[jaxie]

Originally Posted by Brillopad

Lefties, if you want to save the NHS become Brexiteers - an article from Spiked Magazine 12th May 2017.

'Yes, you can always tell when an election is upon us because it's time 'to save the NHS'. There are 14 days to save the NHS as Tony Blair said in April 1997 for example. Labour has been cynically wheeling out the line that the tories are going to privitise the NHS since the 1990s. They have vowed to 'save the NHS' since the 1980s. It's a dismal and pathetic strategy which only exposes the hollowness of a party that began to lose its heart and purpose in the 1960s, when the takeover of the working-class movement by the upper-middle class social liberals began in earnest. Shouty alarmism is all it's got left now.

Because, as you will have noticed, over the past 40 years the Conservatives have never privatised the NHS. Sure they have scaled back the number of free-upon-demand services and introduced the private sector into various areas. And some have talked of privatising it. But there's never been privatisation. And neither will the evil tories ever do so. It would be electoral suicide. Most conservative supporters are not free-market fundamentalists - they consider it 'our NHS' too.

Yet it is true that there is a body of free-market fundamentalists who would like to privitise the NHS, and it's the European Union - that body, which remember, dear Labour manifesto writers, still forbids the re-nationalisation of 'our railways' or our 'postal services', because that would break one of its iron principles: the free market'.

Very interesting article, which casts a dark shadow over Labour Party policies and its constant attempts to use the NHS as some sort of 'bargaining chip'. It is simply preying on the fears of the working-class on losing their much valued NHS. I personally found the above article informative and thought- provoking - thoughts please.

That's a very interesting article, thanks for sharing Brillo, though I am sure I read somewhere that Germany had a nationalised rail service. Or I could be misremembering what I'd read. Or maybe it was something about it being a private company that owned their rail but the government owned all the shares, something like that.