The difference between "left" and "right"

There are an awful lot of poorly considered political arguments out there, but one of the absolute worst is the claim that there is no difference between left-wing and right-wing.

In this article I'm going to explain the difference, take a look at how such confused claims that there is no difference come about, and then take a quick look at why the simplistic left vs right paradigm (although meaningful) is still far too simplistic.

The difference between left and right

The main difference between left-wing and right-wing politics is about economic organisation.

Economically left-wing

Left-wing politics focuses on the public ownership and operation of essential infrastructure and services such as the health service, public transport networks, schools, the police & army, the land registry, mail service, energy infrastructure, social housing. The further towards the far-left you go, the more things are classified as public property and the fewer things are allowed to remain under private ownership.

Economically right-wing

Right-wing politics focuses on the private (and often unaccountable) ownership and operation of essential infrastructure and services such as the health service, public transport networks, schools, the police & army, the roads, the land registry, the mail service, energy infrastructure, social housing (while the public still pays the cost of building/maintaining these things through their taxes). The further towards the far-right you go, the more things are classified as private property and the fewer things are allowed to remain under public ownership.

Other differences

Aside from the core economic difference between left and right there are some other differences too. One of the important common distinctions is that left-wing politics often has a focus on directly combating poverty and inequality, while right-wing politics tends to work on the (ridiculous) assumption that deregulated markets and increased private ownership will tend to reduce poverty and inequality.

Another difference is that left-wing politics has more often been associated with liberal social values than right-wing politics. This traditional association between left-wing political groups and liberal social values sprung up because of the obvious difficulty in reconciling the left-wing desire for greater equality with the practices of overt social discrimination (against women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, disabled people ...) that existed in the past. 

It's important to remember that although the political left has been in retreat for the last four decades or so, liberal social values have been in the ascendancy. In modern Britain we have anti-discrimination laws and gay equality, yet only a few decades ago homosexuality was considered a "crime" worthy of punishment by chemical castration and racial discrimination was all too common (see the openly racist Tory election leaflet from Smethwick in 1964).


The left is more often associated with social liberalism and the right with social conservatism, however liberal social values are clearly not a necessary condition of left-wing politics, and social conservatism is not a necessary condition of right-wing politics. It's perfectly possible to be an economically left-wing bigot, just as it's possible to be economically right-wing and oppose social discrimination.

How the confusion arises

The increasingly common confusion between left-wing and right-wing politics has arisen as a result of a number of factors. In this section I'll detail a few of the important ones.

Political propaganda

One of the main reasons that people struggle to grasp the difference between left-wing and right-wing politics is the way that modern political discourse is framed by the mainstream media.

The UK has the most right-wing biased press in Europe. This means that political coverage is more often than not skewed with an extreme right-wing bias. It's almost impossible to find anything resembling accurate definitions of left-wing and right-wing politics in the mainstream media. The situation has got so bad that social democrats like Jeremy Corbyn (who believe in finding a balance between state socialism and regulated capitalism) are routinely derided as being "dangerous", "radical" "extremists" from the far-left, while the radically right-wing "privatise absolutely everything we can get away with" Conservatives are treated as if their hard-right policies are centre-ground, moderate, common sense and fundamentally beyond question (this refusal to question is particularly noticeable with the widespread acceptance of the macroeconomically illiterate policy of austerity in the mainstream media).

As result of the extreme bias of the right-wing press we've found ourselves in the extraordinary position where the traditional social democratic centre ground is routinely derided as the extreme-left, while the ideologically driven austerity and mass privatisation policies of the most fanatically right-wing UK government in living memory are treated as they are essentially beyond question by the vast majority of journalists.


"Third way" politics

One of the other main causes of confusion between left-wing and right-wing politics is the way that so many nominally left-wing political parties abandoned left-wing politics in order to embrace right-wing economic policies like privatisation, financial market deregulation, globalisation and free-trade. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were two of the first to convert traditional left-wing political parties to pushers of right-wing economics, but they were far from the only ones. PASOK in Greece and PSOE in Spain are two other high profile examples of supposedly socialist political parties that were guilty of embracing hard-right economic policies.

This rightward shift in mainstream politics contributed to the confusion between left and right because swathes of the mainstream media continued to refer to parties like New Labour as "the left" and "socialists" even though they were blatantly pushing right-wing economic policies like the privatisation of public property, PFI, financial deregulation and de-industrialisation. No wonder people began to get confused when the supposedly "left-wing" political party was busy pushing exactly the same kind of right-wing policies as their conservative predecessors.


The immigration debate

The tabloid framing of the immigration debate is another contributor to the confusion between left-wing and right-wing politics. The tabloid press in the UK love to blame "the left" for mass immigration even though the open borders policy in the EU is clearly a right-wing free market economic policy.

The tendency to blame "the left" for mass immigration is inaccurate for a number of reasons. It's a right-wing free market policy that favours employers over employees; the New Labour government that oversaw a big increase in net migration was an economically right-wing  one; the Tory government that followed them has overseen the biggest spikes in net migration in recorded history and it's the most right-wing government in living memory.

When the tabloid press are intent on blaming the consequences of right-wing economic policies imposed by right-wing governments on "the left" (which hasn't been in power since 1979), it's no wonder so many people get confused.

It's more complicated than "left vs right"

The difference between left-wing and right-wing politics is undeniable, but it's simply not sufficient to rely on this one-dimensional distinction alone. I've already addressed the fact that social liberalism and social conservatism are distinct from left and right wing economic policies, then there's the distinction between libertarian and authoritarian style governance to add into the mix too.

Instead of viewing the political spectrum as a simplistic one dimensional line between left-wing and right-wing, it's possible to add other parameters to create more detailed political spectra like the political compass.

The fact that the majority of modern mainstream political parties have occupied the upper right quadrant of the political compass makes it clear where a lot of the confusion is coming from. If the distinction between right and left in mainstream politics has been measured by the difference between a radically right-wing authoritarian party (the Tories) and a slightly less right-wing authoritarian political party (New Labour), then it's no wonder people begun to believe that left and right are essentially the same.

The problem isn't that there's no difference between left and right, it's that mainstream politics has become increasingly confined within the right-wing authoritarian quadrant of the political compass, while other areas of political discourse like left-libertarianism (my kind of politics) and right-libertarianism have been left almost completely unrepresented within the political establishment.

Conclusion 

If you believe that pretty much everything should be public property (either run directly by the state or through more anarchist methods like local syndicalism) then you're very left-wing.

If you believe that pretty much everything should be private property (including essential infrastructure and services like the health service, education system, road networks, the police, public transport ...) then (like the Tory government) you're on the extreme-right.

If you believe in some kind of compromise where some essential infrastructure and services (the police, the roads, the education system, the health service ...) are best off run as not-for-profit public services, while other things (non monopoly businesses, private dwellings, personal property) can be privately owned, then, like Jeremy Corbyn, you occupy the traditional centre-ground.

Just because, for whatever reason, people are incapable of recognising the distinction between left-wing and right-wing politics, doesn't mean that the distinction doesn't exist.

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OR

The fracking = lower energy bills myth

In the wake of the decision by Tory dominated North Yorkshire County Council to approve a fracking licence just a few miles south of the North York Moors national park, the fracking apologists have been out in force to try to defend the decision to completely ignore the massive 131:1 scale of opposition to the plans.

One of the favourite tactics of the fracking apologist is to pretend that there is some kind of correlation between fracking and lower domestic energy bills. In this article I'm going to explain how this argument is not only wrong, but actually completely backwards.

Evidence-free assertions

The claims that the introduction of fracking rigs in the English countryside would bring down domestic energy bills is a classic evidence-free assertion. Fracking enthusiasts just seem to take it as an article of faith that fracking would reduce domestic energy bills in the UK. It's like some kind of unquestionable religious to these people.

If you see anyone making these claims it's a good tactic to ask them to direct you to a peer reviewed scientific study detailing a link between fracking and low energy prices in the UK domestic energy market. They won't be able to do so because no such study exists. They'll just continue repeating the claim on the basis that it's true because they want it to be true.

The UK is not the US

 

Evidence of devastating environmental damage in the US and "cut and run" tactics from unscrupulous US fracking companies who abandon their fracking rigs for the taxpayer to clean up is shrugged off by fracking enthusiasts with the excuse that those things happened in the US and it will all somehow all be different in the UK. However, when it comes to their stories about fracking leading to lower energy prices, they immediately point to the fall in domestic gas prices in the US as if it represents compelling and unquestionable evidence.

It would be easy to dismiss such tactics as "wanting to have their cake and eat it" because it is about as clear an example as possible, but there are some specific reasons that direct comparisons between the US and UK dometic gas markets are desperately misleading.

The early 21st Century fracking boom in the US did lead to a fall in domestic gas prices in the US, but their gas industry was not set up for the mass export/import of gas, so the majority of additional supplies remained within the US market, which created a glut which drove down the price of gas. Not only is the US gas market not set up for mass exportation, there are also laws to disincentivise US firms from exporting energy.

The UK gas industry is very different. The UK gas market is much more interconnected with other countries. If gas production rose in the UK, then domestic prices would be unlikely to fall far because the UK gas market is nowhere near as closed as the US market. In order to significantly reduce domestic gas prices, the UK would need to begin extracting a vast enough quantity of shale gas to impact the entire European gas market. Anyone who thinks that is likely to happen any time soon clearly has no idea whatever about the scale of Russian gas exports to the European market. In 2015 Gazprom (the Russian state gas monopoly) exported 159.4 billion cubic metres of gas to the European market. Third Energy are reluctant to disclose their projections for how much gas they are planning to extract from the KM8 fracking zone, but it's fair to asume that it's going to be an absolutely tiny drop in the ocean compared to the production of the North Sea gas industry, let alone the scale of Russian gas exports to the European market.

Anyone who tries to point to the fall in gas prices in the US as evidence that UK gas prices would also fall is doing nothing but displaying their ignorance of the structural differences between the US and UK energy markets.

 

Ignoring externalities

 

Even if we allow the entirely unproven assertion that fracking will produce lower UK domestic energy bills to stand, there's still the issue of externalities to consider.

If fracking does shave a few pennies off our domestic energy bills, what will be the hidden/unconsidered costs? 

One of the most obvious potential costs that is excluded from the "lower energy bills" claims is the potential cost to the taxpayer of attempting to repair fracking related environmental degridation (in 2013 the Tories exempted the fracking industry from liability insurance). If fracking causes environmental degridation it will either be permanent (an environmental externality), or the taxpayer will have to foot the bill (a taxpayer subsidy that is excluded from the calculation).

Then there's the cost of George Osborne handing the fracking industry a vast tax break in order to make the industry seem even remotely viable. If lower energy prices come at the cost of the taxpayer propping up an unviable industry with huge tax breaks (lost tax revenues), that's clearly an example of giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

Another potential cost is the environmental harm from continued reliance on the burning of fossil fuels to meet our domestic energy demands. Instead of handing vast tax breaks to the fracking industry, surely a more environmentally sustainable strategy would to invest more in things like renewable energy, increased energy efficiency and research into technology like clean fusion reactors?

Another set of costs that has been excluded from the optimistic and unsubstantiated "lower energy bills" claims of the pro-fracking brigade are the costs to the local community. If roads need to be widened to cope with increased traffic, local taxpayers will pay the cost. If property prices fall because of the gigantic fracking rigs in the area, the local community will pay the cost. If the fracking process ends up damaging or destroying the land, the local community will pay the cost.

One of the classic ways of making a bad deal look like a good deal is to cut out all of the extrnalities such as social harms, environmental degredation and economic costs borne by the taxpayer. If these costs are taken into consideration, an even bigger heap of salt needs to be piled on top of unsubstantiated claims that fracking will cause domestic energy bills to fall.

Fracking depends on high energy prices

  

It's already established that claims that fracking will cause UK energy bills to fall are not based on anything remotely resembling peer reviewed scientific studies. It's also clear that such claims are worthless if they involve the exclusion of externalities like social and environmental costs, and economic costs that are carried by the taxpayer. However the most damning criticism of all is that the whole claim is completely backwards. There's no evidence to prove that fracking in the UK would cause energy bills to fall, but if energy bills do fall significantly, then fracking becomes an economically unviable method of energy extraction.

Fracking won't cause lower energy bills because the whole industry is relient upon high energy prices to survive.

The reason fracking relies on high energy prices is that it generates very low rates of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) meaning that the margins are an awful lot slimmer tan traditional forms of fossil fuel extraction like oil and natural gas.

The ever improving EROEI ratings for renewable technologies such as solar, wind and wave power also point to difficult times ahead for the fracking industry (unless the Tory government decide to prop fracking up with even more tax breaks and subsidies whilst directly attacking the renewable energy sector).

A look at the way fracking companies across the US "cut and run" when energy prices fell leaving a trail of envirnmental degridation in their wake is direct evidence that the fracking industry is highly dependent upon high energy prices. If falling energy prices caused such chaos in the US fracking business that left Exxon's Chief Executive complaining that they were "losing our shirts" and Total's boss decying extraordinary losses in Texas with claims that Fracking "doesn't work" and that there's "no point in investing where there is no profitability" - then what on earth makes fracking enthusiasts think that the UK fracking business would be exempt from the consequences of the low energy prices they claim that it would cause?

 

Tory energy market price-fixing

Fracking enthusiasts need not be too worried that falling energy prices will derail their beloved industry though, because the Tories have signed up to a vast energy price-fixing deal to bribe the French state into building a nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point C by paying them double the market rate for electricity for 35 years. A crackpot scam to artificially inflate energy prices like the Tory price-fixing deal with the French is a surefire way of making the horribly inefficient shale gas fracking industry look financially viable.

 

Conclusions

 

Environmental destruction in Wyoming after fracking

companies "cut and run" leaving the US taxpayer to

pick up the bill.

Even after the US propped up the shale gas fracking industry with vast tax breaks and woefully inadequate liability insurance rates, the fracking business in the US has imploded due to falling energy prices, leaving an environmental catastrophe in its wake.

The Tories are utterly determined not to learn any lessons from this debacle in the US, deciding to throw vast subsidies and tax breaks around in order to promote fracking in the UK. It's absolutely clear that a large number of Tory politicians have investments in the fracking business, so it's no wonder they're doing everything in their power to promote an industry that is only viable if energy prices remain high.

If deliberately puncturing the growth of the UK sustainable energy sector; signing completely unjustifiable 35 year price-fixing deals with the French to keep UK domestic energy prices as high as posible; giving fracking companies vast tax advantages over other fossil fuel sources, bribing local councils into allowing fracking to go ahead in their areas; exempting fracking companies from covering their own clean-up costs; riding roughshod over the concerns of local communites where fracking is going to be imposed; and spreading completely back-to-front myths about fracking lowering energy prices - is what it takes for the Tories to support the fracking industry, then so be it. David Cameron and his Tory chums have made it absolutely clear that they're "going  all out for shale".

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OR

The "northern powerhouse" myth

  

To pretty much everyone bar Tory party tribalists George Osborne's "Northern Powerhouse" is already a standing joke. I'm still going to write an article criticising it though, because even though an awful lot of people see Tory references to the "Northern Powerhouse" as the smug and contemptuous Orwellian propaganda that it is, it's still worth compiling some of the evidence so that people know exactly how bad it is.

Local government cuts

The Tories are always banging on about investment in the north, but what they don't say is that since 2010 they've slashed £3.9 billion from local council budgets in the north. Investing a few million here and a few million there whilst slashing almost £4 billion across the region is a classic example of the Tory strategy of giving with one hand, and robbing an awful lot more with the other.

It's absolutely clear that the majority of Tory local government cuts have hit the industrial north, south Wales, deprived parts of London and parts of the midlands, while wealthy Tory councils in London, the Home Counties and the rural north have got off much more lightly, or even ended up with funding increases!

When Tories (including David Cameron's own Oxfordshire council and his own mother) started complaining about the brutal effects of the local council cuts they were suffering, they announced a two year £300 million fund, 83% of which was directed at wealthy Tory councils, with only a tiny fraction for urban councils in the north that have borne much more severe cuts than the wealthy Tory voting councils.

Some "Northern Powerhouse" eh?

Re-branding existing infrastructure projects as Tory schemes

One of the biggest complaints about the "Northern Powerhouse" is how the Tories have dressed up pre-existing infrastructure projects as "Northern Powerhouse" initiatives. All but two of the so-called "Northern Powerhouse" infrastructure schemes were announced before it even existed, and three of them were actually announced by the New Labour government before the Tories came to power in 2010!

There are only two directly funded infrastructure projects that have been announced since "Northern Powerhouse" came into existence. One is the project to turn the M60 into a "smart motorway" and the other is a road upgrade to the A556, which goes through George Osborne's own constituency!

The "Northern Powerhouse" turns out to be a bit like how the Mayor of London Boris Johnson claimed credit for the London cycle hire scheme that became known as "Boris Bikes", even though the project was originally conceived under the leadership of his Labour predecessor Ken Livingstone.
   
Struggling towns

Research by the Joseph Rowntree foundation showed that 10 of 12 of the most struggling towns are in the "Northern Powerhouse", while not a single town in the south features in the top 24 towns in most serious economic decline.   

The research found that the places in most serious decline were:

1. Rochdale (north)
2. Burnley (north)
3. Bolton (north)
4. Blackburn (north)
5. Hull (north)
6. Grimsby (north)
7. Dundee (Scotland)
8. Middlesbrough (north) 
9. Bradford (north)
10. Blackpool (north)
11. Stoke (midlands)
12. Wigan (north)

It's not just that these places are economically deprived, it's that they are in sustained economic decline, which is completely at odds with all the Tory propaganda about rebalancing the UK economy.

When confronted with these appalling findings the Tory "Northern Powerhouse" minister James Wharton refused to comment.

Vast spending disparities

George Osborne's "Northern Powerhouse" propaganda often features claims that the purpose is to rebalance the UK economy in favour of the north, but a look at the figures proves beyond doubt that the UK economy is still being heavily rebalanced in favour of London.

For every £1 per person that gets spent on infrastructure investment in the north east, London gets £24 per person in investment.

The idea that the economy can be rebalanced in favour of the north when London gets 24x the per capita infrastructure investment as the north east would be laughable if it weren't such a serious economic imbalance.

The "brain drain"

Everyone who grew up in the north is well aware of the "brain drain" towards London and the wealthy south. Everyone from the north knows plenty of people who abandoned their own region to find better jobs down south.

In order to create better jobs in the north and allow people to find good employment in their own region, the government needs to stop brutally slashing local government funding in the north and do some serious infrastructure investment, rather than just funding a few road improvements and repeatedly re-announcing existing infrastructure projects as if they represent new investment.

London is massively overcrowded, but big employers are unlikely to choose the north of England over London because northern infrastructure has been so badly neglected for so long, and London continues to get the lion's share of new investment.

The "Northern Powerhouse" is based in London!

Perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of George Osborne's "Northern Powerhouse" is that 97% of the staff it employs are based in London!

George Osborne talks about devolving power to the north, but the fact that almost his entire "Northern Powerhouse" team are based in London proves that his idea of devolution is London technocrats distributing political favours on an ad hoc basis to northern yokels who are far too backwards to run their own affairs for themselves.
  

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
               
George Osborne's 2016 budget of failure
      
Asset stripping "bankrupt Britain"
          
The Tory ideological mission
                  
Austerity is a con

                  
The Tory "economic recovery" is a lie

          

If anyone is playing class war politics it's the Tories

The "bankrupt Britain" lie

Some political myths are more believable than others. Some of them contain grains of truth, or perverse elements of pseudo-logic that seem to make sense when considered in isolation. Other political myths are such pure unadulterated rubbish that nobody should be falling for them. Claims that the UK has been "bankrupted" are amongst this class of political fallacy that even the most dedicated tabloid rote-learner should be able to see through with even the slightest amount of actual consideration.

Outright lies

Claims that the Labour Party are to blame for the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis are spurious enough as they are, but they are at least underpinned by some kind of simplistic pseudo-logical argument (the crisis happened on Labour's watch, therefore it must have been Labour's fault), so it's unsurprising that some simple-minded people fall for it*.

Claims that the UK economy have been bankrupted at any point in the recent past don't have any pseudo-logical foundation whatever. They're just lies. Easily disprovable lies.

The definition of the word bankrupt is "a person or organisation adjudged insolvent by a court, his or her property being transferred to a trustee and administered for the benefit of his creditors". Anyone who thinks that the UK has recently been declared insolvent by any court is living in absolute fantasy land.

If you're not convinced, think about this: If the UK economy has been declared bankrupt, then how is it possible that the UK has been benefiting from the lowest government borrowing costs in history since 2009? Isn't it normally the case that lending institutions are reluctant to lend to recently bankrupted entities, rather than lending to them at the lowest interest rates in history?

David Cameron

"The last Labour Government ... crashed the economy; they bust the banks** ... and they bankrupted this country." - David Cameron, October 16th 2013, House of Commons

It's bad enough that tabloid propagandists use the "bankrupt Britain" lie to push the "blame Labour for everything" narrative. That the Prime Minister openly uses the "bankrupt Britain" lie in the Houses of Parliament (and gets away with it without a word of condemnation from the mainstream press or the parliamentary authorities) is utterly appalling***.

That the Prime Minister of the UK is allowed to lie to parliament (and the public) with absolute impunity is yet another damning demonstration of the lamentable decline in the standard of public debate.

No excuses

There is no excuse for anyone who knows anything at all about economics, or who has the slightest regard for the truth or honesty in debate, to make claims that the UK economy has been bankrupted.

At absolute best it is a display of abhorrent ignorance about the state of the UK economy and the meaning of the word "bankrupt".

Assuming that the person claiming "bankrupt Britain" is not absolved by virtue of their appalling ignorance, there's only one other explanation: that they know perfectly well that what they are saying is untrue, but they're saying it anyway because they believe that you are thick enough to believe it.

There is absolutely no excuse for anyone to use the"bankrupt Britain" lie. Either they're making a crystal clear demonstration that they themselves are an economically illiterate idiot. Otherwise they know perfectly well that it's a barefaced lie, but they're making the assumption that whoever is listening to them is an economically illiterate idiot.

Conclusion

The "bankrupt Britain" lie is a lamentable debating tactic, but it does serve one very useful purpose. It serves as an incredibly clear marker that whoever just uttered it is either a spectacularly gullible idiot, or a dishonest person who knows that it's pure bullshit, but they're saying it to you anyway because they are openly taking you for a spectacularly gullible idiot.

If you ever hear anyone use the "bankrupt Britain" lie, it's a sure sign that you should disregard their political opinions. After all, who would listen to the political opinions of someone who has just proven themselves to be either an idiot or a deliberate liar?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

Footnotes  

* Oddly most of the people who do fall for the "blame Labour" myth are also the kind of right-wing tabloid rote-learners who have been indoctrinated into believing in the personal responsibility myth, which is the myth that everyone should take responsibility for their own lives and not blame the Tory government for things unemployment or low wages. When it comes to a pack of reckless bankers trashing the global economy though, tabloid rote-learners use their complete immunity to cognitive dissonance to maintain the illusion that the bankers bore no responsibility for the crisis they caused, and that instead it was entirely the Labour government's fault!

** It's worth noting the way David Cameron casually offloads all responsibility from the bankers for busting their own institutions in order to score cheap political points against the Labour Party. According to Cameron's bizarre interpretation of events, the bankers were merely passive victims in the financial sector meltdown, with the government of the day taking full responsibility for the failure of these private institutions!

*** For a longer and more detailed examination of David Cameron's "bankrupt Britain" lie, here's a previous AAV article on the subject.

The fiction of NHS inefficiency

Yesterday I saw someone ranting beneath one of my Facebook posts about how they consider the NHS to be "broken", and how it has "been that way for decades".

With the drip, drip, drip of anti-NHS stories in the right-wing press it's easy to see how people might have become convinced that the NHS is a catastrophically inefficient mess, but the evidence actually says that it is not.

Efficiency

There is a mountain of evidence to show that the NHS is still (somehow) one of the most efficient health care systems in the world (despite years of Tory mismanagement and Andrew Lansley's catastrophic reforms that even top Tories admit to being "unintelligible gobeldygook"), and it's still vastly more efficient than the private sector dominated US health system.

According to the 2014 Commonwealth Fund study the NHS ranked as number one in almost every category in comparison to the heath systems of ten other developed nations (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the US).

Meanwhile the 2013 World Bank figures reveal that the UK spent significantly less per head of population on health care provision ($3,598) than all ten of the other countries in the Commonwealth Fund analysis (New Zealand $4,063, France $4,804, Germany $5,006, Sweden $5,680, Canada $5,718, Australia $6,110, US $9,146, Switzerland $9,276, Norway $9,715).

How is it possible that the NHS could have been ranked as one of the best services in the developed world and also as one of the cheapest too, yet be the "catastrophically inefficient failing monstrosity" that certain right-wing elements would like you to believe that it is?

Isn't the fact that the NHS is ranked as both better and cheaper than the health services in so many other developed nations an indicator that it's actually incredibly efficient by global standards?

The NHS is ours

The NHS is ours. It's ours because we have paid for it through our taxes. 

The NHS was founded in 1948 and inspired socialised heath care systems across the social democratic countries of the world, the introduction of the NHS coincided with a massive upsurge in the health of the nation, and the NHS is still demonstrably one of the most efficient health care systems on the planet too.

Of course the NHS isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination because no large organisation ever can be, but it's still one of the most important jewels in our national crown that is being prised out and sold off by the Tory government as part of the greatest fire-sale of public assets ever (that they're currently conducting), a fire-sale so vast that it eclipses Margaret Thathcer's rate of sell-offs during the 1980s.

Propaganda

Remember when Rupert Murdoch's minions used the contamination of baby drips at a private sector supplier to lambaste the NHS as baby poisoners? Remember when Jonathan Harmsworth's minions at the Daily Mail used the accidental mailing of cancer scare letters by an outsourced, privately operated automated letter sending outfit to slam the NHS?

It's amazing really that despite the drip, drip, drip of "NHS = Bad" propaganda that gets pumped out by the right-wing media, such an overwhelming majority of people still believe that the NHS should be preserved as a not-for-profit public service dedicated to providing health services that are free at the point of need. According to a YouGov poll in 2013 the ratio was 84% in favour of NHS preservation and just 7% in favour of the Tory policy of carving the NHS up for privatisation.

It is clear that the Tories have no public mandate to tear apart the NHS and distribute the pieces to private sector interests (many of which have donated directly to Tory party coffers) but they're busy doing it anyway.

A top Tory has even admitted that the ideal way to ensure that the NHS is privatised and stopped from providing universal coverage is by creating a public impression that it is in chaos. 

In this sense the de-funding of the NHS, the closure of hospitals and withdrawal of services despite furious local opposition, and the setting up of ideological battles with vital NHS staff (like the junior doctors for example) would seem to be ideal tactics to manufacture the crisis conditions wanted in order to justify ever more ideological attacks on the NHS.

There have always been elements within the Tory party who have hated the concept of socialised health care with a burning ideological passion. In their view the NHS is an abomination; an impediment to their fantasy free-trade utopia, so it simply has to be done away with. It astounds me that anyone could seriously believe the Tories to be responsible custodians of a socialised health care system.

The sad thing is though that some people have allowed their opinions to be poisoned by the drip, drip, drip of misinformation from hacks employed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Jonathan Harmsworth. Some people allow themselves to believe that the NHS is catastrophically inefficient and desperately in need of reform, and that large scale privatisation is the solution, when in reality it so clearly is not catastrophically inefficient nor in need of further privatisation into the hands of private health interests, many of which have contributed directly to Tory party coffers.

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