Tory leader’s 2002 speech attacked Labour’s commitment to NHS and praised other models of healthcare

During the course of this general election campaign, Boris Johnson has frantically denied his intention to break up, sell off or otherwise sell out our National Health Service.

He has to. He knows how highly the British people value it.

We know that he knows, because in a Commons speech in 2002 he aped fellow Tory Nigel Lawson in describing the NHS as the ‘religion of the British people’.

But Johnson went on to attack that devotion – and to claim that the ‘monolithic and monopolistic’ NHS was a failure.

He then spoke glowingly of the success of other countries’ healthcare systems – and called for the break-up of the NHS that he attacked Labour for wanting to preserve intact:

Boris Johnson’s views on the NHS were a matter of record long before he felt he needed to hide and disguise them to fool people into voting to retain him as Prime Minister.

That opinion, when it was expressed unvarnished, was that it was inefficient and needed to be broken up and replaced by something more closely modelled on other countries.

The Tories have, of course, made the NHS far less efficient and effective than it was under the last Labour government, when patient satisfaction far outstripped what it is since the Tory-induced collapse of A&E performance, nursing numbers, bed availability and social care. And they’ve done it specifically to make it easier to break up and sell off.

So if Boris Johnson hated it in its Labour heyday, it’s certain he despises it now.

Never trust a Tory with the NHS – and never trust Boris Johnson when he denies his and Donald Trump’s plans for it.

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