We came across this campaign video by the Vote Leave UK campaign and thought it was time to re-work it.
Released in 2016, it showed a woman worried by her mother’s cough and taking her to hospital. The screen splits in two, showing the supposed benefits of leaving the EU as against staying.
The future if we stayed in the EU showed a waiting room full of patients, fewer staff, overworked nurses and long queues. Meanwhile in the sunny uplands of Brexit we were promised more staff, happy patients, and almost immediate treatment from a smiling young doctor.
The original film ended by telling us ‘The NHS is at breaking point’, and suggesting a new hospital could be built every week with the money we’d save by leaving the EU. All we had to do apparently was ‘Vote Leave’, and we could Take Back Control to spend OUR money on OUR priorities, like the NHS.
It turns out that the promise of £350 million was based on a lie.
The campaign director at the time was the now disgraced Dominic Cummings.
One of the biggest effects of Brexit was a large drop in overseas recruitment, leading to a shortage of nurses. The World Health Organisation produces a Global Code of Practice seeking to address the issue of richer countries avoiding the costs of training their own medical staff and instead poaching from poor countries, which can then cause shortages there. They promote bilateral agreements between governments, and produce a ‘red list’ of countries where to avoid active recruitment. But two of the red-listed countries, Nigeria and Ghana, actually supplied the UK with more than 20% of new international nurses in just six months last year.
Dentistry and social care have both also seen large drops in EU recruitment, but without any significant increase from elsewhere.
According to a recent report by the Nuffield Trust, medicine shortages and spikes in costs of imported medicines have also risen dramatically since Brexit.
Not all the current woes of our NHS can be blamed on Brexit, but it is clear that many factors caused by our withdrawal have exacerbated the challenges facing health and social care in the UK.
Matthew Elliott and his Vote Leave co-founder Douglas Carswell, are among people linked through a network of lobbyists and think-tanks based in or near 55 Tufton Street, who see a bonfire of deregulation as the key to opening up new trade deals to sell off our lands to huge American agri-business, and to sell off our NHS to private healthcare and insurance companies.
