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Originally Posted by SuperUberBob
Harry's description of health care in Britain in the 1920s shares traits with health care in America today. Like post World War 1 Britain, the rich in America can afford medical care to keep them alive until their twilight years while the poor die from diseases that would be easily preventable with access to free medical care,
Healthcare in the US is a ridiculous nightmare created by plutocrats, but Harry wasn't talking about the US. And if you think Harry's sister's TB would have been 'easily preventable' except that, in Harry's words, 'we didn't have the dosh,' you've bought the hype and drunk the Kool-Aid. As Harry appears not to have known (which is surprising, in the circumstances), there was no cure for TB in the 1930s. Rich or poor, you just died. Even if you could afford an expensive 'sanatorium' in Switzerland with all that fresh healthy air (which was pure superstition), you were likely to die within five years. Streptomycin, the antibiotic cure, was only available from 1946.
Harry had an unfortunate history of talking complete bollocks like that. The mawkish and inappropriate tributes paid by politicians suggest he was this big influencer, but he wasn't. He didn't stop the rollout of Universal Credit and he didn't stop the withdrawal of DLA, the most vital financial assistance programme for the disabled and mentally ill. Nor was he even interested in those issues, because they weren't all about him and his sacrosanct and much-advertised personal history, even though one of his sons suffered serious mental illness and died prematurely, and his other son has suffered mental illness as well. Even with that massive prompt, Harry still didn't give a toss about DLA, because it wasn't to do with Barnsley in the 1920s and Harry's personal poor-me act.
Harry was opposed to Brexit, and yet he ran interference for Corbyn, who is a fanatical Brexitard, and he thereby helped Corbyn play the angles with his 'constructive ambiguity.' That's not good. And Harry apparently didn't even know that Corbyn voted for Osborne's Tory welfare cuts, which even Iain Duncan Smith resigned over, or that Corbyn in his last election manifesto pledged to continue those cuts, because he and McDonnell want to waste the money instead on (a) restoring child benefit to better-off couples, and (b) subsidising tuition fees for better-off students. In other words, buying middle-class votes to give Corbyn and McDonnell personally a shot at greater privilege and power, because their private polling tells them that the working class have deserted Labour and their best chance of doing a Pol Pot relies on appealing to idiot middle-class recreational Marxists.
Harry was just a stooge, I'm afraid. And, despite what the BBC will tell you, he wasn't a pilot, never served in any aircrew capacity and never saw combat of any kind, instead sitting out the war in one of the safest jobs going.