The BBC…The Fourth Emergency Service

‘When Labour is on the defensive, as now, the NHS is a powerful instrument of attack.’

When you’re in dire political trouble, your party is tearing itself apart, your own position is in doubt and the polls show you are heading the way of the LibDems call the BBC. They can help.

Labour is in melt down, internally and in the polls as the looney left took over the asylum.   Corbyn has lost control, well he never had any really, and the firm smack of authority is just as much a fantasy to him as to Max Mosley.

But fear not, the BBC is here to help.  It has stepped in to plug Labour’s credibility gap and provide the ‘official opposition’ to the government that Labour fails to.  It is no mere chance that the BBC has chosen to bombard the government with ‘facts’ on the NHS’ performance recently…facts, facts, facts and yet not so much.  We get lots of stuff we already knew, lots of alarming reports of the ‘crisis’ in the NHS, lots of sensationalist reports of the meltdown of A&E and yet not so much on the causes, or the real causes I should say, and not so much on the solutions other than to constantly ask Ministers if they will be providing more money.  No coincidence that the BBC released its information just in time for Labour to use it in PMQs as their main attack theme.  The same BBC that refused to release the video of a school which was bombed with a chemical weapon in Syria just before the vote in Parliament as to whether military action could be authorised…..the BBC influencing the politics with its manipulation of the news?

The real problem is that A&E is vastly over used with millions more patients coming through its doors…Up to 2003 the number of patients calling into A&E was around 14 million, now it is around 23 million.

Even Sir Robert Francis, whom the BBC interviewed this week, told us that the problem was a growng populaton and more complex cases for elderly patients…the BBC chose to report that if the crisis goes on we are heading towards another ‘Stafford’….when the BBC reported on ‘Stafford’ originally they signally failed to mention Labour by name in so many of their reports as if to try and distance Labour from responsibility.

The Telegraph notes….

All week the BBC has been running special programmes and reports on the NHS. We have learnt that the system is “in crisis” with hospital accident and emergency wards overwhelmed and patients often left for hours before being seen.

Without wishing to denigrate the corporation’s journalism, what has this told us that we did not already know?

Anyone tuning in would imagine the system was on the verge of collapse. Yet the big story with the NHS is not that it struggles to keep its head above water because it needs more money to stay afloat; we know that. The real issue is that no one is prepared to recognise that it needs to be run differently if it is to survive.

To use a medical metaphor, the BBC has once again identified the symptoms but has shunned any serious diagnosis of the cause or the cure.

Pointing out the flaws in the health service is the easy bit.   Inevitably, the debate reignited by the BBC always ends up in the same place: how much more can be taken out of taxes for the NHS.

The Conservatives …. always risk political damage whenever the NHS becomes an issue. Not for nothing did Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, want to “weaponise” the health service during the 2015 election campaign.

When Labour is on the defensive, as now, the NHS is a powerful instrument of attack.

There is something depressing about this cycle. A great national institution is being crucified on the altar of party politics.

The BBC of course has no problem exploiting the NHS as a ‘weapon’ as it tries to prop up its own ailing and elderly political relative just as it had no problem sacrificing so many Syrians on the altar of ‘Peace’…a peace that actually brings more war, thousands dead and millions of refugees…but that’s another BBC story for another time.

Also in the Telegraph…

Why won’t the BBC dare to look at the real causes of the NHS crisis? 

The former Chancellor Nigel Lawson once famously said that “the NHS is the nearest thing the English have to a religion.” Over recent days the BBC has taken on the self-appointed role of championing the faith.    

The chosen method of the Corporation to achieve this has been the traditional one of the evangelical preacher: to create a mood of terrifying, apocalyptic crisis where salvation can only be achieved through ever more fervent worship and ever greater devotion to the case.

As a result, the BBC news this week was completely dominated by NHS stories. Day and night the bulletins were filled with dire reports from the “front line”, as if the health service were a war zone. Viewers were bombarded with images of weeping nurses, stressed-out doctors, and patients lying on trolleys.