Welcome To Zelo Street!

This is a blog of liberal stance and independent mind

Tuesday 30 June 2020

Spiv Uses Pandemic To Attack NHS

For some of those out there on the right, no opportunity to attack those institutions which do not obey their ideological world view can be allowed to go to waste, no matter how opportunist or callous they appear as a result. So it is with Mark Littlewood, head man at Astroturf lobby group the IEA, who has used the Coronavirus pandemic to kick the NHS.
Mark Littlewood, inheriting a fine tradition ...

Taking as his starting point a BBC report that toldAnalysis by the BBC shows Covid-19 deaths and excess deaths have been proportionately worse in the UK”, he goes on to assert “There will be more data to crunch. But this is more evidence that the NHS is pretty much the worst healthcare system in the Western world. Once we look at all the info, there may be a good case for going for an EU-style more marketised system”.
... of spivvery, plain and simple

Happily for Littlewood, this will chime with the IEA’s ideological orientation; it would have been most unfortunate had it come out any other way. But here a problem enters: the reasons for the UK’s poor outcomes are well-known, and do not feature NHS failings, including as they do the failure to lock down earlier, the abandonment of track and trace, and early adoption of a disastrous “herd immunity” strategy.
All of those failings can be laid fairly and squarely at the door of alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his chief polecat Dominic Cummings. But with this no right-wing Astroturfer can agree, invested as they all are in The Adoration Of The Boris. So someone else Done It, and Littlewood’s perverse logic means blaming the NHS.
Moreover, he has already reached his conclusion, suggesting that when he and his pals have crunched all that data, the result will match the conclusion he has already reached. It is not only our free and fearless press that specialises in selective presentation of information which matches the headline already written.
Littlewood’s expertise in this area - as opposed to his ideological anchorage - is, sadly, lacking, as witness “I think social distancing is over. If you’re under 55 and okayish you can socialise. You won’t die” and “Social distancing is over, it seems. Probably a good thing. Most things with the prefix ‘social’ turn out to be pretty anti-social in reality”. Those who never attended an IEA social event may count themselves lucky.
The citation-free outbursts have extended to claiming “You can’t blame the medical staff. The NHS system renders them much less effective than their European peers though”. And the aggressive intolerance has extended to denouncing a neurologist, and health spokesman for the Lib Dems - a party of which Littlewood was once a member - by snapping “Yawn. What a tedious cretin. Muted”. Which is most revealing.
He does not wish learn about the NHS, or health provision elsewhere. It is the manipulation of data to serve the agenda, fit the already written conclusion, demonising the NHS and urging its dismantling. The role of the Government which he and his fellow Astroturfers so slavishly support in the UK’s Covid-19 response is therefore ignored.

Using the pandemic to attack the NHS is little short of wickedness. But that thought will not distract Mark Littlewood. He pretends to care about the less well-off, but does not. He feigns concern, but has none. The impression of cheap spivvery is inescapable.
Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by adding to its Just Giving page at

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/zelostreet6

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Another amoral greedy eyed Rodent from Tufton Street. Is there no way to extirpate these "think-tanks"?

Starbuck said...

@Tim
there is another of his opinions masquerading as facts that make him look profoundly cretinous : "Once we look at all the info, there may be a good case for going for an EU-style more marketised system”"

I don't know if it's part of an subversive attack on European healthcare system (most people gets rather scared when told the NHS is going to be "marketised"), but it couldn't be furher from the reality experienced by continentals.
Healthcare is very much perceived as a social and public good.
private clinics do exists ofc, but many countries (most in western europe I believe) spend a larger share of their GDP onto their NHS than in Britain

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthcaresystem/articles/howdoesukhealthcarespendingcomparewithothercountries/2019-08-29


Best regards

Anonymous said...

There is much wrong with the NHS and only a fool would think it is perfect. Blind faith is no substitute for proper treatment.

Anonymous said...

Littlewood has a strange resemblance to that other ranting righty...."Lord" McNicol the red tory quisling and practicing gobshite.

grim northerner said...

Only strawmen think the NHS is perfect.

N said...

It's good isn't it, that no one says it is perfect and that your rant is a response to precisely no one. Please avoid, in future, making up opponents in your head. What a incredibly odd person.

Sam said...

Australia has avoided the worst of the Covid pandemic under a highly funded and superb socialized Medicare. The NHS problem is the endless privatising at the edges. And I have friends who are still NHS nurses & workers. They know the real problem- the ideological snipping off of the best bits for private profiteers.