[Redway]

Originally Posted by GiRTh

This post has thrown me a bit. I agreed with the earlier point that unemployed people tend to benefit most from the NHS — that’s just how a universal system works, and it’s generally seen as the fairest way to run one. What I can’t quite follow is how the conversation jumped from that to talking about “ethnic minorities” and supposedly “backward” cultures, especially when the post isn’t even about immigrants or illegal immigration, but about long‑established communities within the country.

I mentioned in the immigration thread that I’m the son of immigrants, and I genuinely believe they’ve contributed a huge amount to this country. It might sound like a strange analogy, but food is one of the clearest examples. Thirty years ago, you couldn’t get a cappuccino in your local pub; now you can probably find one within a five‑minute walk. Someone brought that here. Chicken Tikka Masala — a dish born from South Asian immigration — is now the nation’s favourite. Even my own cupboard is full of things like olive oil, chilli sauces, paprika, and basmati rice, none of which were standard household items a few decades ago.

The country has absorbed all of this without much resistance, and our everyday lives are better for it. Yet the same anxieties about the people who introduced these things keep resurfacing. The culture changes are embraced; the communities behind them are still treated with suspicion. That’s the part I’m struggling with.

And people from all-these various communities in the world contribute so much to the NHS as workers within it, in varying sectors. Yeah. I have to agree there.

Either way, the NHS needs to be refined, not deleted. It’s not even about employment vs. unemployment. It’s about the rich (or at-least comfortably middle-class) vs. everyone-else. Even a pharmacist can’t necessarily afford to go private, let-alone a teacher at an independent faith-school (that doesn’t get any government-funding, naturally), a support-worker or a cleaner. Just having a job doesn’t automatically make you well-off enough to go private whenever you’re bored of waiting-lists. You have to have over a certain amount to spare each time every time you’re concerned about smelling melting butter on your hoodie being connected to encephalitic synaesthesia (or some random, crazy shi. like that, for people who really do have money to throw away and get ridiculous about), not just vague, broad potential financial means. Otherwise where’s the predictable surplus? It’s not a guarantee that that will always be there, or even twice in however-many decades? The NHS exists precisely because most people, working or not, just can’t afford unlimited medical uncertainty.