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Who loves the NHS? Is it true?
Posted by Nils Boray
Friday, 1st January 2010
Sorry but I just can not resist posting this about David Cameron’s reported meeting with the radical nursing group Nurses for Reform
It is reported in the Telegraph: David Cameron meets NHS privatisation campaigners, with the by-line: “ David Cameron has met a health care pressure group that advocates full privatisation of the National Health Service – a meeting that could infuriate doctors and nurses.”
Certainly the group themselves are full of this – the article David Cameron seeks policy ideas from NFR appears on their website, and neither do they make any bones about their support for dismantling the National Health Service, in this article on the Adam Smith Institute website The micro-politics of hospital privatisation.
It’s on their own site though that I spot the most flabbergasting statements About Nurses for Reform;
“NFR rejects bland egalitarianism in favour of competition. And it believes in people – not politics.”
All of which leads me to believe that Mr Cameron has once again been upstaged by the right wing of his party – and this time it’s not recognised fringe mavericks like Daniel Hannan doing the NHS down – no this time it’s cuddly Dave himself, in what I would guess will prove to be a huge embarrassment to the Conservative party.
Of course I’m not alone in thinking that, the Telegraph article itself does point out similar concerns:
“His decision to meet the radical group, which calls the NHS a “dystopian, Soviet-style calamity”, will be seen as foolhardy after the painstaking efforts he has made to reassure voters that the NHS is safe in Tory hands. The meeting risks reigniting the row which exploded four months ago when Mr Cameron was forced to distance himself from a leading Tory MEP who suggested that the NHS was a “mistake”. “
The Telegraph remember, is rather more well disposed towards the Conservative party than I am. The article also says …
“the meeting is bound to be exploited by Labour ministers in the run-up to the election. Nurses For Reform, by its own admission, is the most extreme pressure group calling for NHS privatisation in Britain. On its website it denounces the NHS as a “Soviet” organisation which must be dismantled.”
