Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary

Extracts from Part III of this interview

On the NHS “The NHS is a soviet style system…and makes a virtue of the fact.”

“There are very few incentives in the system of any kind to use resources properly to treat patients as customers, to care about their needs…in other than the most immediate fashion. And that's why we have the problems that we've got.”

“I think we should be putting in place a royal commission whose…explicit mandate is: work out how you transform the NHS into a European style insurance system, still free at the point of use largely, but with more incentives and more rationality in the system.”

On Education

“We’ve let lots of genies out the bottle and putting them back is not going to be straightforward but we must have a go.”

“We need to get back to the principle where teachers are not teaching ideologies but they are teaching about a range of views. Ideally you shouldn’t know what a teacher’s own political or ideological views are.”

“The important thing is we need to get back to the principle whereby…teachers are not teaching ideologies, but they are teaching about a range of views.”

“I think the key thing is to… remind teachers they are professionals. They're supposed to be educating. They aren’t kind of ideological commissars, and we should be clear about that.”

On Cultural and Institutional Bias

“I think a lot of this comes from the Equality Act. It’s encouraged a group rights mentality, where everyone sees their own advantage as… finding some identification with a disadvantaged group and trying to profit from that.”

“So now we're seeing exactly what I always feared would happen…everybody is trying to get on the bandwagon… even white privileged men are trying to define themselves as an Equality Act group.”

“The Equality Act needs huge reform. In my view you just need a simple non-discrimination provision. And… all the panoply that has come with that should just be swept away.”

On the Judiciary and the Civil Service

“I think the amount of deliberate ideological bias in either the judiciary or the Civil Service is probably quite low.”

“I think there is a quite a lot of kind of cultural bias probably… Civil servants tend to be selected from people who sort of believe in public service. They believe in the public sector. They believe they're not necessarily the most go-getting people themselves. And I think that society - their view of society - gets reflected in the decisions they take.”

“When I joined the Foreign Office, which was the late eighties, it was a very conservative – with the small c – environment. It just was not the soft-left currency of debate that you have now.”