Sir,
Shame on Channel 4 for broadcasting “Brexit: Crisis on the wards”. This
half hour of unsubstantiated opinion was dressed up as fact and intended purely
to scare and bully people. Like a Japanese soldier refusing to accept the end of
WW2, Channel 4 are still fighting against Brexit, keeping the Project Fear fires
burning.
The premise was that we will all suffer and die because Brexit means the
NHS won’t have enough nurses. Yes, really. And Channel 4 has the nerve to
criticise others for pushing “fake news”.
Some inconvenient facts for the peddlers of propaganda at Channel 4
–
– A tiny (and I mean tiny) percentage of NHS workers come from EU
countries;
– Immigration into the UK from the EU went *UP* in the 6 months after the
Brexit vote. If there were fewer nurses amongst the hundreds of thousands of EU
citizens still moving to the UK it is for reasons other than
Brexit;
– Brexit means *controlled* immigration, not ‘no immigration’. If the UK
finds itself short of nurses or any other profession there is no reason why we
could not continue to recruit overseas if we want. The NHS has more workers from
the Commonwealth than it does from the EU, and we are not in a political union
with, nor do we have an open border to, the
Commonwealth.
More to the point, there are thousands of people in the UK who want to
train to become a nurse, but are turned away. We then poach the nurses we need
from other, often poorer, countries. That we are unable to staff the NHS, and
must resort to poaching staff trained by other countries, is not something to be
proud of.
Respectfully,
Gary Conway
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