| |
Losing GPs fuels the politics of despair
BY steam-rollering over the public the Camden Primary Care Trust (PCT) has added another notch to the politics of despair.
Their decision to allow the take-over of three GP practices by a US monopoly health company – and a notorious one at that – will prove, in retrospect, to be another step in the dismantling of the publicly owned National Health Service envied in so many parts of the world.
In the absence of wise government, local or national, a political vacuum emerges as people retreat from the political process. This will only encourage the growth of populist extremist bodies.
Broadly, it’s already happening in Britain.
The remark made by the Tory grandee Lord Hailsham decades ago that our system had become an ‘elective dictatorship’ has a ring about it that sums up politics today.
The arguments of the PCT are both specious and hollow.
Privatisation isn’t measured, as the PCT maintains, by whether the services of the newly bought up GPs will continue to be made in the public interest.
The only social and economic measure is: Who owns the service?
The answer is: An unaccountable corporation based overseas and responsible only to its shareholders.
Behind the scenes, the advocates of the take-over say nothing has changed because GPs themselves form private partnerships.
But these partnerships have proved down the decades to have one loyalty only – to their patients.
GP practices can be likened to small traders. Sadly, when giant supermarkets take over the High Street, the corner shop dies.
This is the future facing the NHS.
To refuse an advert is no threat to freedom of speech
THE refusal of a publication to accept an advertisement does not mean free speech is in peril (see pages 6 and 12).
The Ham and High – like any publication, including the Camden New Journal – has every right to refuse to accept an advertisement on moral or commercial grounds.
A cash nexus is created when an individual or organisation offers to pay for space in a newspaper – and it is up to the publication to say Yes or No.
Newspapers are often faced with making such judgments – as has this newspaper, and, no doubt, the Ham and High over the years.
This has been the case since the emergence of the popular press in the 19th century.
Will an advert from a far right body offend readers? In Hampstead live many families whose ancestors fled from the Nazis in the 1930s – who can doubt that such an advert would cause offence? Ethnic minorities, as a whole, in Camden would feel deep unease at seeing such an advert, not to mention the wide swathe of fair-minded, liberal opinion in the borough. That is why the advert should have been refused.
|
 |
|
| |
