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Britons Take to Twitter to Respond Angrily to Donald Trump's Tweet Attacking Their Health Service

By Petr Navovy | Social Media | February 6, 2018 |

By Petr Navovy | Social Media | February 6, 2018 |


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Much like they do when anyone dares to express the wrong opinion about the proper way to make a cup of tea or the correct way to queue, Britons have been speaking with one angry voice, rising up on social media in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweet about their ‘broken’ National Health Service.

It’s like this:

Yesterday, the Cheeto-In-Chief tweeted this:

The tweet was referencing an actual demonstration that took place over the weekend, but like a lot of Mr Trumps’s pronouncements it managed to be such a deft inversion of truth so as to be an almost Dadaist piece of art. Yes, thousands of us marched here to protest our health care, but the message of that march seems to have been lost somewhere in transit over the mid-Atlantic. For rather than being up in arms about the existence of a universal, free-at-the-point-of-use health service that ensures that everybody, no matter what their financial situation, is able to receive the care that is their human right, Britons were in fact marching to defend this system.

Why does it need defending? Well, it has been the case for a few decades now that successive governments have to various degrees introduced elements of the private sector into the massive system that is the National Health Service (NHS). This has increased exponentially since the Tories came into power as part of a coalition in 2010, and billions of pounds worth of contracts now regularly go out to tender to private healthcare providers interested in plundering the NHS. The government’s end goal is full privatisation. Our current Health Minister Jeremy Hunt once co-authored a book about the need to privatise the British health service, and he is leading the charge in the way that has proven so effective for so many public services around the world:

Step 1: Defund and demoralise

Step 2: Watch the system deteriorate

Step 3: See people get fed up with poorer service thus making a private alternative more palatable

Step 4: Gradually introduce a relatively affordable and efficient private alternative

Step 5: Diminish and abolish public service, moving all people onto a private system that quickly then ramps up costs while worsening service.

This process has been in progress for quite some time in Britain, but thanks to a complicit media and effective government messaging the public has been slower to react than they should have. Now they are relatively woke. It has taken patients dying in hospital corridors, hospitals having to cancel urgent operations, junior doctors striking for the first time in history, and humanitarian crises being declared, but the public is waking up to the fact that their beloved NHS is slowly being stolen from them. Despite the protests and despite the multiple red alerts being sounded by doctors, nurses, and hospitals, however, the government still refuses to offer up the much-needed funds in order to alleviate the problem. Death by a thousand cuts is the agenda after all.

And so the British march.

And so too do they take umbrage when the President of the United States misrepresents/misunderstands their marching as an attack against their beloved health service.

‘You daft orange cockwomble!’, they all seem to say in unison. ‘You silly misshapen fucktrumpet! We’re marching in protest of the bloody government neglecting our health service, not because we want to see that service replaced by one that looks like yours!’

A rather characteristically more polite form of rebuttal came from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose party has pledged to reverse the rampant privatisation of the NHS, and who responded to Mr Trump this way:

Others chose a different tack:

Even our NHS-destroying Health Secretary got in on the action:

Not everyone was fooled, however:


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Petr Knava lives in London and plays music