Max Raymond

Whether this post is a good idea is unknown, but this has been building up inside me for a while.

It might have been hard to ignore but this week Fox News and the Republican Party in the US used the NHS as a tool for their arguments against President Obama’s proposed healthcare reformation. They’ve been calling the system a socialist idea and have made lies saying that ‘Stephen Hawking wouldn’t survive under the NHS if he was British,” causing everyone with a brain to tut at their ignorance. In Britain, it came to a head when MEP Daniel Hannan made an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News to, as Graham Linehan put it in his interview with Channel 4 News on Thursday, stab the NHS in the back. David Cameron just shrugged it off by describing his views as ‘eccentric’ and in the end chose not to fire him.

Hannan’s appearance could be a key moment in our current political history. Ever since he became his party’s leader, David Cameron has been more than keen to paint a rosy picture of a future Conservative government, banging on and on about change and continually assaulting the current government with their ‘past it’ taunts. Hannan’s appearance, in which he contradicted everything Cameron has ever said about the NHS in one brief interview, might just make people think that their policies are not as they first seemed to be (a sort of modern version of the Conservatives) but instead a continuation of their traditional policies.

The thing that I despise in modern day politics is the need for parties to cover up their true policies for the sake of constructing a narrative. I find that this is exactly what the Conservatives are doing. Let me mention some of their policies:

• The minimum wage – the Tories are considering scraping it altogether (and they tried to pass a bill earlier this year), completely breaking the infrastructure of fair employment that the Labour government built ten years ago.
• The NHS – What Hannan said on Fox News may be a feeling shared by many other Tory MPs. They’re considering at least a massive lessening of public spending towards the NHS and whilst I think a plan to scrap it would be met with riots it’s not completely out of the picture.
• A British Bill Of Rights – They want this to replace the Human Rights Act, allowing immigrants to be deported without having to go through ‘irritations’ like judges and juries, heavily supported by the BNP.

And the biggest thing that they aren’t telling people is that they plan to make the divide between rich and poor even bigger. They plan to, amongst other things:

• Give hundreds of thousands of pounds in tax rebates to millionaires
• Reduce public spending on people who could actually do with the money and instead spending more to aid the super-rich.

All of the above are being sidelined in order to continually bash the opponents. For example, the Tories reacting to the Digital Britain report and managing to spin the story in order to make themselves look good. They did so whilst avoiding discussing their own policies in this area, despite their own policies being not too dissimilar to that of the current Labour government.

Of course, none of the above appears to be known in the public mainstream, because the Tories have done a clever job of not mentioning it and instead trying to put a positive spin on it. This is what they’ve been doing for the last few years and have managed to convince the majority of the public that by electing a Conservative parliament our lives will get better. By the looks of the Tory policies, it’s only going to get a lot worse in my eyes. It’s not the fact their policies are what they are that disgust me though. Instead, it’s the attempts to hide all this information that makes me angry.

I’m not saying that there are better alternatives. I’m not sure if there was a party I would vote for at the moment because we seem to have the best of a bad bunch. However, all the other parties are at the very least being truthful about what their policies are, whether you like them or not. Heck, even the BNP is more honest than the Conservatives! If this is the state of British politics, where a party comprised of racists and fascists are more open than a party that looks set to go into power next year through propaganda, buy me a plane ticket out of here.

Incidentally, as I was writing this I was redirected to this open letter by Gordon Brown that also sums up the two-faced nature of the Tories pretty well. Yes, Gordon Brown has written something that I find hard to dislike. We’ve truly gone mad.