the southern states of the U.S. all sensible slave-owners took good care of their slaves—saw that they came into the world without mishap, did not die if possible when they got ill, and that finally they were decently buried. In antiquity the Romans and the Greeks did not find it necessary to draw up a Bill of Rights of that sort: they cared for their slaves as a matter of course.”
http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewisw-rotting/lewisw-rotting-00-h.html
The man or woman who can’t eat because of lack of teeth and can’t read or even see because of lack of specs isn’t in much of a position to enjoy his or her political freedom.
maxdunbar said,
August 17, 2009 at 9:07 am
You could do a good post on historical opposition to the NHS.
Rosie said,
August 17, 2009 at 10:53 am
Someone who knows more Labour history than I do could do a post on it. I’ve come across the odd sneer about free teeth and specs in the likes of Evelyn Waugh.
I’ve just done a Google search on Raymond Williams’s great piece on the importance of material advancement for working people, and I see that you’ve quoted it first:-
“I have seen all these things being used, and I have seen the things they replaced. I will not listen with any patience to any acid listing of them – you know the sneer you can get into with plumbing, baby Austins, aspirin, contraceptives, canned food. But I say to these Pharisees: dirty water, an earth bucket, a four-mile walk each way to work, headaches, broken women, hunger and monotony of diet. The working people, in town and country alike, will not listen (and I support them) to any account of our society which supposes that these things are not progress: not just mechanical, external progress either, but a real service of life.”
maxdunbar said,
August 17, 2009 at 10:56 am
It sounds like you should write the post. It doesn’t have to be perfect, we’re writing on blogs ffs