Cameron’s astonishing attack on GPs
On any normal news day, Cameron’s astonishingly cynical and ignorant attack on GPs would surely be headline news. Here it is, from his Privatise Everything White Paper speech:
People with money can get friendly with their local GP at a dinner party, maybe see them out of hours if there’s an emergency. In this world of restricted choice and freedom it’s the poorest who lose out.
First, there’s the idea that people seek out a GP when they have an “emergency”. What world is Cameron living in? The idea of the 19th century personal physician, always at the beck and call of the elite, springs to mind.
More seriously, Cameron here comes close to accusing GPs of outright corruption, and he certainly suggests that many of them are not following the duty of a doctor set out by the General Medical Council to:
Never discriminate unfairly against patients or colleagues.
Cameron’s view that a standard GP is part of a ‘dinner paty’ clique is more a reflection of his upper-class background than it is of any kind of reality. The reality is that the dinner party circuit as envisaged by Cameron is a phenomenon really quite specific to the ‘networking’ ruling class that Cameron inhabits; in most towns and cities up and down the country, it simply doesn’t exist.
If there is one statement from the last year that sums up Cameron’s lack of experience of the real world, a lack of experience which makes him fundamentally unfit to govern Britain, then this is surely it.
I’ll leave the last word to a very angry GP on the Pulse Today comments board (grammar and spelling slightly tidied):
Mr Cameron is obviously delusional considering his sense of reality – time to stop sniffing the solvents, Mr PM. His public school boy background obviously afforded him such great insight into social dynamics! He thinks he knows more about the average GP’s social calendar than we do.
What a twat! Since when do most GPs attend dinner parties with their patients in attendance? Utter bollocks. He’s just slinging mud at GP’s to deflect the shit storm facing him in the wake of his relasionship with corrupt press officers and ahead of the BMA’s action on pensions.
And what world do you live in, I can now phone my GP and get him out to see me by paying a fee which is £35. It’s been like this since New Labour came to power, I mean Blair wanted everyone to pay £35.
If I phone up my GP to night I will be placed onto a call center and I might well speak to a doctor in Germany who will listen to me and then decide if I should call an ambulance.
Under Labourbour in some cases you could not call an ambulance until you spoke to NHS direct. It was changed when I tried to call an ambulance for a motor bike accident in which I had to call the NHS direct, then the local GP before I decided to phone the police, and I asked them to phone the ambulance.
Unless you live in the real world I guess you do not know what’s going on, if I need to see a GP at night I will pay the fee. otherwise your told to go to the hospital or wait until surgery.
My GP earned last year in excess of £200,000 so i suspect he does live in that upper crust world