Posted on 04/15/2015 1:28:13 PM PDT by Olog-hai
The UK Independence Party launched its election manifesto on Wednesday, appealing to Conservative voters with pledges to raise defense spending and bring forward a vote on Britain’s EU membership. […]
(Nigel) Farage vowed to spend “substantially” more than the NATO minimum of two percent of GDP on defense in a move that he said would “rattle the dwindling number of Conservative voters who still see (Prime Minister David) Cameron’s party as the party of security”. […]
The anti-mass immigration party, which had two MPs at the end of the last parliament, also promised to cut small business taxes and boost funding for the state’s National Health Service. …
(Excerpt) Read more at euractiv.com ...
NHS? Seriously?
I had to highlight that in the excerpt.
Last I looked, NHS was the 2nd largest bureaucracy in the world, after only the Indian Railway Service.
Increasing spending on these clots is just another way to piss pounds away, as Farage certainly knows. One does, however, have to win elections...and Cameron already has one foot out the door and the other on a Slip'n Slide, so this is a helpful push from UKIP.
Full disclosure: when I was just shy of 5 years old, NHS almost killed me. Thank Heaven my father was an ex-medic from the military, and carted me off bodily to the US, where I got proper, and prompt, care.
NHS = established religion there
NHS = No hope, Swampy.
Did you know that, in 2013, more children born in NHS hospitals and/or care centres were born in corridors and (no joke!) elevators than in birthing rooms? Yah, yah, gimme dat ol' time health care, gimme dat ol' time heath care...it's good enough fo' me!
I keep hearing about this supposedly universal adoration of the NHS even in spite of the multifarious horror stories about it. There are really that few there who remember pre-NHS and the fact that Britons survived quite fine without it?
Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.
Actually they didn’t. That’s why the NHS was deemed necessary. Even the Tories of the time supported it.
Perhaps because ALL you hear is the occasional horror stories. I am no NHS superfan, but all the USA hears is the bad stories.
Full disclosure, the NHS has saved the lives of both my parents and my brother. And none of my family (immediate and close) has ever had any serious problem with the NHS. Maybe we are lucky, I don’t know. But from child to elderly, my family has been well treated.
I am a conservative, no blind superfan, and well aware of the NHS problems, but I also know how well it worked in older times, what needs to be done to make it work again. What it should and shouldn’t be doing.
I would like to see that stat please.
Right, the entire population of the UK was dying and nearing extinction without the NHS. Why do I sense no credibility in such a claim?
Not even the BBC or the Manchester Guardian cam find any good to say about the NHS, so they keep silent. The horror stories merely by volume are a singular damnation against the abomination in question.
The NHS will forever have the horrid distinction of being the first enabler of abortion on demand in the English-speaking world. Ever since the 1967 Abortion Act, all I heard about while living in Ireland was the remarkable number of young women who would travel across the Irish Sea for such purposes. And of course, the UKIP now wishes to expand funding for that and other such “procedures” (such as “gender reassignment”; must I go on?)
I didn’t say that. At all. Any more straw and you can burn Edward Woodward.
The UK health service pre 1948 varied in quality. In poor areas the quality was poor, very poor, that’s why the NHS was enacted and was/is popular.
As I said, I will not defend the NHS blindly, but also I will try to give a fair view of it.
I support abortion. Or more to the point, I support a woman’s right to choose for her own body. You don’t support that right, and I fully respect your position. That’s not being glib, I do.
I like how you find the fact Irish women and girls faced criminal charges in their own country over the right to control their own bodies and had to go to another nation acceptable, yet we British who offered these services are the big bad you-know-whats. Irish draconian laws and mindset OK by you clearly.
The UK brought in the act in 1967 to a—give women rights over their own bodies and b—to get away from backstreet abortions which had killed many and maimed others, to offer a safe service.
I didn’t say you said that. But it can be extrapolated from what you said.
Perhaps it is the case that the Labour government engaged in degrading economic conditions in three years (yes, it is possible, especially in the wake of the damaged wreaked by WWII) that they created an artificial demand for an entity such as the NHS? just like making British Rail(ways) out of the Big Four? The fact that abortion came on the scene a scant 19 years later, with the NHS as the vehicle for the law, bespeaks a more dangerous agenda.
You’re on the wrong forum in that case; this forum by and large is anti-abortion. I can see what is at the core of your defense of the NHS now.
Abortion is not a woman choosing to do something with her own body whatsoever, but with the body of someone else—a baby has its own genetic makeup and not that of its mother. It also absolves responsibility from who is supposed to be the most responsible of all in the creation of a new life—the father. Hence, it is a major step for leftists towards their goal of destroying the family.
Supporting a “woman’s right to choose” is supporting the murder of children.
I think I can claim with this background to be able to comment on the NHS with more authority than anybody else on this forum, and there's a great deal, a very great deal I could say. I'll confine myself to just three points:
Firstly that for its first three decades, until the late 70s/early 80s, the NHS was a great success, with very few serious problems. It was only from the 1980s onwards that the cracks began to appear. It is from the experience of those initial decades that the persistent British allegiance to the system, across the political spectrum, derives. (When Thatcher famously said 'the NHS is safe with us' she knew that to say anything else would be political suicide, since it would alienate her core Conservative vote, which tended to view the NHS as one of the irreducible core functions of small government: equivalent to the armed services, with which it shared to duty of defending the country from its enemies).
Secondly that in all those decades of first-hand encounters with the NHS I've had only one seriously bad experience. It was 45 years ago, and all the more memorable for its rarity.
And finally that the sheer size of the NHS, as has been mentioned, is one of its biggest problems, probably the biggest. Nothing that large can be coherently managed. But the corollary of its size is that there's plenty of room within it for excellence as well as the opposite. One of the errors often made by overseas commentators is to assume that because the underlying structural model is flawed (as it undoubtedly is), then each and every aspect of its detailed operation must of necessity be equally flawed. Far from it. The only generalisation which can safely be made about the NHS is that all generalisations about the NHS are likely to be untrue.
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