Gove 'lying' about EU citizens' NHS rights to gain votes
Michael Gove
has been accused of deliberately “lying” to the public about EU
citizens’ rights to access to the NHS as a cynical ploy to win votes in
Labour leave marginals.
Gove, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, wrote in the Mail on Sunday that it was “unfair” that EU citizens had “preferential access to free NHS care … without paying in”. His opponents said this creates an impression of “spongeing, bed blocking EU citizens”.
The Labour MEP Claude Moraes said he feared the Conservative party was reverting to 1980s “dog whistle” anti-immigrant campaigning to score political points.
EU citizens who are not students have access to the NHS only because they pay tax.
Nicolas Hatton, the co-founder of the3million, which campaigns for EU citizens rights, said Gove’s remarks were “disgusting” and “complete misrepresentation of the facts”. “It’s a cheap political ploy based on xenophobia designed to get votes.
“EU citizens do not have automatic rights to health systems in EU states. In the first three months, you are treated like a tourist with no rights, and after three months, unless you are are working or are self-sufficient, then you have no rights to the NHS,” said Hatton.
EU free movement rules are designed to enable easy movement of workers around the bloc and reciprocal health arrangements have enabled around 1.2m British nationals to settle in the EU with access to national healthcare.
Moraes said: “Gove is lying and I think they are going to
continue lying for the campaign. The line that Gove used about ‘paying
into’ the NHS is really an old-style racist trope and is designed to
target Labour marginals where the vote is about leave or remain.Gove, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, wrote in the Mail on Sunday that it was “unfair” that EU citizens had “preferential access to free NHS care … without paying in”. His opponents said this creates an impression of “spongeing, bed blocking EU citizens”.
The Labour MEP Claude Moraes said he feared the Conservative party was reverting to 1980s “dog whistle” anti-immigrant campaigning to score political points.
EU citizens who are not students have access to the NHS only because they pay tax.
Nicolas Hatton, the co-founder of the3million, which campaigns for EU citizens rights, said Gove’s remarks were “disgusting” and “complete misrepresentation of the facts”. “It’s a cheap political ploy based on xenophobia designed to get votes.
“EU citizens do not have automatic rights to health systems in EU states. In the first three months, you are treated like a tourist with no rights, and after three months, unless you are are working or are self-sufficient, then you have no rights to the NHS,” said Hatton.
EU free movement rules are designed to enable easy movement of workers around the bloc and reciprocal health arrangements have enabled around 1.2m British nationals to settle in the EU with access to national healthcare.
“You can’t pay into the NHS even if you wanted to. Michael Gove knows only too well that free movement is the new immigration and if you can conflate the two and throw in something about Aussie-style points system, you are saying to voters: ‘We will control EU migration, all the millions of “EU wasters”. We’re blocking them and the only brown and black people who come in will be heart surgeons or tech people.’ That’s the psychology of this, and it’s lethal.”
The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, accused Gove of deliberately “bashing and blaming migrants” while the migration historian Tanja Bueltmann called it “dog-whistling”.
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