Thu 16 Apr 2020, 02:57 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER from Mic Craig, member of the Labour Party Northern Ireland
An army veteran aged 99, Captain Tom Moore, raises £12 million [to date] for the NHS by walking 200 laps of his garden before his birthday. You have to admire the monumental efforts of this old soldier, and the generosity of the hundreds of thousands of people who sponsored him, but the NHS should be neither about giving nor receiving charity.
“Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.” So said Aneurin Bevan, the Minister for Health who founded the NHS in 1948
The billionaires and millionaires are watching Mr Moore and his supporters and laughing all the way to the off-shore banks with the money they’ve been creaming off our public services. This theft has left the NHS in such a state that people like Mr. Moore feel that they have to give donations in order to save it in this time of crisis.
The well-intentioned people who put their efforts into raising funds for public services are inadvertently undermining them. The NHS is a public service, not a charitable one, and it is paid for through taxation and National Insurance contributions. We have already paid for it!
By donating to the NHS we let the government off the hook. We are sending a message to the government and their friends, the speculators, that it’s alright to continue to steal our taxes through PFIs and outsourcing. We’re telling them to carry on regardless, because when the funds have been siphoned off, we’ll happily pay again to make up the shortfall.
Thanks Mr. Moore and thanks to all those who supported your initiative, but really folks, you’d do the NHS a lot more good by directing your efforts into a campaign to stop its deliberate destruction by a bunch of parasites.
