Edwina Currie accused Adil Ray of “turning into Piers Morgan” after the Good Morning Britain host blasted her for comments over NHS migrant workers.
This weekend it was revealed that Dido Harding plans to end the reliance on foreign doctors and nurses if she becomes the next head of the health service.
Baroness Harding of Winscome – the former head of the much-maligned Test and Trace service – formally applied to succeed Sir Simon Stevens atop the NHS last week.
If successful, the Tory peer will become chief executive of Europe’s biggest employer, with a budget of more than £150 billion and a waiting list of anxious patients awaiting treatment and surgery which stands at around five million.
Harding has charted NHS Improvement since 2017 and is close to ministers – but her leadership of the government’s testing programme has been harshly criticised as ineffective and wasteful, The Sunday Times reported.
She reportedly plans to challenge the “prevailing orthodoxy” in government that it is better to import medical professionals from overseas. According to the House of Commons Library, 170,000 out of 1.3 million NHS staff say their nationality is not British – close to 14 per cent of the workforce.
Appearing on GMB this morning, Currie came out in favour of the plans, much to the annoyance of Ray, who said:
“Those migrant doctors have held up this country, have held up the NHS.
“127,000 people have died in the last year, many tens more thousand would have died if it wasn’t for migrant workers.
“They are British”
Currie then accused Ray of “turning into Piers Morgan” following the rant, but according to Twitter, his sentiment is a popular one.
Peter Stefanovic said migrant workers “courageously and selflessly risked their own safety to keep us safe” during the pandemic, while Rachel Clarke pointed out that many have already had to endure “institutional and other forms of racism”.
David Scheider said the “moral of Brexit is that xenophobia will get you power”, adding that “now is the turn of the NHS”.
While Dr Julia Grace Patterson said she is “disgusted” by the attitude of Dido Harding.
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