"There is virtually no testing anywhere. The WHO policy that you test, you trace, you isolate, you contain is being TOTALLY ignored by the Johnson/Cummings regime. They are not even testing health workers. [...] This is putting thousands of health workers at risk, and essentially abandoning hundreds of them to catch the virus, to spread the virus, and in many cases to die. The experts in a health emergency are, of course, the health workers. But they are silenced by the Tories and the NHS bosses — threatened with dismissal if caught telling the truth to the public they serve — as if we were living in Stalinist China. Those in power are afraid the crisis will expose the reality of NHS under-resourcing and creeping privatisation. Because of Tory underfunding there are not enough testing kits, not enough protective suits, not enough ventilators, not enough staff, not enough, not enough — even though they have known for a quarter of a century that a major pandemic was a clear and present danger. Even now, if they chose, a government invoking near-wartime powers could fix these shortages rapidly by requiring companies to shift production to the needs of fighting the virus. [...] But it involves massive resources, a society-wide strategy to defeat the virus, and that is something the government is not prepared to envisage. The Tories are terrified by any kind of from below — because it would marginalise elites and empower ordinary people."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Neil Faulkner on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, Mass Deaths, Mass Poverty, Mass Repression, co-written with Phil Hearse, 20 March 2020, Mutiny
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/National_Health_Service
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
National Health Service
13 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by National Health Service →
Related Quotes
"A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society."
"A free Health Service is a triumphant example of the superiority of collective action and public initiative applied t…"
"No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied aid because of lack of means."
"Society becomes more wholesome, more serene, and spiritually healthier, if it knows that its citizens have at the bac…"
"Intrinsically the National Health Service is a church. It is the nearest thing to the embodiment of the Good Samarita…"
"We must establish on broad and solid foundations a National Health Service. Here let me say that there is no finer in…"
"The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked whether it…"
"[The NHS is] a great national blessing enabling people to live longer and happier lives."
"The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practice in it regard…"
"I suggest in The Dirty War on the NHS we look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass ob…"