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.