It is the left's Orwellian policies on the NHS that are racist

As Hope not Hate continue their infantile attacks on UKIP's attempts to find workable solutions to the chaos which passes for our NHS, our attention has been drawn to an article in the Daily Mail from last August which raises an issue we mentioned several days ago: the fact that the NHS strips doctors from the poorest countries when we are turning away British kids who want to train as doctors from our own universities.

Villagers queue to see a doctor in the Sudan. Hope not Hate
think taking Sudanese doctors to prop up the NHS is an
acceptable way of dealing with the shortage of medical
personnel in the UK.

The Mail article refers to General Medical Council figures on the number of overseas trained doctors who are on the British medical register.

An example would be the 1,415 doctors who trained in the Sudan. According to data from the Henry J Keiser Family Foundation, Sudan has 2.8 doctors for every 10,000 people, or 14 for every 50,000. The British NHS has 138.5 for every 50,000.

Sudan suffers from famine and drought. 20% of the 30 million plus population live below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day. The country receives some £50m of aid from the UK alone every year. The Global Hunger Index ranks the country the 5th hungriest in the world, and states it has an 'Alarming Hunger Situation'. The country ranks 171st on the Human Development Index, making it one of the states with the lowest human development in the world. The Red Cross talks of the 'desperate situation of health care' in the country.

Despite all this, Hope not Hate and their Labour and Union paymasters seem to think that taking 1,415 doctors out of the country is somehow a good idea for the NHS, an damn the poor Sudanese. To put this into perspective, with 2.8 doctors per 10,000 population and a 30,000,000 population, that means there are only around 8400 doctors in the Sudan. If you work out the maths, that means the equivalent of 16% of all Sudanese trained doctors are now in the UK, and yet the UK continues to recruit medical personnel from there to prop up the NHS.

As if taking doctors from the Sudan wasn't bad enough, the NHS also employed doctors from Haiti, Burundi and Liberia, where there are so few doctors that they don't even register on statistics which count the number of doctors per 10,000 of population. All of these nations are so desperate for doctors that much of their healthcare is provided by charitable organisations such as Medecins sans Frontiers. They have economies ravaged by civil war and natural disaster, huge healthcare problems including major epidemics of HIV/AIDS and, in the case of Liberia, Ebola.

Hope not Hate might want to pretend that the NHS is one of the reasons why unlimited immigration is such a wonderful thing. From their point of view, we're sure it is - it hides the abysmal failure of the Labour government between 1997 and 2010 to come up with an educational system which can train the number of doctors we need. It brings relatively poor, non-English speaking immigrants right to the door of the largest unions in the UK. Unions which, coincidentally, fund Hope not Hate.

Whether it is quite so good for the Sudan, Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Libya, Syria and all the other desperately poor countries is an entirely different question. For that, you'd have to ask the villagers who walk for hours to see one of the ever decreasing number of doctors. Will Hope not Hate do that? We doubt it. The villagers are black, poor and don't vote in UK elections, so why would those right-on, achingly liberal class warriors give a shit?

Are we angry? You'd better believe it. As Lowles, Smeeth and their colleagues in the Labour Party and the unions sit on their arses feeling smug about 'protecting the NHS', the thought that they are depriving millions of desperately needed, life or death medical care doesn't seem to cross their minds. And how are they doing it? By allowing the poorest countries in the world to train medical personnel, and then stealing them with inducements to emigrate to the UK because it is cheaper to throw money at them than it is to train our own doctors. And when UKIP - or anybody else - attempt to have a serious, grown up discussion to ensure that we can create an NHS which is capable of living within our means, they attempt to close down the argument with the sort of 'four legs good, two legs bad' arguments which Orwell would recognise for what it is.

The hard left are fond of labelling stupid statements by individuals racist, fascist and Nazi. They seem incapable of realising that what they are doing is far worse than someone being called by the wrong politically correct term for their colour this week. Their solution is imperialist, racist and breathtakingly cynical, but they see nothing wrong in that, for in their quest for equality, there is one thing they are absolutely certain of: All men are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

The NHS steals desperately needed doctors from Africa, but HnH attack UKIPs health policy

More fundamental dishonesty from Hope not Hate writer 'Simon Cressy' (Carl Morphett's pointless pseudonym) in an attack on UKIP's Neil Hamilton over the NHS. Quite what the NHS has to do with HnH's 'anti-racism and anti-fascism' campaign, we don't know, although possibly it is guilt over the Labour inspired need to import doctors from Sierra Leone (1 doctor per 50,000 people) in order to sustain the NHS administration (142 doctors per 50,000 people). Who knows? Labour doesn't care, Sierra Leoneans don't have a vote here anyway. With the partial privatisation of services introduced under the last Labour government, it probably makes sense to take desperately needed doctors from third world countries rather than train enough at home anyway.


Sierra Leone - Labour and the Unions are happy to steal their
medical personnel to prop up their NHS empires

On the HnH website, Cressy puts his name to an article titled "UKIP Claim NHS is diseased and worse than Taliban". Referring to an article which is over a year old, and coincidentally discovering it on the evening that Hamilton was due to attend a selection meeting for the Basildon constituency (he withdrew), Cressy begins his distortions in the title, and doesn't let up throughout his entirely misleading article.

Take the Taliban claim. What Hamilton actually wrote was, "Since 2001, we have had 450 British fatalities in Afghanistan. During the same period, Mid Staffs hospital alone was responsible for at least 1,200 avoidable deaths....another 14 English NHS trusts ... may be responsible for 13,000 unnecessary deaths".

Neil Hamilton

In other words, what Hamilton said was the same as the original Express article's subtitle - The NHS is a more effective killing machine than the Taliban. However much Cressy's union paymasters may not like this, the statistics are true, which is more than can be said of the gross distortion of Cressy's paraphrasing of Hamilton's words.

Did Hamilton say the NHS was diseased? Yes, it was the title of the article. But what he was referring to - contrary to what Cressy implies  - was not the principle of free, universal healthcare, but rather the dominance of it by Labour and the largest trade unions and the need to break that by genuine democracy - "If we are to retain a state-funded system, it must be more democratic so that patient power counter balances the power of unions like Unison and the BMA."

That Hope not Hate should leap to the defence of the big Unions is hardly a surprise as they are heavily reliant upon them for their funding. And control of the NHS - and the £120bn annual spend and 1.4m employees - is essential if the Union's fat cats are to continue drawing banker style salaries. As Hamilton says, "Labour's shroud-waving has closed down debate on whether this is the best way to provide healthcare free at the point of delivery."

Whether you agree with Hamilton's assessment or not is immaterial, as is whether you have

Carl Morphett - not the first time he's
been caught taking lessons from Goebbels

reservations about Hamilton. Certainly his argument about debate being closed down is correct: what other point is there in deliberately distorting the whole thrust of his argument?

It borders on the obscene that on a day that Hope not Hate is singing the praises of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights they should fall back on the tactics of the totalitarian: to distort with propaganda rather than to argue with facts. The point of a democracy is to hear all sides of the argument. It is not talking about other options for the NHS but preventing those options even being open for debate which is fascist. Perhaps someone will buy Cressy/Morphett a dictionary for Christmas.

Political Correctness before Patient Safety, say Hope not Hate

A busy day for Hope not Hate as apart from doing their best to cause maximum violence between EDL and UAF supporters they also took the time to attack UKIPs Nigel Farage for suggesting some foreign doctors weren't up to scratch in an article posted by 'Jack Blanchard' on Nick Lowles personal blog.


Hope not Hate seem remarkably keen to put political correctness ahead of the facts. According to a Daily Telegraph article from December last year, Freedom of Information Act requests have shown that over 60% of the doctors struck off by the GMC in the past five years were trained abroad. Their report also showed:

• 3/4 of doctors struck off in the past year were trained abroad
• Doctors trained overseas are five times more likely to be struck off than those trained in the UK
• 669 doctors were struck off or suspended in the past 5 years. Of those, 420 (63%) were trained abroad

The situation appears to be getting worse. In 2009, 41 out of 67 doctors struck off were trained overseas (61%), while by last year 29 out of 39 struck off were trained overseas (75%).

Hope not Hate undoubtedly think that anything which mentions the word 'foreign' in a negative sense is bad, but the consequence of their absurd, unthinking political correctness could well put the lives of British NHS patients at risk.

We would recommend that before putting their mouths in gear, Hope not Hate engage their brain and do some basic research. Thankfully they are not the government, or they would be explaining why their knee-jerk reaction without bothering to check facts could lead to situations such as those listed at the bottom of this article. We've never heard of anybody dying from Political Correctness, but if Hope not Hate had their way, it could soon feature amongst the leading causes of death in the UK.

Dr Vladan Visnjevac, 59
Bosnia and Hercegovina
Obstetrics registrar at St Peter’s Hospital, in Chertsey, Surrey
Struck off in April 2008 after using three times the proper force on forceps to deliver a baby in 2002. The girl died of a fractured skull and brain injuries.

Dr Sabah Al-Zayyat, 55
Pakistan
Consultant paediatrician at St Ann’s Hospital, in Haringey, north London
Granted 'voluntary erasure’ from the medical register on health grounds in February 2011 after failing to diagnose the broken back of Peter Connelly – the 17-month-old, known as Baby P, who died as a result of abuse. It meant she avoided a misconduct hearing.

Dr Navin Shankar, 62
India
GP at Wigmore Lane Health Centre in Luton, Beds
Relinquished his registration with the GMC in February 2011 after failing to diagnose “persistent” cancer symptoms in a young woman over a six-year period. The woman died aged 26 in August 2007.

Dr Benjamin Obukofe, 44
Nigeria
Doctor at Spire Leicester Hospital, a private hospital in Leicestershire
Suspended by the GMC in September this year after being found guilty by a court of sexually assaulting two colleagues at the hospital. Given a suspended prison sentence and put on the sex offenders register for seven years.

Dr Oluwaseyi Farombi, 43
Nigeria
Mental health doctor across the South East
Struck off in January this year after the GMC discovered he was a criminal with a record of deceit that spanned more than a decade. He has been on the run from police for three and a half years after failing to show up at his trial for fraud in 2009.