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Choose ONE: Sadistic, Greedy, Scamming Tories OR the NHS

Will Black
4 min readDec 11, 2022
Photo by Red Dot on Unsplash

Nine years ago (almost to the day) Professor Stephen Hawking, one of our finest minds, used a TV broadcast to caution the UK about right-wing plans to undermine and asset strip the National Health Service (NHS). What we have been seeing over the intervening years is that managed demolition, prior to the wholesale fire-sale of component parts to private firms, many based in the USA. Private companies, which have already managed to grab some of the ‘spoils’, will be salivating like ravenous predators in anticipation of tearing flesh from the public health system we (and our parents, grandparents and great grandparents) built over 75 years.

In a short programme after the Channel 4 News, on December 4th 2013, which could have been called ‘A Non-Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the NHS and the People of Britain’, Professor Hawking said: “Fifty-one years ago I was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given two to three years to live. The NHS is the reason I have survived so long. It is Britain’s finest public service and must be preserved from commercial interests who want to privatise it.

“During the debate on Obama’s bill to reform America’s health care system, a right-wing source said: ‘If Stephen Hawking was British and had to rely on the NHS he would be dead by now’. I replied: ‘I am British and am proud of it’.

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Will Black
Will Black

Written by Will Black

Will is an anthropologist, journalist and former clinician. He is the author or Veneer of Civilisation, Psychopathic Cultures and Beyond the End of the World

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