Jeremy Hunt just rewrote history to pretend that the Tories created the NHS!

Jeremy Hunt's pathetic effort to steal credit for probably the greatest achievement of the Labour Party is bad enough as it is, because it's a sickening display of historical revisionism to claim credit for the creation of the NHS when your party fought tooth and nail to prevent it, voting against it 22 times.

What makes it even worse though is that Jeremy Hunt is actually overseeing the deliberate rundown of the NHS under the tried and tested Tory strategy of systematically crippling public services with funding cuts and destructive reforms in order to sell privatisation as their snake oil cure to the problems that they themselves caused. 

Jeremy Hunt has been overseeing the biggest NHS funding cuts in decades and the mass privatisation of NHS services into the hands of private profiteers like Circle Health (operated by a bunch of major Tory party donors) and Richard Branson's Virgin Health.

Under anything like normal circumstances anyone with a shred of decency should be outraged that the man who is actually overseeing the ideological ruination of the NHS is falsely claiming credit for its creation. But the Tories have got so adept at spewing reality-reversing propaganda that Hunt's outrageous revisionism is unexceptional against the constant barrage of distortions, misrepresentations, malicious fantasies, economically illiterate propaganda, divide & conquer tactics, and outright lies from his Tory colleagues.

After trying to claim credit for the creation of the organisation he is enthusiastically dismantling, Hunt went on to push another extraordinary propaganda tactic.

Instead of addressing the urgent problem that Tory policies (scrapping NHS bursaries & their outright contempt for the rights of EU citizens working in the UK) have resulted in a huge 23% drop in the number of trainee nurses, he actually announced an extra 5,000 nurse training places!

Anyone with a grip on the facts would ask "what the hell is the point in creating an extra 5,000 nurse training places when your policies have actually collapsed the number of trainee nurses by 10,000?"

But then the art of Tory politics is to deny the public the basic facts, and hope that they fall for the propaganda.

Of course citizens have some responsibility to learn the absolutely fundamental facts for themselves (Labour created the NHS, the Tories have created a huge NHS recruitment crisis by scrapping NHS bursaries and lumbering trainee nurses with vast debts) but the real responsibility lies with mainstream media hacks.

There's no way that pro-Tory hacks are unaware of the Tory-instigated NHS recruitment crisis or the fact that there isn't a hope in hell that Jeremy Hunt's 5,000 extra nurse training places will be filled, but they'll uncritically repeat the Tory propaganda line about the "biggest increase in nurse training places in NHS history" without explaining the context, because complicity and deception in favour of the ruling establishment is their job.

The billionaires who own the media platforms these hacks work for have vested interests in the privatisation of the NHS (which represents rich pickings for corporate profiteers), so mainstream media hacks will push Jeremy Hunt's lies and spin as hard as they can in the desperate hope that people like you and I are so under-informed that we'd actually believe that the Tories founded the NHS (rather than fighting it every step of the way), and that creating 5,000 extra nursing places after you've just chased 10,000 trainee nurses per year away with the prospect of astronomical debts is a sensible approach to NHS recruitment.

Hopefully this Tory pitch to the catastrophically under-informed backfires in their faces as decent people recoil in revulsion at the Orwellian revisionism and the sheer bloody-minded refusal to engage with the reality of the recruitment crisis their own reforms have created.
But then 13.67 million people voted Tory in Theresa May's vanity election, so they're either the catastrophically under-informed Tory target audience, or they're actually happy with the ongoing Tory vandalism of the NHS (maybe they've got private health insurance and don't give a shit about anyone else? Maybe they own investments in private health companies looking to gorge themselves on the Tory NHS carve-up? Or maybe they're naive enough to believe that they have some magical lifelong immunity from serious illness?).

Still, figuring out why so many people would vote for a party that is actively wrecking the NHS in front of their eyes is a bit of a toughie. If you know anyone who voted Tory in Theresa May's vanity election, perhaps you could ask them to explain why they actively endorsed Jeremy Hunt's continued vandalism of the NHS?

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