US conservative senator Ted Cruz, hit out at the NHS and British government by proxy when he referred over twitter to the case of Alfie Evans, stating “it’s a grim reminder that systems of socialised medicine like the NHS vest the state with the power over human lives, transforming citizens into subjects”. By all accounts Ted Cruz is right, firstly because the UK system of government is simply an extension of the morarchy, whereby legislation passed by the elected (and unelected) officials is effectively still a command from the crown, therefore British ‘citizens’ are in fact still subjects of the crown whether they like it or not.
The Alfie Evans’ case was shocking and wholly indefensible because by any coherent application of rational examination, it was the intentional human sacrifice of a child by government. The nuts and bolts of the situation are that the NHS stated that they would no longer help Alfie Evans to remain alive by life support or feeding, but also obtained a court injunction to forbid his parents from removing the child from the hospital, helping him to remain alive, or indeed seeking treatment anywhere else.
In typical media and government double speak, they attempted through mental and lingual gymnastics to draw parallels in legal precedent to cases whereby the hospital could be put in a position in which parents could choose not to allow their child to have a blood transfusion or some other life saving treatment. Clearly this was a simple case of a government with far to much power killing a child while using double speak to rationalise the position and force to back it.
With regard to the NHS, I have many a time made the argument that as a system of healthcare, not only is it completely unsustainable, but lacking in both the resources and the transparency that a medical system needs to effectively function, while remaining free of corruption. As an example of transparency let’s take a person who was to seek treatment in a private hospital in America. In America the patient would make an appointment (which would be of his/her choosing) promptly be treated, before receiving an itemised bill of exactly what said treatments costs. What people in the UK tend to forget is that there is still a bill, you just don’t get to see it, nor does the average person have any conception of where the huge sums of money that flow into the NHS actually go.
The usual arguments about the NHS, both in favour and against, tend to come from personal experiences such as “The NHS saved my son” or vice versa, but most of these can easily be debunked. When someone says that their son was ‘saved by the NHS’, what they really mean is that their son was saved by a team of doctors and nurses that just happened to be working within the bureaucratic constraints of the NHS. Proponents of the NHS also seem to forget that not only is the NHS NOT FREE, but can be, and is, massively exploited, while those forced to pay for it are further and further impoverished. The mainstream narrative always tends to scapegoat capitalism for all the problems in the world, when in truth if citizens are not crippled by exorbitant taxes to support gargantuan and often incredibly corrupt socialist systems, then being able to afford health insurance would far from be beyond the reach of your average working family.
Alfie Evans was not the first child to be sacrificed on the ritualistic alter of NHS and government bureaucracy, neither will he be the last, unless radical change away from current UK socialism begins to take place. The troubling thing is that at the moment in the two party system (or one party system depending on how you see it) there simply is absolutely no alternative option to socialism being tabled by any mainstream political representation. The UK governments grip over every aspect of civic life has indeed become so tight and repressive that it has been sparking protests throughout the country and continues to do so. On Sunday May 6th Goldfire media will be covering and live streaming the Day For Freedom protest that will be taking place in London, this coming on the heels of the huge protest the other week because of the sentencing of Mark Meechan.
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