Just how much are those who charge hospital parking fees paying towards New Labour, its key figures’ offices and pet think tanks, and so forth?
Or is this government (with, as was also the case with New Labour in 1997, a health policy significantly to the right of that of the Tories) simply so obsessive in its Howard Hughes-like fear and hatred of the “dirty” public sector, that it will do this sort of thing for free?
Hutton, Purnell, Mandelson, the Milibands, all that trash – they will not rest until Tony Blair’s legacy is complete, with the NHS abolished, with workers’ rights scrapped, with everything that they can lay their hands on privatised in the interests of their own paymasters, with school vouchers on the basis that even state schools will be free to charge anything they like even far in excess of the value of the vouchers, the lot.
They know that the people who would suffer most as a result hardly vote as it is, and that neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems would oppose these policies at the ballot box anyway.
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Thank God someone has noticed that the Tory health policy is to the left of the Labour one. I thought only angry Tory bloggers had cottoned on.
ReplyDeleteAs I said, no change there - where health was concerned, the 1997 Election was a significant step to the right.
ReplyDeleteMajor had the same working-class Tory attachment to the NHS that he had to, say, the hereditary peerage. Nothing wrong with that.
The Cameron lot don't mean it, of course. But at least they are saying it, which makes it part of the debate on one level.
Can you go into a bit more detail? I don't see what's left-wing about the current Tory policy of handing over control of the NHS to an unelected board, accelerating the drive towards foundation hospitals, forcing hospitals to raise money by borrowing against their own assets, or altering the NHS funding allocation system to take money away from more deprived areas.
ReplyDeleteStill better than the Government's official one (which also includes the Board, of course), never mind the one that the Blairite remnant, plotting its own restoration in the next Parliament, wants.
ReplyDeleteNow, I am not denying that the Bliarite one is what a Cameron Government would actually do. But if you don't beleive me that what they say that they would do is well to the left of what Brown is already doing, then just read any of the Tory blogs (ConHome, Coffee House, Iain Dale, &c) whenever health policy comes up. Their Thatcherites readers are incandescent.