Health Secretary insists UK will have US trade deal even if it has to walk away – and admits Tories only partially successful in keeping NHS off table in earlier talks
Health Secretary Matt Hancock looked panicked as Sky’s Adam Boulton put him on the spot in what quickly became a car-crash interview this morning.
Hancock tried to blame the EU for the NHS being ‘on the table’ in trade talks with the US – then admitted that the Tories were only ‘partially successful’ in preventing it.
But under the pressure of yesterday’s revelations by Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn of the Tories’ NHS negotiations with Trump’s advisers, Hancock soon shot himself in the foot with a rattled insistence that if the US insisted that the NHS had to be part of a trade deal, the UK would ‘walk away’.
But when Boulton pointed out that would mean not having a trade deal, Hancock tried to insist that there will be one – and when Boulton challenged him to make his mind up, he started spinning like a self-contradictory top:
Donald Trump, of course, has stated unequivocally that the NHS ‘and a lot more than that’ would have to be on the table for the US to agree any deal.
The Tories’ negotiation papers have made clear not only that the US continues to insist that access to the NHS and a new patent deal that would push up drug prices are central to any deal from the US viewpoint – but also that the talks to include them are at a very advanced stage.
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They are not really in any position to walk away, I would have thought.
We have it on record from Hancock that if the USA insist on our NHS being part of trade deal negotiations the Tories would walk away, as would Labour I assume if we were in government. So what happens to Brexit then when a major trade deal bombs? This is one of the reasons Brexit is so crazy and why the SIL – self indulgent left is such a danger.
Look at Hancock.
He is wearing an NHS badge—just like all those American politicians who wear a flag badge whilst shredding the US constitution!
Adam Bolton must have gone off message for a few minutes and forgot he was not meant to give a rough ride to the Torys…Maybe the torys are getting complacent and are starting to believe their own publicity and the election is won for them
Hancock is an utter prat. Why he keeps being wheeled out to be the Tory spokesperson is beyond me. He ‘s a total embarrassment and utterly clueless .
Mind you, so are all the other Caninet Ministers when they take their turn in front of the cameras.
doesnt matter how much of an embarrasment you are if you are not asked the hard questions….
tory politicians are “entitled” and expect to be allowed to just spout their talking points for the day without any scrutiny in accuracy or truth.
and that is what has been happening almost across the board …cept for channel 4 now and then …which is why johnson wont go near that debate…
when put under the magnifying glass of genuine scrutiny they will always look bad ….sadly the lack of journalistic integrity in the media is the norm
because the establishment do not eat their own unless they are gnawing their own leg off to escape
Reply to Peter Berry
Hancock is wheeled out because Johnson and the others are even more embarrassing and clueless.
Johnson knows that the more exposure he gets the more the electorate will see through him so he shys away public appearances safe in the knowledge that the BBC and the print media will cover from him.
Hancock’s half-witted. What a gobshite.
One odious, slimy little ‘yes-man’ him. Reminds me of that little white slug thing that sat on Baron Greenback’s lap in ‘Danger Mouse.’
Despite Skwarkie’s best efforts to excite his readers, the only events of consequence during the campaign has been (certainly) the suicide of the Brexit Party which will serve to push up Conservative gains, and (possibly but possibly not) the Corbyn interview and Chief Rabbi intervention. Everything else has been fairly inconsequential. What was of consequence happened earlier: Labour gifted the election to the Tories over the summer when it changed its stance from respecting the Referendum result to supporting a second poll.
That lost Labour tens of seats in the heartlands as well as in the target seats, 70% of which voted Leave. After that, people just weren’t listening to us.
64% of working class voters voted Leave but Labour Party members did not give a toss and insisted the people vote again until they get the answer right. Never mind that EU law renders much of Labour’s nationalisation plans illegal. Never mind that the free movement of capital strangles any serious anti-austerity programme by inviting capital flight. Nothing more clearly signals than this shafting of the working class electorate Labour’s transformation to a party of the middle class, and from democratic socialism to Fake Left ‘left-liberalism’. Now the Party can expect to reap a bitter harvest at the polls.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/27/yougov-mrp-conservatives-359-labour-211-snp-43-ld-
Danny, you are correct, Skwawky is something of a fluffer but the people he’s been trying to fluff are SILs such as yourself who would rather spout anti EU stuff about neoliberal this and that than face the reality that despite it not being perfect, we are far better in the EU as a full partner than out.
Those of us who recognised all along that the referendum was a right wing sham have no duty whatsoever to honour the result. Why should we honour the result of a process which was designed to get the Tories off the hook and was riddled with lies and half truths to deliberately confuse the less well informed and play upon their fears of immigration and loss of control? It was a referendum in which the right wing media, following Farage the snake oil salesman, had conditioned the public for years with antiEU propaganda. Then along came Cummings with his massive funding and media manipulation, devoid of facts and by his own admission, playing upon emotive language, to complete the subterfuge.
Why should we honour or respect the result of such a corrupt process which without doubt is going to damage our country and possibly lead to its fragmentation if it goes ahead in any form?
Cheering news, everyone!
Win or lose, Professor Danny won’t be back after the election…
Ditto our next caller…
The blindly pro EU and the just generally blindly optimistic posting on here are going to be gobsmacked when the 12th June Exit poll shows we have thrown away our once in a lifetime potential to have a Leftish labour government – in preference for the pro EU Left Liberalism of most of our middle class membership. But meanwhile, in the real world, the Labour Leadership have suddenly apparently realised from their latest disastrous private party polling in our heartland seats that the contempt Labour has shown our millions of Leave supporting traditional working class Labour voters with our cynical, slippery, Remain and Second Referendum position is about to be responded to in their millions by mass voting abstention or voting Brexit Party. Hence a ludicrously late switch to sending key Shadow Cabinet members ‘oop north’, to try and persuade the tiresome thicko, knuckle-dragging, bigoted, proles that Labour is still just possibly ever so slightly ‘Brexity’ , and they should anyway just trust their political betters and damn well VOTE LABOUR ! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50580699
But don’t worry Left Liberal Corbynistas and Labour Right pro EU fanatics alike, this latest tactical shift news can safely be dismissed as ‘BBC Fake News’. Sooooo….Nothing to worry about… because, what do the private party polls know …….as The Guardian has been telling us for years – our lovely, liberal, educated, Labour voters , even in our massively Leave-supporting heartland seats, all voted Remain, and have no problem with our blatant betrayal of our 2017 Manifesto promise to respect the Referendum result. Yeh, no problem … and…over the cliff the party goes … to political oblivion on a French Socialist Party, or PASOK, or SPD, scale.
jpenney, if the exit polls on the 12th of your imagination are as you predict, it will be precisely because of the ‘advice’ Self Indulgent Lexiters such as you and Danny, not forgetting Ian Lavery, have given Corbyn. Leaving the EU will be a catastrophic act of self-harm.
I am still one of Corbyn’s strongest supporters but thanks to the SILs we have a leader who is now so torn between choices that he has decided not to campaign for either. This is an intolerable position for Corbyn to take and it is being exploited for all it is worth by the right wing media. There are millions of voters who even now are confused, possibly more than ever, and they need guidance from someone they respect. Respect for Jeremy Corbyn I’m sorry to say is now haemorraging and it is not because he won’t support Leave.
I canvass every weekend for a Corbyn Labour government and I know from first hand that many of the people in the most deprived areas I’ve visited, who have next to nothing, believe that things will change dramatically for them for the better if we leave the EU. They have fallen for the cruel deception of Farage and the SILs and by talking to them without criticising, you find out that they really do not have a clue about the workings of the EU and that many of their areas would be even worse off it wasn’t for our membership of the EU.
It may now be too late to change course, if so I hope to hell I’m wrong and that Brexit is not the issue I believe it to be but if not we will have lost the chance to have a true Socialist Government for at least a generation. And that’s not even considering the anti-Semitism issue which we have made a complete hash of by never ending appeasement and capitulation.
What a mess. The Conservatives are showing us that their brains are nothing more than Eton messes. No ideas to fix the climate emergency, the rigged economy, the housing crisis, the schools crisis, or the abject poverty – all the problems that their choice called ‘Austerity’ created and weaponised.
Khazerai – piggery thinking from the hegdesch (pigpen).