OK, stick with me on this one please.
BBC bias is often sophisticated and nowhere is there more obvious than on any discussion of State monoliths such as the NHS.
One of the few Conservatives that impress me is Daniel Hannan. He is courageous, independent-minded and best of all, an actual conservative. That’s why I am not that shocked to read that he has been rebuked by his party leadership for endorsing American criticisms of the National Health Service. Thou must not criticise the NHS is the 1st commandment of British politics. It doesn’t matter how useless it is, it doesn’t matter how many it kills through poor hygiene and sloppy standards, it doesn’t matter how many bureaucrats it piles onto the payroll each year, it doesn’t even matter that it offers shocking value to patients for the £££ billions it receives. All that matters is politicians control it – lots of votes in it, you see.
Hannan has broken the golden rule and so the BBC delights in putting up Andrew Lansley – that political giant – to slap down young Daniel. The easy consensus – between all the political elite and the likes of the BBC – is that the NHS is a good thing and those who criticise it are bad. In this way, the NHS gets away with being the National Death Service and grins all round.
There are plenty of us who have real doubts about the NHS, and there are some of us who would like to see it de-linked from political control. Of course that then creates a rather unfortunate template that the BBC does not like. We no more need a National Health Service than we do a National Broadcaster. They are both creations from another age, they are both anchored in socialism, and the sooner they both go the better. Such a view as that which I have just expressed brings convulsions to the BBC and is rarely given media time. And so when Daniel Hannan dares to go on…gulp..Fox News, and speaks honestly of the failures in the NHS, he is pilloried by the smug elite who then use the State Broadcaster to stick the knife in, surgically. In this way, the BBC acts in conjunction with the politicians to maintain the status quo even thought it is, literally, killing us.