UPDATE: ‘Scaremongering Sarah’ Wollaston Slammed Remain’s NHS Alarmism

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By Louise Mensch | 7:31 am, June 9, 2016
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“During [2015] election it couldn’t have been spelt out more clearly to MPs that people do not want to open our borders to more migrants” – Dr. Sarah Wollaston MP,  before her Remain fearmongering

Dr. Sarah Wollaston announced her “decision to switch to Remain” in the EU Referendum. The phrase must be put in quotes, as it is reasonably clear that Wollaston was always lined up for Remain, and planned to make a  “switch” in the last week in order to sway undecided voters. It is likely Remain have lined up a couple more planted MPs to do the same thing.

The arrogance of Wollaston, however, was to assume that nobody would check her statements against her delivery. In her Vote Leave phase, her consistent line was that she hated scaremongering; fair enough, there has been unfortunate hyperbole from figures on both sides.

But Wollaston, as a GP, was always going to be most powerful on the NHS. On her website she rows in with this dramatic warning for Bremain:

Could services, research and public health be put at risk in the event of a vote to leave the EU? I believe the balance of evidence is that the isolation and instability of Brexit should come with a health warning.

This is exactly the sort of scaremongering that ‘Vote Leave’ Sarah was slamming just weeks ago. When Jeremy Hunt risibly stated that Brexit would hurt the NHS, Dr. Sarah rushed out her prescription: Project Fear can hurt your health. “Armagedding tired of all the scaremongering,’ she said, before projecting Armageddon herself.

but that’s not all. Sarah Wollaston ramps up the fear rhetoric in her ‘I’ve changed” statement, to the point of echoing Cameron’s World War Three rubbish, with a gibbering paragraph about war and her father on his way to an operation:

For him, the risk of war in Europe is not some abstract debate but a fearsome horror against which the EU, for all its imperfections, has brought us the protection of peace. He pressed this home all the way to the doors of the operating theatre. Whilst some would celebrate the instability that would be triggered across the EU by Britain’s exit, even if that lead to its collapse, I do not. We all benefit from a stable Europe.

“the risk of war in Europe is not some abstract debate but a fearsome horror against which the EU… has brought us the protection of peace”

A fearsome horror! War in Europe! The EU brings us peace! Blimey. Could the language be any more alarmist?

A pity then that Vote Leave Wollaston presented the much calmer, more rational side of the argument.

“Ratcheting up the alarmist rhetoric on security by project fear ‘in’ campaign will backfire; people don’t like to be be taken for fools”, she said  in February.

Yet now Alarmist Remainer Wollaston is giving us the ‘war in Europe’ and telling us of “fearsome horror”?

In the past, Wollaston was – pre Referendum in 2013  – very critical of the EU’s impact on the NHS and the one-sided nature of EU health:

Wollaston also previously told her constituents that whatever the result of the referendum, both the UK and the EU would be just fine.

Update: Sarah Wollaston was, very regrettably, also scaremongering about immigration, using Project Fear language that pretends that after we leave the EU, Britain would choose to discriminate against immigrants from the EU:

If you meet a migrant in the NHS, they are more likely to be treating you than ahead of you in the queue

This is a dramatic change from Dr. Wollaston demanding a government inquiry on EU health tourism:

 

Wollaston’s “Last-Minute Project Fear” blog continues:

and very many of our core health and social care workforce come from the EU.

Of course – all Brexit campaigners, and Sarah pretended she was one, know this, and it is an aim to increase skilled migrants from the EU and from Commonwealth countries like India. Wollaston has retreated to an anti-factual stance. The objection of Leave campaigners is not to immigration itself, just preferential, blank-cheque immigration for EU members that gives preference to Belgians over Brazilians.

Wollaston has retreated to using fearmongering about non-existent discrimination:

The leave campaign has redrawn its battle lines around immigration for the final weeks of the campaign. It looks increasingly indistinguishable from UKIP

But Wollaston made exactly the same point on preferred EU migrants, with the blanket right to benefits, that UKIP’s Douglas Carswell has been making.

In fact, the pre-fearmonger Dr. Wollaston warned often of the massive risks of trafficking migrants to Germany who are not “refugees” but economic migrants:

Benefits to all EU migrants – as we now have? Wollaston was adamantly against it, arguing it would strain the NHS:

 

Camapigners on the Leave side were surprised and grateful to see Wollaston join them, as she has always presented herself as on the left of the Tory party. Perhaps given the ferocity of the alarmism in her Remain statement, they should have known better.

The most disgraceful thing about the long-planned switch, however, was Wollaston’s excuse – that she did not like the Vote Leave figure – a correct figure – of £350m a week. Remain prefer to halve that, because the EU spends half its money on things it believes will benefit the UK in the UK.

Whichever way you fall, though, this figure has been used by Vote Leave throughout its campaign. Wollaston knew that when she signed up for Brexit.

To pretend that her “sudden decision” is as a result of something that has always been there is shocking. Wollaston previously said that the EU had crushed Greece and Italy, creating a generation of young unemployed people. Her dramatic, alarmist scaremongering today essentially states that her being miffed over how one represents the payments the UK makes to the EU trumps the welfare of a destroyed generation.

And that is a deeply unprogessive, uncompassionate stance.

Let us hope the British public call time on the scaremongering quackery of Wollaston’s new-found love of alarmism. While folk can and do change their minds, to pivot to screeching warnings of instability, catastrophe and “fearsome horror” [sic] is the very scaremongering that Wollaston has always said she opposes; and that is frankly shameful.

 

 

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