How Britain has fallen

OPINION:

The world watched in shock and horror this past week at British police guarded a hospital in the UK. They were there to prevent a critically ill child from being removed and given the chance at life.

Two-year-old Alfie Evans was born with a degenerative brain condition. In December, 2017, the hospital, controlled by Britain’s National Health Service, filed a legal action to turn off the child’s ventilator. The hospital claimed that it was in the child’s “best interest” to be murdered.

For those who aren’t familiar with the National Health Service, just imagine the worst aspects of the DMV and the IRS and then imagine them running your healthcare. But NHS has the added feature that it occasionally, or perhaps more often than occasionally, kills people.

Let’s face it, who wants to go to a hospital where doctors have to prescribe water to make sure their patients get something to drink.

Alfie Evans’ parents wanted another opinion. They wanted an option to save their child’s life. Enter Italy. Italy even made Alfie Evans an Italian citizen to facilitate the ability for him to receive treatment.

Unfortunately for little Alfie Evans, modern Britain has taken George Orwell’s “1984” and decided to use it as an instruction manual, not a warning. The doctors claimed that the flight might cause him more physical damage, so it would just be better to turn off his life support and let him die.

And the British Courts agreed with the doctors and on April 28, little Alfie Evans died.

The real issue here is not the fact that after World War II, Britain decided to completely socialize the healthcare sector of its economy. The story here is just another example of how the people in England are no longer a free people.

Alfie Evans is not the only child murdered by socialist healthcare in the U.K. In 2017, Charlie Gard was murdered too. In both instances, the government bureaucracy fought to keep the parents of the child from having any options other than euthanasia.

This isn’t the only example of why the British are no longer a free people. In 2016, the Independent reported that 2500 people in the previous five years, just in London, had been arrested for sending “offensive Facebook and Twitter posts.”

The U.K. has eliminated private gun ownership in one of the most sweeping gun control measures ever seen in an allegedly free country. Yet it is not just guns that are banned. It is the right to self-defense.

In Britain, there is virtually nothing you can carry for self-defense. In 2015, a police website advised the only thing that could be legally carried for self-defense was a “rape alarm.”

In early April, a 78-year-old homeowner returned to his London home to find two men burglarizing it. A fight ensued. At least one of the burglars was armed with a screwdriver and during the fight, the 78-year-old man stabbed the 37-year-old burglar, who later died of his wounds.

The homeowner was arrested by the police. Charges were only dropped after public outrage.

Freedom is not some ephemeral concept that cannot be measured. Freedom has certain characteristics. A free people have the right to speak, to determine what is best for their families and to defend themselves against criminals.

Citizens of the United Kingdom have none of those rights.

Britain has fallen.

• Judson Phillips is founder of the Tea Party Nation.