“If you had loved ones on a long waiting list for surgery, would you, if you felt that that was the only way forward, use private healthcare?… Keir Starmer?”
“No.”
“Absolutely no, if your loved one was on a waiting list for surgery?”
“No. I don’t use private health. I use the NHS. That’s where my wife works, in one of the big hospitals. As I say, it runs through my DNA.”
That exchange, between a moderator and Keir Starmer during a pre-election debate, tells us much about the present Prime Minister and the ultimate inhumanity of the cult that British leftists have made of a National Health Service that was created to serve the nation, but is now served by it, as was illustrated by the mantra universally recited during the pandemic: “Protect the NHS.”
Some of us had imagined the NHS existed to protect us, rather than the other way around. Of course, there was an element of sense in the notion; Covid took a grim toll of clinicians working under nightmarish conditions to save lives, sometimes at the cost of their own. Both during and after the pandemic, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to doctors, nurses and ancillary staff who work so hard for the public well-being. But that does not obscure the fact that there is a severe malaise at the centre of Britain’s healthcare system.
