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**

The NHS isn’t a free service, 

we can’t afford to treat the world’s poor, they must pay

A notice caught my eye as I was leaving our health centre. “We are a safe surgery,” it said. I wondered what that meant, so I read on, with mounting disquiet.


Apparently, it means that if you turn up with no appointment, papers or identification, you will still be seen by a doctor. No one will ask you for your immigration status.


Why not? It should be mandatory for GP surgeries, hospitals and A&E departments to verify whether those who turn up seeking treatment are entitled to receive it without paying.


The rest of the world seems to think that the National Health Service is free – and at their disposal. It is certainly not free for those who live here legitimately.


It costs us all more than £180billion in taxes and this is set to rise to £192billion. The cost is equivalent to about 11 per cent of the total wealth we produce each year.


If you haven’t contributed so much as a penny to those billions, you cannot expect to be treated without paying, except in the direst circumstances. Sorry, but the NHS is not a charity and it is time those who work there stopped treating it as such.


I am the same age as the NHS. My father was happy to pay for its foundation and in his later years benefited from it. I too am content to pay (though I think we cough up too much for too little and reform is long overdue).


Now my children are paying. But for whose benefit? The Sunday Express carried a story this week about an Albanian who came to Britain on a small boat “for the money”.


He skipped from a migrant hotel hours after arriving in Dover and worked in a cannabis factory and then as a labourer for cash in hand. But as an illegal, he was making less than the minimum wage back in Albania.


So, with the dream punctured, he decided to go home. But before he boarded a £48 flight to Albania’s capital Tirana, he strolled into a British hospital for a little under the counter surgery.


“I was in pain and I had an operation, and after that, I left. It was easy,” he told the Sunday Express.


I don’t actually begrudge him his operation if, as he claims, he had a ruptured appendix. Without prompt treatment, that can be fatal.


This is not the United States. We should not demand details of your credit card before we help you to overcome a life-threatening condition.


But no one required anything of him and there was no bill at the end of his hospital stay. He just gave them his name and got his op, simple as that.


The good news is that he now tells relatives who want to follow his example and head for Britain: “Don’t bother.”


The journey here cost him £5,000 paid to people smugglers. “I regret that I ever came to Britain,” he says now. “It was like a bad dream. I came there for the money and made none.”


A member of our family has worked in several of London’s top teaching hospitals. She tells the story of a doctor who arranged for a young Indian woman to fly from her own country for an operation here.


When she questioned whether the patient was entitled to the free treatment she had received, the doctor simply said: “Well, no. But they’re friends of the family, you see.”


I have seen in a local pharmacy a family from the Gulf – clearly not poor – arguing over the cost of a prescription. “No,” said the father, “free, FREE,” as he jabbed a finger towards the prescription.


It was a private prescription from a consultant in Harley Street. So, no, it wasn’t free, as the shop assistant tried patiently to explain.


This is going on all the time with no attempt to curb it – as the notice at my health centre confirms. We cannot continue to nurture all the world’s poor, displaced or sick. Mean? I don’t think so.


The argument goes sometimes that we are a wealthy country and have a duty to help others. Maybe that was true once. But as Rachel Reeves has discovered, far from rolling in it, we are just a few coppers away from proving Charles Dickens’s maxim:—


“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness.


“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”


Still, it is true that we should not turn our backs on those in urgent need of medical attention, such as the Albanian man.


But even they must pay for their treatment. And there is simply no excuse for the cheats whose lives are not at risk and who are just playing our absurdly liberal system.


Well-meaning folk who help them to get around the rules have no right and are effectively aiding and abetting a crime.


*****


Newspapers are two-headed beasts. One looks after the money: investment, profits, a fair return to shareholders for their stake in the firm. The other takes care of the creative stuff.


Traditional newspaper barons – Beaverbrook, Harmsworth, Murdoch – have always understood this and striven to limit the conflict (unless it suited them to have some creative tension).


Not Jim Mullen, though. He’s the head honcho at Reach, which owns the Mirror, the Express, the Manchester Evening News and the Liverpool Echo. And he seems determined to cut off the head that creates his company’s product.


I am told reliably that he is now known by a new nickname, conferred on him by staff. He is called Pol Pot because he has turned Reach into the killing fields.


Apparently, the skulls of “disappeared” editors who challenged his cuts are turning up all over the place. There’s talk of a museum.


Mullen gave an interview to William Turvill for the Sunday Times Business section. It perfectly demonstrates why Reach is doomed.


“The narrative,” he tells the ST, “is that we’re a clickbait organisation. Which we’re not.”


Does he even read his own pisspoor websites? They are littered with clickbait trash that doesn’t begin to resemble news. If you are foolish enough to try to read them, you are largely foiled by a blizzard of pop-up adverts.


He has slashed and burned the best of the newspapers’ capital. Once they were brands, trusted and admired. The Mirror under Mike Molloy in the late Seventies and early Eighties was the finest newspaper I have ever seen. The Express once sold four million copies a day.


Their decline began long before Reach but Mullen has done nothing to arrest it. Within a very few years, they will close as printed publications. Then what?


Pol Pot will be left with websites that are free to read. “We are continually going to get criticism by those who don’t understand the model, or by those who think we should be paid for or subscribed to,” says Mullen.


“What they don’t understand is that a lot of our readers are actually making a decision on whether or not to put frozen food in the freezer or put the heating on.”


He justifies the content of Reach websites by saying that their readers enjoy “light-hearted” stories. “In some people’s minds that might be a demeaning use of content – but our readers like it.”


All readers like light-hearted stories, Mr Mullen. But they exist to leaven the real news, which is often complex and depressing.


But he goes on peddling junk news, lightweight drivel that shouldn’t have more than a (profitable) cameo role in a proper news organisation.


Meanwhile his journalists have to churn out this stuff under pressure of page-view targets and article quotas. One regional reporter – the poster child of Reach, says the ST’s Turvill – filed 106 articles on Friday, including ten on financial guru Martin Lewis.


Pass the sick bag, someone.


*****


An exchange on the forum of my local news website:-


Post – “RIP Marianne Faithfull, 78. Faithfull lost custody of her son and her life began to spiral out of control. A suicide attempt left her in a coma, and she ended up an alcoholic, anorexic heroin addict living in a bomb-damaged building in London's Soho. After all that, I'm surprised she managed to reach the age that she did.”


Response – “Have you ever considered professional eulogy writing as a career? I think you have a talent for it...”


*****


“The only truly anonymous donor is the guy who knocks up your daughter.” – Lenny Bruce



RICHARD DISMORE


4 February 2025