RATS and cockroaches invading hospital beds and wards. Sick and elderly patients treated in corridors and car parks.
And the dying forced to endure their final moments in public, surrounded not only by their loved ones but random strangers, stripped of peace, privacy and dignity.
It sounds like the Third World, doesn’t it? Some tin-pot dictatorship in the middle of nowhere that’s unable to look after its own people?
Except it’s not. It’s Britain. It’s what is happening right here, right now, in what is supposed to be one of the most advanced nations on .
These are just a few from two shocking recent reports on the dire state of our National Service — one by the Royal College of Nursing and the other by Unison, who surveyed 9,000 staff in the NHS.
Released in recent weeks, both of these reports pull back the curtain to reveal the nightmare that awaits should you or your loved ones find yourselves having to run the gauntlet of our collapsing health service.
To be honest, I had to read the damning findings twice because the first time around I found them so utterly shocking and disgraceful.
How is it acceptable to have a health service in which nearly one in five staff working in it does not think their buildings are safe, more than half have seen buckets catching leaking water, and nearly one in four has seen sewage leaks?
‘Mockery of fair play’
How is it acceptable to have a health service in which nearly one in five staff working in it does not think their buildings are safe, more than half have seen buckets catching leaking water, and nearly one in four has seen sewage leaks?
Astonishingly, one worker said they had even seen mouse droppings on the floor of hospital wards and rooms that are used to store sterile instruments for surgeons.
And how is there not national outrage about the fact that our sick and elderly are being given inadequate care, are being treated in busy hallways, toilets and car parks, and are sometimes dying alone, left undiscovered in hospital corridors?
As the union Unison said, this is not a functioning national health service — it is “a crumbling Dickensian relic”;.
But what makes all this even worse, what makes me even angrier, is when you contrast the terrible and deteriorating state of our health service with the vast amount of hard-earned taxpayers' that, at the very same time, our hapless leaders in are sending not to fix the NHS but to countries overseas.
It is making a total mockery of the British sense of fair play — our belief that while we are willing to help others, we should always prioritise those who have contributed to the collective pot by paying tax and playing by the rules.
How is it acceptable to have a health service in which nearly one in five staff who work in it do not think their buildings are safe?
How is it right or fair, I ask you, that while the NHS is collapsing around us, and while hospitals and trusts say they do not have enough money to fix these hideous problems, the government is still sending more than £13BILLION of taxpayers’ money overseas in foreign aid, which is equivalent to about 43million for our elderly?
Just look at some of the truly bizarre projects you, the taxpayer, have been funding overseas, rather than having this money spent on fixing the glaring problems at home.
There’s the £40million we just spent on “empowering women in ”; and helping “feminists in ”;, which is especially interesting given that here in Britain, the Labour government only made a paltry £5million available for a few local inquiries to explore how British women and girls have been abused by and which, as we saw this week, Labour is now rapidly backtracking on.
There’s the £18million that went on helping refugees in find “decent work”;, while back here in Britain we’re apparently unable to get one in nine Brits off out-of-work and back into a steady job.
There’s the £34million that went on “transforming the lives”; of people around the world, with vague talk about promoting “inclusion and diversity”;.
How many more doctors and nurses would this have paid for?
And then there’s the £1million that went on helping obese people in . . . . Seriously.
While China can land on the moon, apparently it needs British taxpayers to help its people manage their weight.
While it might not be the largest sum in the world, it symbolises the much bigger problem I’m pointing to — a ruling class in this country who would much rather spend other people’s money, YOUR money, on bizarre and unnecessary projects overseas, from bankrolling opera and cycle lanes in to road schemes in , rather than spending it on fixing our increasingly Third World health system.
It’s not just me who thinks that we should now be taking a big chainsaw to the foreign aid budget and redirecting the savings into fixing our collapsing NHS
Matt Goodwin
It’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s not on.And it’s not just me who thinks that.Like ‘s president Javier Milei, we should now be taking an ever bigger and redirecting the savings into .
So do the vast majority of British people and, I'd happily take a punt, the readers of this newspaper.
When pollsters YouGov recently asked Brits what they think the UK government is ‘spending too much on’, the most popular answer, by far, supported by six in ten Brits, was overseas aid. Nothing else came close.
And when the same pollsters asked Brits if they support slashing foreign aid to redirect this money into supporting things that actually protect our own national interest here in Britain, such as defence, two-thirds said they did.
The key point in all of this is that the vast majority, the forgotten majority, are sick and tired of seeing their hard-earned taxpayers’ money being sent elsewhere while they and their loved ones are forced to live with the dire consequences of these decisions back here.
Because let’s be honest, it’s not the wailing liberal elites — the luxury belief class — who will have to sit on these hospital wards and deal with this dark reality.
‘Better choices’
They will all have private healthcare — so blabbering on about the need to send millions to teach women about modern art, or to support “eco-farms”; in , while we are simultaneously smashing family farms here in Britain with higher taxes, makes no difference to them.
It will be people like you, it will be the forgotten majority, who once again have to live with the dire effects of policy choices over which you have absolutely no control. And it stinks.
And it's not just about foreign aid, either.
Why are the British people, we might also ask, being forced to forfeit another £7BILLION a year that could go toward fixing our NHS but is instead being wasted on our totally shambolic asylum system, which even includes illegal migrants — people who have broken our laws — getting free healthcare!
The whole thing is a total joke.
Once again, we need leaders who will make much better choices, which in this case means doing whatever is necessary to fix our broken borders, including leaving the European Convention on () and then redirecting those savings, too, into our dismal NHS.
Because I don’t know about you, but I think the hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding public deserves much better than this.
They deserve a political class that puts them first for a change, that says, “Yes, we will help people overseas when we can, but before we do that, we must have a fit and proper health service for our own people who have paid for it through their taxes and hard work”;.
Do you want to know what my political motto would be?
It’s “Fix Britain Before Trying To Save The World”;.
And I’ll keep on saying it until we get all those rats and cockroaches out of our NHS.
That’s what the long-forgotten majority want and that’s what they should get.
