27
Keir Starmer: ‘If you want change, you have to vote for it’
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
27 points (93.5% liked)
UK Politics
3067 readers
166 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Wanting the NHS to refuse to use private companies, even if that might mean better outcomes, which is the actual policy and the goal, is a privileged position.
Streeting is not proposing the NHS 'no longer be in public hands', so whether views on that are middle class, leftwing or whatever, are not relevant.
Nobody's asking for worse outcomes - it's a difference of opinion of what will actually work. Saying people want everyone to suffer so they can have their way is just being disingenuous.
That's also not a fair characterisation of Streeting's argument. It's not that they want people to suffer, just that they're not exposed to the consequences of the policies they're advocating.
My point is that it's not only middle-class people using private healthcare who think this. And Wes Streeting knows that. He just doesn't want to argue for his market-based approach (because it's really unpopular) so he just mischaracterises the opposition to it.
Private healthcare doesn't come into it. It's about people who don't regularly interact with the health service, which is most of us, having stronger opinions about how healthcare is delivered than whether it is.
Again, it's a difference of opinion about how it's delivered, not whether it's delivered. Can you find me a single example of someone saying they don't want the NHS at all unless it's 100% publicly delivered? Because that's the imaginary person you and Wes Streeting are arguing against.
People (in this very thread, so not strawmen!) mischaracterising using any private companies in delivery as taking the NHS out of public hands was exactly the argument that he was responding to.