Progressive? Don't make me laugh

A few months ago, Go Fourth highlighted the remarkable views of one of the rising stars of the Tory Party - Daniel Hannan.

You'll remember he went on Fox News in the US to describe the NHS as a '60 year mistake' and it 'made people ill.'

This is what he said at the time.

I was so furious, I went and did this vlog outside the Department of Health and publicly challenged David Cameron to distance himself from this man's comments.

Not surprisingly, I heard no reply.

Now Hannan's at it again but this time he's gone much further.

He's activelty campaigning with the Republicans and Sarah Palin in the US to stop America moving to a fairer healthcare system, saying he wouldn't wish the NHS on anybody!

Here's the transcript:

Interviewer: You have lived and grown to adulthood under the British National Health Service, would you wish that on a free market like we have in the United States Mr Hannan?

Hannan: I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. We have a system where the most salient factors of it are; you get huge waiting lists; you have bad survival rates; you would much rather fall ill in the US than in the UK.

You know if you get cancer, if you get heart disease, you get stroke, five years on the chances are here you are gonna be healthy ; in the UK you are not. Why do we stick to it in the UK? Because there is such a huge vested interest, there are so many people now who depend on it.

We have 1.4 million employees in the NHS in the United Kingdom. It’s the third biggest employer in the world after the Chinese Red Army and the Indian national railways. And that means that electorally it’s almost impossible to get rid of the thing.

Even though - most of those employees are administrators and are bureaucrats rather than doctors and nurses – and even though the people in the system, the people working for it, are ruthlessly exploited because it’s a monopoly employer and are very badly paid, but that is such a big conservative block in the sense of being resistant to change, that it’s something you almost can’t politically get rid of.

And that’s why, you know... don’t believe if you’re watching this programme, don’t think that you can experiment with one of these things and then reverse it if it doesn’t work out. That’s not how it happens.

Interviewer: Mr Hannan, do the best and the brightest become physicians in Great Britain? Is there a shortage of physicians as a consequence of either you work for the government or you get another job?

Some people will become physicians just out of a calling. You know and I don’t want to imply that because we have a bad system it doesn’t contain good people. A lot of very generous, very patriotic people become doctors, even though they’re working in a system that doesn’t maximise their utility, because they have a calling to help other people.  

And so that’s gonna happen, and of course that then weirdly becomes an argument for the system because people come out of a basically bad experience with the NHS and they say “oh the nurses couldn’t have been kinder, you know the doctors couldn’t have been more professional”,  as though that is something exceptional rather than what you would expect if you see what i mean.  

But no, as a matter of simple statistical fact, we have many fewer GPs per head of population than you have in north America or indeed than they have in the insurance based systems in continental Europe. We have had an emigration of physicians from the UK to the US as I understand there has been from Canada to the us. Because people want to be in a system where they’re valued and where their skills are put to maximum use.

The Tories are desperately trying to convince the public that they've changed.

This week George Osborne made the laughable claim that they now carry the torch of progressive politics.

Daniel Hannan's comments have just poured cold water over what little spark of progressiveness that party claims to have.

If the Tory Party really believes in Progessive politics it should prevent one of its senior politicians actively trying to stop another country moving to a healthcare system that will provide greater coverage to the many and not the few.

As we said before, the mask is slipping and Hannan is the true face of 'caring' Conservatism.

Looks like our ad for the June elections is just as relevant now as it was then.