He does after all, work, I presume, for the Daily Telegraph

I don’t think so. Having a blog doesn’t mean you’re on the payroll by any means. I also recall that the Telegraph allows anyone to register for a blog on their platform.

We have all no doubt used the NHS and benefited from it in some way. I know I have but I must admit the experience could have been better and should be. Even from the peripheral I could see many examples of wasted time and unneeded bureaucracy. The NHS has been bloated to the detriment of the patient; there are more bureaucrats than doctors and nurses. The NHS plunders billions of pounds and yet the waiting lists are longer and my auntie has to lay in the corridor and the wards still needs more nurses. Yes it’s a good thing that the NHS is free at the point of care but why does Hannan get shot down for daring to open a debate on how to make it better?

The main arguments against him are a. millions of people with not be able to get treatment and b. why doesn’t he say it here instead of the US? Well a. he has never said the poor will not be treated he even said of the Singapore model he examples “Nor can it be repeated often enough that Singapore- like every developed country – pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended”. B- he has been saying it for a long time, he’s written a book about it. No one listens to him because criticising the NHS is treason to pretty much everyone.

I applaud Tom for his limited defence but I applaud Hannan more because whether you like it or not it’s got an audience.

Oh by the way I have a lot of respect for doctors and nurses but I would them to work in and for me to be cared by a better and more efficient health care system.

Seemed ideal to me, funny that the only contribution hes made was to put Brown back in the game.

Be nice dear friends x x

and Peter Mandelson is…….?

However, I don’t think I was being any more or less ‘personal’ than you were in the original article. The simple difference is that you were defending Mr. Hannan’s character, (e.g. approving of his ‘coming out fighting’, or flagging up that he’s held these views for a lot longer than a rather tendentious Press have paid him any heed for) whereas I am attacking his character.

Let me outline my points more politely.

While I agree with you that the behaviour of the Press is hardly honourable – as you say, picking one or two stories and then hounding it down – I have no sympathy for Mr. Hannan. He actively seeks to be in the public eye, and I doubt he wished for sympathy the last time he was in so much spotlight. That is, during the episode where he posted a video of him ‘telling off’ Gordon Brown to YouTube, it got millions of views, queue Press interest and Hannan bragging about it on his own blog – on the Telegraph site.

‘Fair play’ would surely be where we expect that Mr. Hannan takes the good with the bad interest?

Secondly, the behaviour of the Press is tendentious and passing (e.g. why this particular British libertarian, rather than, say, Nigel Farage?) and this makes it appear as though Daniel Hannan has preferred to slink off to the USA to spout his anti-NHS tirade. While he’s not guilty of that charge, on the other hand, this is a very privileged man – of public school and Oxbridge background – who is attacking the core institution of British redistributive politics, which guarantees healthcare for millions who (if America is anything to go by) could not afford the same standard thereof.

That is odious, and is surely deserving of personal comment – in the same way that Daniel Hannan himself implicitly passes personal comment on the seven million people in Britain in poverty through his politics. And his implicit comment is not that the British can pull themselves up by their bootstraps – it is that, those who fail to compete in the marketplace do not deserve the same rights and privileges as those who do.