Delingpole: The NHS Is 70. Time to Put It out of Its Misery

LIVINGSTON, SCOTLAND - JUNE 29: Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party, addresses a NHS
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty
James Delingpole

Britain has been celebrating the 70th birthday of the National Health Service (NHS) with services in Westminster Abbey, a specially commissioned symphony, eulogies from government ministers, and endless hagiographies on the BBC.

All that was missing was a May-Day-style parade down the Mall featuring T72s, Katyusha rockets, missile launchers, red flags, and Owen Jones leading the goose-stepping marchers of the Red Army Choir.

This isn’t about health and it never was about health. This is about left-wing triumphalism.

If the NHS was really about making people better it would never have been set up the way it was and would certainly have been dismantled many years ago. No, the NHS is just a life support machine for preserving the long discredited Soviet-era ideology of state control, enforced egalitarianism, communal misery.

The sooner that life support machine is turned off, the sooner the rest of us stand a chance of making a swift recovery from this 70-year-old horror show.

Sure there are many other good reasons why the NHS must die: that it kills thousands of its patients, leaves many thousands more in abject squalor and misery, wastes stupendous quantities of money, breeds inefficiency, covers up negligence and incompetence, and has some of the worst outcomes for serious health conditions anywhere in the civilised world.

But by far the worst thing about the NHS — bad though all the above things are — is this: it is the socialist Trojan Horse which will forever stand in the way of Britain’s chances of evolving into an advanced, prosperous, free market economy.

So long as the NHS exists, Britain will remain stuck in the dark, post-war Austerity-era mentality of rationing, jobsworthery, and the lowest common denominator. And stuck there by design.

That’s because it was created by Communist fellow-travellers (with half an eye on the shining example offered by Stalin’s Soviet Union) for the promulgation and entrenchment of socialistic values.

It’s no coincidence that about the only area the NHS performs well in international league tables is in equity of treatment: whether you’re rich or poor you get the same bowl of gruel.

Which of course is the essence of the socialistic worldview. Never mind if the service is shit, just so long as no one gets a slightly less shit deal than everyone else.

Or, as Churchill more eloquently put it – “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Indeed, and this is the point. The NHS will always be sub-standard, no matter how much more taxpayers’ money gets squandered on it. That’s because in the socialistic economic model on which it is built, waste, inefficiency, and perpetually low standards are not bugs but features.

There is no need to rehearse here all the horror stories that illustrate why the NHS has been so disastrous for healthcare in Britain. If you have a moment, listen to my latest podcast with an NHS casualty doctor. Or read some of the heartbreaking stories being told on social media, as a counter to all the propaganda.

And what propaganda!

Consider that phrase which no one uses except NHS advocates being given copious airtime on the BBC: “The Envy of the World.”

As shameless inversions of the truth go, that one is right up there with “Religion of Peace”.

Or look at how the worst, most cynical kind of politician now regularly refers to the NHS as “our NHS”, as if it were a thing so precious, so unassailably perfect that merely to utter those magic three letters is to be clutching to one’s tender bosom the very essence of caring, cuddly, altruistic, modern British values.

That was the point of Danny Boyle’s London Olympics opening ceremony, another party political broadcast on behalf of Labour’s socialists masquerading as a cheery mash-up of Britain’s key historical moments. Except they were all key historical moments as redefined by a left-wing sociology professor at a former polytechnic: Industrial Revolution – dark, satanic and mill-y; NHS – gor bless you Mary Poppins and all those cheery urchins bouncing up and down on all those empty, clean, free beds with which the NHS so famously abounds…

This isn’t just mendacious. It’s also very sinister. Indeed, I’d argue that it represents the left’s single greatest victory over British culture — the way that it has successfully created an environment in which no one, be they a victim of appalling treatment, be they a well-informed think-tank analyst, be they an honest, reforming politician, is allowed to make even the slightest criticism of the NHS without being savaged as an uncaring, ignorant, peevish, unBritish monster.

Look at what happened to Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) when, gamely and bravely, she appeared in several TV debates, to talk about the research showing the NHS’s poor performance relative to other first world healthcare systems.

For this she was horribly traduced, not just by the usual leftist trolls, but also by people who really should know better such as the BBC’s former Economics Editor Paul Mason:

In this climate of terror, it’s hardly any wonder that even the most robustly classical liberal Conservative MPs — even the great Jacob Rees-Mogg himself — feel unable to venture any constructive criticism of this broken institution.

But they should, for by failing to do so they are betraying not just the principles of conservatism but also all those people who are going to have their lives shortened or their health impaired or their money wasted by a system which simply isn’t up to the job of providing the healthcare people need in the 21st century.

We need to be clear and honest on this. The NHS is not just second-rate. It is evil.

I’m not saying its intentions aren’t good (the road to hell, and all that). But the outcome is often thoroughly malign – not just in what it does to patients but, more generally, to the level of political debate, the cause of free speech and, ultimately, Britain’s future as a free, prosperous nation unencumbered by the shackles of socialism.

The 1948 creation of the NHS is not something we should be celebrating it. It was a ruthless socialist takeover.

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