Farage ignores the havoc that Brexit is wreaking on NHS
Farage took to Twitter calling our doctors ‘a disgrace’
LAST weekend, the bad boys of Brexit really were letting it all hang out, with so much fighting talk and pure testosterone I hardly knew where to look.
Take the baddest of them all, Nigel Farage, who announced his “comeback” in a newspaper column that sizzled with such machismo I could almost imagine him kissing his biceps as he said of Remainers: “The time has come to teach them a lesson – one that they will never forget.”
Like the most virulent strain of hospital superbug, nothing, it seems, can prevent Farage coming back – not even the fact that he never went away in the first place.
I suppose words don’t need to make actual sense when you’re the nearest thing Britain has to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, albeit one who wears tweed.
Putting the battle into bus once more, Farage is embarking on a UK road trip, fearlessly taking on “antidemocrats” everywhere to stop them thwarting Brexit. Except, that is, when those ruthless scoundrels are diminutive, female NHS doctors, armed with something that makes Farage shrivel quicker than you can say drug-resistant gonorrhoea. Facts.
When Farage took to Twitter last week to accuse doctors of being “an absolute disgrace” for warning of the future risks of Brexit to the NHS, he conveniently ignored the havoc the referendum result is already wreaking on NHS patients. My Twitter thread in response to
Farage spelt out some of the appalling consequences of the hate unleashed by his toxic referendum campaign.
Disgraceful, I told him, is the fact that some of the most wonderful palliative care nurses with whom I work are feeling so unwelcome, post-referendum, they’ve left the NHS and gone back to mainland Europe.
Disgraceful is an NHS hospice being forced to close a third of its beds, having lost too many nurses to keep them open.
Disgraceful is dying patients now trapped at home, in desperate need of inpatient care, partly because of the immigrant-bashing rhetoric of Poundland Trumps like him. Oddly, despite the thread’s 22,000 retweets and 4 million impressions on Twitter, the self-proclaimed man of the people didn’t take me up on my offer to discuss the NHS on his LBC radio show.
In fact, he didn’t respond at all. Suddenly, Farage looked less of a Reservoir Dog and more of a toy poodle, bringing a whole new meaning to his term “Project Fear”.
Not that any of this matters. The point is that already – before Brexit has even happened – NHS patients are paying the price. Last year, 4,000 EU nurses quit the NHS, with only 800 EU nurses joining. This can only mean more closed beds, more misery, more pain for patients.
Put that on your bus, Nigel Farage.