Monthly Archives: January 2017

Britain, Government, Health, Politics

Why are we letting the whole world use our health service?

NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

health-tourism

The National Health Service is under considerable strain. It is not an international health service providing a worldwide service.

LAST year foreign patients left the NHS with an unpaid bill of almost £30million.

That is nearly double the amount for the previous year and clear evidence that action must be taken to clamp down on health tourism.

The NHS, as the Department of Health has rightly said, is a national health service not an international one.

There is simply no way that the British taxpayer can afford to pay for the rest of the world to come here and access treatment.

It would of course be inhumane to turn away anybody in need of emergency care while they are in this country.

But that is not to say that the NHS is obliged to treat for free any individual who happens to suffer from a minor illness or requires non-urgent treatment while on British soil.

For all the tough talk we are continuing to offer healthcare worth huge sums of money to people who have no right to it.

An explosion in demand is putting the NHS under increasing pressure.

This is not purely the result of health tourism but stopping people from overseas from accessing free treatment should be easy.

That ministers allow them to keep getting away with it is worrying. We are not a country that should be providing free-for-all.

We need the Government to put British taxpayers first and stop others from abusing our health service.

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Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Terrorism, United Nations, United States

The West has a responsibility in Iraq

mosul

Mosul: Violence in Iraq continues to escalate.

IRAQ

Intro: Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end.

Violence still engulfs Iraq. The United Nations has said that at least 6,878 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2016, a number that is most certain to be on the low side because of the unverifiable number of civilian deaths in war zones. And we do not know the full death toll from the ongoing fighting in that country because the Iraqi government has not published the causality figures for government troops and paramilitary forces fighting in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq. It is a tragic toll.

In December alone, 109 civilians perished and 523 injured in Baghdad. These are largely attributed to Islamic State who have claimed responsibility for a string of bombings. But, as IS get shifted out of Mosul and other areas they have controlled, the bombings will only get worse. Fanatics will carry on the fight on the streets of the country’s cities.

Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end. Along with the United States we were at the forefront of the regime change invasion of Iraq that has unleashed such a violent insurrection since. Britain cannot be allowed to wash its hands as if now the mayhem has nothing to do with them. It does.

The conclusions of the Chilcot Inquiry found many failings of the UK but was specifically critical of the way in which the U.S. dismantled the security and intelligence apparatus of Saddam Hussein’s army, as well as describing the whole invasion as a strategic failure. Whilst the immediate violence is largely being perpetrated by IS and its fanatics, the West could have served the Iraqi people much better after getting involved.

It is always difficult to stand back and watch merciless dictators with no compunction committing butchery on their own people, but the long-term costs of not thinking through action from the start is now all too clear. Western intervention and the lack of proper military plans in Iraq – in dealing with all that has happened since that ill-fated invasion of 2003 – explains much of what we are witnessing now. Hideous incompetence.

A lesson we still seem not to have learnt in Syria.

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Aid, Britain, Europe, European Union, Government, Politics, Uncategorized

Taking back control of the foreign aid budget

uk-aid

Destinations and allocations of British foreign aid in 2015.

BRITISH FOREIGN AID

Intro: Enshrined into UK law is Britain’s ill-judged legal commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid which ministers are obliged to spend.

The statement made by the European Commission that hundreds of millions of pounds spent on international aid will be returned to the Treasury will be welcome news for Out campaigners. This goes to the heart of the Brexit cause and why British voters chose to leave the European Union: leaving means that decisions taken in the name of British voters, using money that belongs to British taxpayers, are made by people who are directly accountable to those people.

This is one of the starkest examples of what was wrong with Britain’s involvement with the EU; a situation where large sums of money were extracted from taxpayers and handed to unelected and unaccountable Commission officials to spend on aid and vanity projects about which British voters were never consulted. Regaining control of such cash and such decisions is the essence of Brexit.

But, as things stand, that money will not be used very differently. Enshrined into UK law is Britain’s ill-judged legal commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid which ministers are obliged to spend. This grim irony, a policy which is as unpopular with voters as EU membership was, shares similar undemocratic origins: a political project beloved by metropolitan elites who felt entitled to foist that commitment on taxpayers who did not consent to it.

Taking back control of money sent to Brussels, just as voters instructed, reconciles directly to what Brexit means. The same control must now be restored over the aid budget: the 0.7 per cent target should follow our EU membership into history.

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