TV historian David Starkey has compared the NHS’s handling of coronavirus to the child abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church.
The well-known broadcaster accused health bosses of working to “protect the institution and not the patient” during an outspoken interview about the deadly pandemic.
His shock claims were made in a talk with the The New Culture Forum (NCF) – which boasts of “having the deeper discussions mainstream media won’t provide.”
Starkey, 75, targeted the NHS in a YouTube chat with Peter Whittle, who is the founder and director of the think tank.
The historian said: “One of the things that has happened throughout this crisis is that Sir Nigel Lawson’s joke about the NHS being the nearest thing in Britain to a national religion has actually come true.
“We see nurses being hailed as angels..we’ve stopped doing anything on Sunday. The Church of England has shut itself down instead everybody gathers outside and claps for carers.
“It’s a false religion. The way the NHS has behaved, and this is really going to get everybody very cross, exactly the way the Catholic Church did under the threat of child abuse.
It’s a false religion. The way the NHS has behaved, and this is really going to get everybody very cross, exactly the way the Catholic Church did under the threat of child abuse.
David Starkey
“In other words it tried to protect the institution not the patient. And this is what is coming back to haunt us.”
Earlier in the discussion Starkey said Britain had committed “economic suicide” during the pandemic.
He also claimed Covid-19 “is not actually a very serious disease.”
Starkey added: “It is 40,000 deaths. That out of a population of sixty million is an infinite percentage.
“If you go back to a REAL pandemic. If we go back to the Black Death of the middle of the 14th century you are looking there at a first impact – when it hit England – of about 20 to 25 per cent of the populations with repeated returns.
“By the end of the 14th century of England is half what it is.”
However, it is Starkey’s comparison to the paedophile scandal which are likely to upset Brits.
The Catholic Church has faced an avalanche of child sexual abuse accusations over the last few decades.
Although some accusations date back to the 1950s, molestation by priests was first given significant media attention in the 1980s, in the US and Canada.
In the 1990s the issue began to grow, with stories emerging in Ireland, Argentina, Australia and elsewhere.
A Church-commissioned report in 2004 said more than 4,000 US Roman Catholic priests had faced sexual abuse allegations in the last 50 years, in cases involving more than 10,000 children – mostly boys.
A 2009 report found that sexual and psychological abuse was “endemic” in Catholic-run industrial schools and orphanages in Ireland for most of the 20th Century.
Responding to Starkey’s comments, Daisy Cooper, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said: “Whatever your view on clapping for carers, public debate is now rightly focused on how we recognise the efforts of the thousands of frontline NHS workers, protect our NHS for future generations and fix the huge crisis in social care.
“The UK has the second highest number of deaths in the world and any attempt to trivialise that in public debate is deeply insulting.”
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