Page 16 Daily Mail, Tuesday, August 27, 2019COMMENT
True cost of being the
world’s health service
THERE appears to be a growing
misconception – especially among health
unions – that the NHS is free.
It isn’t. It’s a monumentally expensive
service paid for by the taxes of hard-
working people, to ensure that when they
or their loved ones are sick, they receive
treatment free at the point of need.
When people who have not paid into this
insurance scheme are allowed to exploit its
benefits, the whole system – and public
trust in it – are undermined.
Today a Mail investigation reveals that
overseas patients owe the NHS at least
£150 million in unpaid bills, and probably
far more than that.
One London hospital alone is owed
£28.3 million, enough to pay the salaries of
more than 1,000 nurses for a year.
Yet the British Medical Association claims
charging health tourists is racist, with
some members actively discouraging staff
from handing out invoices.
This is the same BMA that constantly
complains the NHS is desperately
underfunded. So shouldn’t they take greater
care of the money we already provide?
No one is suggesting hospitals should
refuse to treat the sick and needy, wherever
they come from. But if patients are not
eligible for free care and have the means,
they should pay.
We simply can’t afford to run a health
service for the world.
Give us a clue, Boris
IN his closing press conference at the G
summit, the Prime Minister gave every
impression of a man seriously worried
about missing his flight home.
Boris Johnson rattled out one or two-line
answers to journalists’ questions at
machine-gun speed, revealing precisely
nothing we didn’t already know.
Crucially, he gave no indication that his
much-vaunted alternative to the
Irish backstop – demanded by Angela
Merkel within 30 days from their
meeting last week – was anywhere near
ready for presentation.
One thing he did confirm was that the UK
will not stump up the £39 billion divorce
bill in the event of No Deal, despite dark
threats from Brussels that non-payment
would mean no trade talks.
If we’ve learned anything about Mr
Johnson however, it’s that he isn’t easily
cowed. And beyond honouring our EU
pension and administrative commitments,
isn’t it perfectly reasonable to ask why we
should pay to negotiate a free-trade
agreement which benefits Europe just as
much as the UK?
This has been a good week for can-do
Boris. His ready wit and unsinkable
optimism have clearly warmed him to the
big beasts of Europe.
There’s the definite sense of a new spirit
of engagement. But the glad-handing is
over. It’s time for some hard graft.
The deal Mr Johnson says he craves is
dependent on convincing the EU to accept
his technological solution to the Irish border.
That will not be achieved by charm alone.
÷
THE Archbishop of Canterbury is said
to be in talks to lead a series of public
meetings designed to stop a No Deal Brexit.
Taking sides on such a contentious political
issue is a dangerous business for the head
of our established church. If Justin Welby
wants to lead this rebellion, he should
stand for elected office. If not, he should
focus on his day job of working to revive the
dwindling fortunes of Anglicanism.
÷
THE Mail understands and
sympathises with Mr Johnson’s desire
to reduce the density of immovable
Remainers in the House of Lords. But
please, don’t do it by creating more peers.
The chamber is already the largest
legislative assembly outside Communist
China. Make it much bigger and it will have
to be moved to an Amazon-style out-of-
town warehouse.
be wise to be on their ‘A game’
before subjecting themself to
an interview with Mr Neil.
With fierce and forensic
questioning, he can take apart
lazy arguments, expose the
reality of any subject and make
politicians squirm.
Does he do any of this by
hurling insults at politicians,
by calling them liars like an
over-wrought eight-year-old in
a playground spat?
No. He does it by knowing his
facts and by subjecting
political assertion to rigorous
and independent scrutiny.
What Neil doesn’t do is start
with a political world-view that
infects his line of questioning.
Nor does he lead viewers to a
politically biased conclusion:
he trusts them to make up
their own minds on the basis
of what they have seen and
heard rather than telling them
what to think. That is what
good-quality broadcast
journalism is about.
But although subject to the
same Ofcom rules of impartial-
ity as BBC News, ITN, Channel
5 News, Sky News and ITV
News, does anyone seriously
doubt that Channel 4 News
has its own political agenda?
Was anyone really surprised
when its veteran broadcaster
Jon Snow joined in with a
baying Glastonbury crowd
shouting ‘F*** the Tories’ at
the 2017 music festival where
Jeremy Corbyn was treated as
the headline act?
In her lecture, Ms Byrne said
she believes that in this ‘diffi-
cult period’ we ‘need the truth
and we need proper scrutiny of
all our major politicians’.
What she really means by
that is the scrutiny which
takes place specifically in a
Channel 4 News studio.
When she talks about truth,
what she really means is hertruth. This is the truth of the
liberal and Left-wing elite, so
quick to dismiss the views of
millions of people who don’t
agree with the Channel 4 polit-
ical agenda. It’s precisely this
sort of ‘we know best’ attitude
that has caused such terrible
division in our country.
The idea that Ms Byrne
should be the moral arbiter of
truth and scrutiny in broadcast
journalism is beyond parody.
She also took aim at my time
as Downing Street Director of
Communications under
Theresa May.Insightful
During this period, I hit the
headlines for turning down a
request for the then Prime
Minister to be interviewed by
Channel 4 News at the 2018
Tory conference. Having given
Channel 4 an interview just the
week before, we had to draw
the line somewhere.
But the inevitable claim
came that we were dodging
scrutiny. At the same
conference, Mrs May took part
in 36 other interviews.
Ms Byrne, incorrectly, quotes
me as saying: ‘What’s in it for
us?’ about the interview
request. What I did argue, then
and now, is that for an
interview to really work it has
to work on three levels — notjust for the news outlet and
the politician, but also for the
public. That doesn’t mean a
softball interview with a patsy
journalist; it means a rigorous
and insightful interview with a
news channel that is both
forensic and fair.
In three years as PM, Theresa
May did interviews with print
and broadcast journalists; she
held press conferences in
Downing Street, around the
country and abroad; in the
Commons, she spent more
than 140 hours at the dispatch
box and answered more than
4,500 questions. Few modern
politicians have been subjected
to more scrutiny.
The real root of Ms Byrne’s
grievance is not that our
leading politicians won’t
explain themselves at all, but
that they don’t always choose
to explain themselves in a
Channel 4 news studio.
To that end, Ms Byrne is
dismissive of Prime Minister
Boris Johnson’s determination
to talk directly to the public as
he has done with the ‘People’s
PMQ’s’ via Facebook. He is
also a prolific user of Twitter.
This desire to speak ‘directly
to the nation’, Ms Byrne
claims, is straight out of the
Vladimir Putin playbook.
Since when did talking
directly to the people you
serve become a bad thing?What is really frustrating
Dorothy Byrne, I believe, is
that social media has afforded
modern politicians a way of
communicating that can
bypass any broadcast bias and
allow voters personally to hold
politicians to account.
The rules of the game have
changed, and broadcast exec-
utives like Ms Byrne need to
wake up to it and understand
that impartiality in reporting
is not something they can
observe or ignore at will.Toxic
And to any broadcast
journalist who wants to parade
their politics like a badge of
honour, I’d say your political
opinions are not relevant.
Your job is to seek out and
explain the opinions of others,
to make sense of a compli-
cated world and to distil a
great deal of factual informa-
tion into an accessible format.
You are not a personality and
you are not a television pundit.
You are not there to raise your
own profile by displaying your
bias on Twitter and dressing
up your opinions as fact on air.
Broadcast journalism is not a
narcissistic tool, nor is it a
political weapon. It is the
means by which millions of
people should be able to see
and hear what is going on in
the world through objective
and impartial reporting and to
draw their own conclusions.
At its best, broadcast jour-
nalism is independent and
fearless. It is forensic but fair.
And it is vital to our democ-
racy that it stays that way.
My advice to Ms Byrne is to
focus on that rather than add
her own contribution to the
already toxic level of public
debate in this country.The petulant
jibe at Boris by
a Channel 4
boss that
strips bare
its bias — and
contempt for
its viewers
by Robbie
Gibb
T
O ME, it came as no surprise
that the Prime Minister
decided not to give an
interview to Matt Frei of
Channel 4 News at the G
Summit in Biarritz at the weekend.
Why would he when, days earlier, a senior
Channel 4 executive had made it clear that
she thinks it is perfectly acceptable to call
Boris Johnson a ‘known liar’.
You probably hadn’t heard of Dorothy
Byrne before she hurled abuse at our Prime
Minister, but she is the channel’s Head of
News and in charge of current
affairs programmes.
And Channel 4, like all broadcasters,
operates under the rules of the Ofcom
Broadcasting Code. Chief among those
rules is that news, in whatever form,
must be reported with ‘due accuracy and
presented with due impartiality’.
So it remains one of great mysteries of our
age how Channel 4 is not now drowning
under a sea of complaints to watchdog
Ofcom, so flagrant, in my opinion, is its
political bias.
Ms Byrne took aim at the Prime Minister
during her keynote speech at the Edinburgh
TV Festival last Wednesday.
She believes that broadcast journalists
are too polite to our senior politicians and
should be calling them out for their
transgressions. Indeed, she got the ball
rolling herself by bandying about words like
‘liar’ and ‘coward’.
I am loath to give Ms Byrne the publicity
she so obviously craves — how else does
one explain such an inflammatory attack
— but it is difficult to know whether she is
more wrong-headed in her view of politi-
cians or of journalists.Squirm
Let us begin with the role of broadcast
journalism. For more than two decades, I
worked as programme editor for some of
the BBC’s flagship political programmes.
And for all the claims of ‘BBC bias’, I know
we operated under strict guidelines that
ensured impartiality was at the heart of
everything we did.
Being impartial is not the same thing as
giving politicians an easy ride.
It has been my honour to work with some
of the sharpest journalists in the business,
such as Andrew Neil. Any politician wouldTHERESA MAY’S DOWNING STREET DIRECTOR OF
COMMUNICATIONS AND FORMER BBC EXECUTIVEV