Bill Carmichael: Hate campaign is sick at heart

IN a quiet, fairly nondescript English town, a woman has been driven from her home by a vicious hate campaign.

Julie Bailey has received death threats, poison pen letters and abuse on the streets. Her mother’s grave has been repeatedly desecrated and a boycott of the café she ran has been so effective she’s been forced to sell it at a knock-down price.

She’s now so fearful for her safety that she is abandoning her home and going to live in a caravan a long way from her tormentors.

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That events reminiscent of a medieval pogrom can happen in modern Britain is shocking enough, but the reason Miss Bailey has been targeted is more scandalous still.

She simply stood up for the NHS, or rather – and this is a crucial distinction – she stood up for the patients of the NHS.

She set up a campaigning group – Cure the NHS – after watching her mother’s appalling suffering at the notorious Stafford hospital.

At the time the hospital had descended into little short of a grim death factory. Seriously ill patients were left lying in their own waste for days at a time and denied food and water. Some were so desperate with thirst that they drank water from flower vases. Up to 1,200 died unnecessarily amid scenes of appalling neglect.

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Beyond the patients and their families no one cared. Not the politicians and the hospital administrators who pushed through a box checking culture at the expense of patient care. Not most of the doctors and nurses who colluded in a dereliction of duty to patients. And certainly not the supposed watchdog, the Care Quality Commission.

In February this year, six years after Miss Bailey first blew the whistle, a public enquiry found that years of abuse and neglect has caused almost unimaginable suffering to hundreds of vulnerable patients.

But being right hasn’t saved Miss Bailey from the fury of the Left who believe the NHS exists for the benefit of the people who work in it, not for the unfortunate people who have to use its services.

One paramedic was sacked after saying he hoped Miss Bailey would suffer a life-threatening illness. A Labour party member posted a YouTube video in which a man expressed the hope that she would die.

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These people are despicable. Anyone who dares challenge the rose-tinted view of the NHS as “the envy of the world” is smeared and vilified.

In fact we owe Miss Bailey a debt of gratitude. Without people like her we would never learn of instances of terrible treatment. The politicians, the unions and the administrators would collude to hide the truth from the public.

The people of Stafford should be 
raising a statue of her, not running her out of town.

Off the guest list

Trenton Oldfield, the public school educated Australian who disrupted the boat race in a protest against “elitism”, is complaining he faces deportation after serving a two-month jail sentence.

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He bleats that he should be allowed to stay because he’s “highly skilled”, which sounds a bit of an elitist argument from one who purports to hate elitism.

Tough. He is a guest in our country and he abused our hospitality by breaking the law. If you invited someone into your home and they started acting dangerously and stupidly, you would be perfectly entitled to ask them to leave. The same principle applies.

In fact we are doing him a big favour. He doesn’t like the way our country is run, so now we are giving him a wonderful opportunity to find somewhere to live that is more conducive to his political beliefs.

Bye bye, Trenton, I don’t think we will miss you too much.

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