UK PM says he wants to understand more about ‘work that’s been done in some of the countries where people are coming from’There is nothing that Labour is more proud of than being the party that set up the NHS. But, in her speech to the Liberal Democrat conference this morning, Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader and health spokesperson argued that the NHS was a liberal idea – because it delivers freedom (from the effects of ill health) and because it was based on ideas in the wartime Beveridge report, and William Beveridge was a liberal.At the election the Lib Dems put a £9bn health and social care plan at the heart of its manifesto.As liberals, we don’t blindly defend the NHS as an institution. We defend it because it’s the manifestation of an idea – a liberal idea – that our NHS should be free at the point of use, and based on need not ability to pay. And we campaign for it – because health is about individual freedom.You don’t have freedom, if you’re on a waiting list so long that your world shrinks and you’re left hobbling at home from one room to the next. You don’t have freedom if you’re diagnosed with cancer, but you have no start date for your treatment. You don’t have freedom, if you’re ready to leave hospital and go home, but you’re discharged instead to a care home miles away – losing mobility, independence and connection – for the sole reason that there aren’t the care workers to help you recover at home.I was really scared. And I often wonder what’s happening now to the young woman – or man – who is suffering those same symptoms now. Can they even get an appointment with their GP?Obviously we take that incredibly seriously and want to be working more closely with countries upstream.The principles that we’ll be following in everything that we do is that it is workable, affordable and in line with international humanitarian law. Continue reading...
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