David Cameron’s silence on the Hannan slur speaks volumes

From LabourList

Labour’s Health Secretary Alan Johnson has responded to David Cameron’s silence on Daniel Hannan’s outburst on Fox News over the weekend, in which the Conservative MEP said that the NHS is “Socialist postwar conspiracy, a terrible mistake we’ve lived through for 60 years”.

Alan Johnson said:

“David Cameron’s silence on this issue speaks volumes. He’s already dropped a commitment to match our spending on the NHS. Now he is refusing to take action against a senior Conservative who wants to stop spending on the NHS altogether.”

“Daniel Hannan told an American TV channel that our Doctors and Nurses made people “iller”. David Cameron should go on British TV and apologise to NHS staff for these ignorant and insulting remarks.”

Watch Daniel Hannan’s insulting diatribe for yourself.

David Cameron praised Daniel Hannan in an email to Conservative Party members only last week. The Tory leader has also endorsed Daniel Hannan’s book ‘The Plan‘, which recommends privatising the NHS, saying:

“I passionately believe we need to localise power, as recommended by the Direct Democracy movement of Conservative activists and MPs”.

Some interesting quotes from this Hannan book include:

“Allow patients to opt out of the NHS and instead pay their contributions into individual health accounts.”

“There are people who find the very mention of money in the context of healthcare distasteful. Surely there is something elevated and ennobling about knowing that the sick will be cured regardless of their means, they say. Health, after all, is a universal human need. (So, even more, is food, although no one argues that it should be apportioned by a National Food Service.) Fair enough. If you are squeamish about considerations of economy, think instead about considerations of lifestyle. It is often pointed out that the NHS would be better named the ‘National Sickness Service’, since its function is to treat maladies that have already developed rather than anticipate them. True. But the logical inference is rarely drawn. If there were some price mechanism in healthcare, people might make more effort to avoid developing conditions that require expensive cures.”

“Such a system would involve individuals initially paying around ten per cent of their income into their health account. This would be offset by a compensating tax cut. From this payment, a small amount (ï¿¡300 to ï¿¡400 per annum) would be used to pay for private catastrophic medical insurance. Individual citizens would choose the health services they wanted. If they chose to see their GP, they would pay whatever rate they and the GP agreed. If they wished to see a GP after hours, they could do so: there might be a higher fee, but that would be between them and the GP. If they thought that an ailment required a specialist, they could go directly to a specialist of their choice, bypassing the GP.”

Do the Conservatives want to remodel our National Health Service on the American system?

Will David Cameron come out and condemn his new poster boy’s remarks on our National Health Service or is this the accidental slipping of the “Compassionate Conservative” mask he’s tried so hard to brand?

And how safe will our public services be under a Conservative government?