Let’s hope that the Idiots of the North who voted for Boris Johnson are happy that they have now gained control of their lives whilst all around lose theirs
It is difficult to understand how anyone, let alone working class people, could seriously believe that the NHS would be safe in the hands of an Old Etonian and Bullingdon boy. The collapse of the Red Wall in the last election is a testimony to the depoliticisation of much of the working class.
As 569 more people lose their lives in Britain to Coronavirus, the Idiots of the North should be pleased that we have now become sufficiently independent to reject taking part in a collective European bid for ventilators. The official excuse was that the government ‘lost’ an email but anyone buying that really should write a letter to Santa Claus.
Today we are paying the price for 10 years of austerity. Just 2,000 NHS staff, out of half a million, have been tested for COVID-19. The Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, promises that 100,000 will be tested per day by the end of the month. By then there may be another 15,000-20,000 dead. Even if this is achieved, which is by no means certain given the history of broken promises, it will mean that it would take one and a half years to test everybody.
The key statistic is the number of intensive or critical care beds. Britain hasjust 6.6 per 100,000 people compared to 29.2 for Germany and 34.7 for the United States.
The situation for hospital beds is even worse. The number of beds per 1000 people today is 2.54 in the UK, 35thout of 41 countries. Since 2013 the number has steadily declined from 2.76 to 2.54. Compare this to Germany with 8 beds per 1000.
Or to put it in perspective the number of hospital beds in the UK has declinedsince 2000. In 2000, there were over 241,000 beds in the UK, by 2017 this figure was approximately 167,600. This means over this sixteen-year period there were over 70 thousand fewer hospital beds in the UK. The decline did not start in 2010 but in 2000 under New Labour. Indeed the steepest decline was under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for those who believe austerity began with the Tory/Liberal coalition.
But even the worm turns eventually. Yesterday’s Times ‘Cornavirus testing plans in chaos’ and even more surprisingly The Telegraph, which is virtually the Tory party’s in-house magazine, ran a front page‘Health officials ignored offers of coronavirus testing help as anger mounts at Government's failure to ramp up capacity’ which disclosed that
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| Some of the Idiots of the North at Grimsby Fish Market Who Believed that Johnson was 'one of us' |
‘officials have repeatedly ignored offers of help from many of the country’s leading scientific institutions. Meanwhile, senior health sources warned that the moment for this country to launch a successful mass community testing programme may already have been lost.’
Britain’s 3,000 deaths is testimony to how the NHS has been run down for the past 20 years, under New Labour and the Tories/Lib Dems. All those people, and the thousands of deaths to come will have been in vain if, at the end of the crisis, we go back to more austerity and more cuts.
And yet we are committed to spending 2% of Gross Domestic Product on the armed forces, defending us against a non-existent threat.
All the signs are that there is a determined effort to keep politics out of the Coronavirus crisis, as if COVID-19 was an act of god and as if the utter shambles of the government’s response is also just a natural disaster.
Johnson’s bonhomie and clownish behaviour are no longer funny when people cannot even see off their loved ones, when funerals can only be attended by a maximum of 10 people with no wake afterwards. The Tories lied when they told us that all they were making was 'efficiency' savings. What they were doing was cutting into the bone whilst at the same time spending hundreds of millions of pounds on 'competition managers' and other useless bureaucrats whose sole task was creating a false 'internal market' in the NHS so that Johnson's pals could make a killing out of lower wages and poor standards.
The state of the NHS is a tribute to a political ideology that prefers tax cuts for the rich to more hospital beds and ventilators.
Who would have believed that doctors now have to choose who will live and who will die? Who will benefit most from a ventilator and who is least likely to benefit?
Any working class person who voted for the Tories last December, because the Mail and the Express told them that Corbyn was their enemy and the Old Etonian was their friend can have no complaints if they succumb as a result of the crisis in the NHS.
But Labour too bears a great deal of the blame for not dealing decisively with those who portrayed it as ‘anti-Semitic’ and hostile to Jews. The failure of Corbyn, McDonnell and their acolytes to rebut these smears is seen in the pathetically weak candidature of Rebecca Long Bailey.
Boris Johnson’s trademark has been that of a buffoonish character, which has helped to disguise his far-Right and racist views. Anyone who is poor who believes that Johnson is ‘on our side’ really does need a lobotomy.
Johnson is a believer in eugenics, the ‘science’ that social attributes like intelligence, wealth, personal success are inherited and part of one’s genetic make-up. It was no accident that he hired Andrew Sabisky, an open believer in eugenics and the racial sciences, as an adviser. This and the previous Tory government has had a habit of appointing racists
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| Toby Young and his admirer |
There was Toby Young who wrote an article for the Spectator which talked of ‘progressive eugenics’, in addition to plain homophobia and misogyny. He said of Michael Gove’s desire to bring back O levels that if he is serious about this then
‘the government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn’t ‘accessible’ to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be ‘elitist’ and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law.”
This didn’t prevent Johnson criticising the “ridiculous outcry” at calls for his dismissal, saying Young would “bring independence, rigour and caustic wit” to the OfS. We also had the late and unlamented fascist Roger Scruton, former editor of the Monday Club's Salisbury Review, who the government was forced to sack, after a series of racist outbursts.
Johnson’s book 72 Virgins was a tribute to the racism that percolates in Tory and Brexit circles. It made reference to 'Islamic headcases' and 'Islamic nutcases'. Arabs were noted to have 'hook noses' (an old anti-Semitic caricature) and 'slanty eyes'; a mixed-race Briton is called 'coffee-coloured'; and use of the term 'pikeys' and 'half-caste'."[6]
Johnson described Barlow, believed to be himself, having a jaunty vaudeville act beneath which there are no real core ideals, values or beliefs." Which is probably a fair description of himself.
The book also depicted Jews as "controlling the media" and being able to "fiddle" elections. Strangely enough the Board of Deputies wasn’t interested in its anti-Semitism but that might be because the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign was never about anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism.
Eugenics used to be all the fashion and the Nazis took it one step further by exterminating the disabled in the belief that the ‘race’ would grow more healthy.
This Saturday will, unless there is an upset, demonstrate that the Labour Party has moved to the Right and Keir Starmer, who has all the charisma of a dead pony, will assume the leadership. No one should assume that as he purges the left, that Labour will assume power at the next election. The decline of social democracy throughout Europe is a phenomenon that isn’t confined to Britain.
Meanwhile for the Idiots of the North who still believe in Brexit, despite the cost of not co-operating with Europe over the current crisis, they have the prospect of coming under Trump’s thumb. After all, having gained control now of our affairs we could even emulate the US health care system where not only do 20 million people have no insurance but the majority of American people are underinsured, which means that even if the insurer pays some health bills, you are expected to pay the rest.
It is this, more than anything, which is responsible for the fact that more people go bankrupt because of an inability to pay medical bills than anything else.
The Guardian reportedthat one out of every six Americans has an unpaid medical bill on their credit report, amounting to $81bn in debt nationwide, while about one in 12 Americans went without any medical insurance throughout 2018. Even as many Americans struggle to afford health insurance coverage in the first place, those that have it are not insulated from facing massive debt due to medical bills
And we should be under no doubt that if you are a free marketeer then the NHS is anathema, based as it is on the good old socialist principle of ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their needs.’
Let no one be in any doubt that if Johnson and his fellow Brexiteers, such as Rees Mogg, could get their way then they would move to an insurance model. Instead they have decided to privatise the NHS by stealth. New Labour and Starmer, because the two are interchangeable, support private involvement in the NHS.
Meanwhile, under this shambolic government thousands are going to die for lack of NHS staff, lack of equipment and lack of testing.
You have been warned and it is up to us to ensure that after this crisis we say NEVER AGAIN to those who say there isn't enough money for a decent NHS.
Tony Greenstein