Stop the lies about our health service

First, let me declare an interest. Both I and my grandson (who was born prematurely, has been in and out of Great Ormond Street children's hospital and will require continuing treatment for the rest of his life) have received the sort of care from the National Health Service that would have been beyond the means of the majority of people in the US. Like the vast majority of people in the UK, I'm proud of the NHS and I'm sick of those wealthy vested interests that try to run it down.

Now let me urge you to sign up to the message below to the people of America. About 80,000 people have done so already; it will take you a couple of minutesto join them.

UK to US: the truth about the NHS

Barack Obama's movement for change in the US is at risk of collapsing - in large part because of lies about healthcare in the UK!

It's incredible, but Obama's health plan, and with it his entire presidency, could be derailed if big corporations and the radical right manage to convince Americans that the NHS is a nightmare rationed service that refuses to treat patients and abandons the most needy, such as Stephen Hawking, without care.

We need a huge popular outcry to show the truth - how proud and grateful we are in the UK to have a public healthcare system that works, despite its imperfections. Sign on to the message to America and forward this link - if enough of us sign, we'll cause a stir in US media and help change the debate: http://www.avaaz.org/en/reform_health_care_uk

US healthcare is run by large corporations - it's the most expensive in the world, but ranks 37th in quality, and 40 million Americans can't afford any care at all. It's an awful system for people, but corporations make enormous profits, so they're fighting to keep it. Industry lobbyists are ramping up their smear campaigns right now to make sure the Obama plan is dead on arrival when Congress meets in September. Americans are hearing a constant barrage of propaganda that the NHS is a nightmare. Let's say it ain't so.

Myths about the proposed health care reforms http://www.communitycatalyst.org/projects/national_reform/alerts?id=0066

Extreme tactics of the conservative right http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/health/policy/04townhalls.html http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-08-17-voa45.cfm

Paul Krugman on health care
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=2&scp=31&sq=health&st=cse

The extent of the health care lobby
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aZdbr0YXz5jI

Health insurers stocks rise as health care plans fade http://www.reuters.com/article/hotStocksNews/idUSTRE57G4BU20090817?sp=true

A patriot for Aretha

Aretha Franklin does it for me every time. So if it’s ‘My country ‘tis of thee’ that she’s singing, even if it isn’t my country, I’m a patriot. And yesterday I was a British-American patriot.

The pessimist, the sceptic and the cynic in me have all struggled to keep pace with my inner Obama on that incredible journey to the White House. Mostly, they’ve managed to keep in touch, albeit at a distance. Yesterday, though, they got left behind somewhere in the deep recesses of leftist soullessness – because soul is what you would have to have been without not to be moved by this occasion. It is one of those great, shared global events, like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the release of Nelson Mandela, that I am glad to have lived to see.

It’s sometimes hard to grasp the fact that it is only four decades, barely half a lifetime, since the civil rights movement tore down the legal barriers that kept black Americans segregated and oppressed. Or that it is only two decades since Barack Obama’s predecessor in the office of president and his equivalent in the UK were the principal defenders of apartheid outside South Africa itself. If so much can change so quickly, why not believe that so much more can yet be changed?

Barack Obama jokes

Okay, that’s enough of a new dawn, new day. The sun’s risen now, Obama’s not yet in the White House but all that can be said has been said. We’ve just got to wait until January for some action. As David Letterman put it, though – anyone mind if he starts a little early?

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to find even one half-funny joke about the president-elect. I’m not picky or PC – I’ll laugh at anything with a bit of wit to it. But a trawl of the usual sources for these things have come up with nothing better than the following:

Q: Why did Barack Obama cross the road?
A: To help the other side.

That was on a right-wing website where they clearly felt that the Good Samaritan was a commie agent. Doesn’t anyone have any good ones?

Feeling good

Yo Obama!

My inner Obama

Tonight I’m getting in touch with my inner Obama. My side came back from three goals down with five minutes to go to grab a draw in football earlier this evening, after calling on a bit of that ‘Yes we can’ spirit to defy the odds. I’m assuming John McCain won’t do something similar in the US election, so I’m settling in to savour the most positive political development of the 21st century to date.

Of course there are 101 things I could come up with to diminish the occasion. Obama’s no socialist, no matter what the Republican right may think. I’ve no doubt he’ll leave the major power structures of US society, and the inequality and injustice that go along with them, largely unchallenged and intact. I dare say he’ll disappoint over some of what might be considered touchstone issues. And I suspect he’ll sell the pass on occasion when we’re looking for firm leadership to take a stand.

But no one who has cast half an eye towards the United States over past months can have missed the mood that has accompanied the ascent of the man who will now surely become the country’s first black president. People who never vote, people who are disenfranchised, people who are excluded and unrepresented have been mobilised in their millions in a way that hasn’t happened in two generations. No one else – certainly not the US left or other alternative political movements – has had anything like the impact. If not Obama, then what? Quite simply, this is the best – the only – chance of change we have had in decades.

It’s not just a matter of what Obama himself will do, important though that undoubtedly is. It’s a matter of the dynamic he creates, the opportunities that are opened up, the direction the US is moving in. The old leftist slogan that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government still gets in has never been closer to the truth than in the US, where the division between Republican and Democrat has sometimes seemed so narrow as to defy definition. But the 2000 election should have put an end to that illusion for good. Who can doubt that the world would now be a different, safer place had Al Gore’s ‘stolen’ victory been upheld in court and George Bush and the neocons not been unleashed upon the world?

So the champagne is on ice ready for that ‘Yes he has’ moment. Plenty of time for the provisos and reservations later.

A Tory for Obama

Andrew Boff has been in touch to say ‘thanks... for the very generous review. I should emphasise that I wasn't the main organiser, just a helper but there is common ground nowadays between people who might have been on either side of barricades in the 80s now finding that they are sometimes together in opposing the blunt corporatism of big government.’

I’m not sure how sound that common ground is (Broadway Market is not so far from Hackney Marshes, after all), but Boff is one of that new(ish) generation of Conservatives who are comfortable with civil liberty and personal freedom issues to a degree that would have been inconceivable in Margaret Thatcher’s day. He’s even a member of the intriguing ‘Tories for Obama’ Facebook group. Apart from Iain Dale, though, there don’t seem to be many other Tories of note prepared to nail their colours to the Obama mast, so that might not have been the best of moves if Boff has any future aspirations to higher political office under the Conservative label.

Barack Obama is a Muslim

I’ve lived my life one consonant short of being a dickhead, so I sympathise with Barack Obama’s problems over his name. If a simple misspelling could help the Republican cause this autumn, I’m sure Fox News would be happy to have him down as Osama as often as they can get away with it.

There are some in the Obama camp who believe there is a deliberate attempt to make people think their candidate is a Muslim. In a country where the arts of black propaganda managed to persuade a substantial number of voters last time around that a decorated war hero was a coward and a documented draft dodger a hero, this is far from incredible.

Media commentator Roy Greenslade gives an example in his blog today of what he says is ‘just one of the examples of the way in which the US media is helping to relay the “Obama is a Muslim” lie to American voters’. He describes as a ‘disgraceful oversight’ an MSNBC Live report that ran for 25 seconds with the caption ‘Obama Is a Muslim & He Will Not Win Because of That’ over a discussion about what people think of him in Baghdad. The caption was a ‘purported quote from an Iraqi engineer’, though you can tell from the ‘purported’ that Greenslade isn’t convinced.

There’s no doubt that branding Obama/Osama a Muslim, even subliminally, would cost him votes. Polls suggest that while being black is now less of a problem than being a woman, about as many people would vote for a Muslim in the US as for an atheist, which is as low as it gets before you start asking about crack heads and child molesters. But is there a concerted right-wing conspiracy – or, to put it more mildly, campaign – as some of Obama’s supporters are suggesting?

Well, there are certainly plenty of far-right anti-Obama people out there in the blogosphere who are doing their best to create one. Greenslade himself has attracted one or two. I am reliably informed that the following post in the comments section of his blog is not satire:

‘It's not a big lie – Obama bin Osama IS Muslim – probably a Wahabiest, as it were. He and his radical spouse first will award “reparations” to blacks – per capita annuities of many tens of thousands of dollars. Then they will begin slowly to institute Islam. How will they overcome a Christian congress? With their Democratic allies, basically an anti-American party, they will pack the supreme court with radicals who will then see to it than Islam becomes the state religion in all but name. Muslim countries will receive gobs of military assistance and other aid. Unbiased observers won't recognize America after the first two years of an Osama bin Obama administration. Be afraid, Europe. Be very afraid. We're in danger of becoming Muslim even before you achieve pure socialism and adherence to Allah.’