Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, has suggested that she received priority treatment from an NHS doctor because of her decision to vote in favour of a ceasefire in Gaza.
Addressing the gathered throngs at “An Evening With Jess Phillips”, the Minister for Safeguarding described visiting A&E at a Birmingham hospital for breathing difficulties. Luckily, given that she told the crowd she had “genuinely seen better health facilities in war zones, in developing countries around the world”, she did not have to stay long.
Phillips claimed that she was able to push ahead of other patients because the doctor who treated her was Palestinian, and she had previously resigned from Labour’s front bench after voting in favour of a ceasefire in Gaza. “He was sort of like, ‘I like you. You voted for a ceasefire,’” she admitted. “I got through quicker.”
There are a number of reasons why this is staggering. The first is that Phillips claims “almost all the doctors in Birmingham seemed to be [Palestinian].” Given that only 207 Palestinians work in the NHS in total, it’s little wonder she was waiting so long. Equally astonishing is that Philips would tell this story at all. Presumably, she meant to convey a sense that Gaza had real impacts on her constituents because it is an issue that matters to respectable people like doctors.
Certainly, this would fit in with Phillip’s history of blinkeredness. After receiving a torrent of abuse from pro-Gaza activists at the last general election — including being threatened, intimidated and drowned out by shouts whilst giving her acceptance speech — she was asked whether this hostile response was sectarian. She responded that “the fact that they were Muslim is not significant because there are Muslim people in my constituency who didn’t behave like this”, before adding: “they did it because they were idiots.”
But, after being given priority for medical treatment by a doctor on the grounds of sectarian division generated by the latest flare-up of a millennia-long inter-ethnic conflict thousands of miles away, it is hard to see how the blinkers can stay on. Accusations of two-tier policing are bad; the implications of two-tier healthcare are arguably worse.
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