I had a chance to use the French health service recently, it was quick, efficient, very well staffed and equipped with no waiting around and cheap; even for a foreigner.
While some will use this as evidence that the NHS is broken, or needs reforming or privatising, and you can hear the Tory attack dogs pulling at their chains to be allowed to destroy it, but the real lesson to learn is this.
If you pay higher taxes you get a better health service. In fact, pretty much everything is better; schools, roads, the armed forces, social care, and all the rest.
Strangely, the very advocates of low tax know this full well. In the private sector Rolls Royces cost more than Fiats, because they are better. The NHS is worse than the French or German systems not because it is different but because it is cheaper.
But we live in a country where the idea that decades of low taxation are not to blame for anything is gospel and the idea that tax cuts are always a good idea still reigns.
We have been conned into cakeism, and we were conned long before Johnson took it to new depths. Thatcherism was and is also cakeism, what else is “You can have tax cuts and the NHS”?
You get what you pay for, you have not been paying enough, full stop.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
At 72 I’m still hoping I live long enough to hear a politician say this