Nigel Farage has been accused of ‘running scared’ from a doctor who destroyed his claims about the damage Brexit will have on the NHS.
Dr Rachel Clarke responded to the former UKIP leader on social media after he dismissed yet another warning from NHS professionals over a ‘No Deal’ Brexit.
Farage accused the British Medical Association of engaging in an ‘extreme form’ of ‘project fear’ and called the body that represents healthcare professionals an ‘absolute disgrace’. That’s right – the very people who save lives on a daily basis.
Dr Clarke, a palliative care doctor from Oxford, responded with a Twitter thread of devastating statistics and hard-hitting facts. She ended the thread with a challenge to debate the facts on his LBC programme.
Her tweets have reached more than 1.5 million people in just one day with hundreds praising the responses.
NHS campaigner Clive Peedell said: ‘Dr Rachel Clarke is Nigel Farage’s worst nightmare to interview about Brexit and the NHS. She’s a doctor with an academic background in politics and she talks in an evidence-based, factual and truthful manner’.
Broadcaster Shelagh Fogarty said: ‘Judge this one for yourself, people. I’m not on those wards. @doctor_oxford is’.
The lack of acknowledgement from the arch-Brexiteer to the tweets have prompted many to claim that he is ‘running scared’ from the argument.
Twitter user @_havelok said: ‘Nigel Farage deals with empty emotive rhetoric, not real issues that affect real people’s real lives’.
Ailsa Rutter tweeted: ‘Nigel Farage in a million years doesn’t have the guts. Running scared. Knows he’d be totally out classed and out of his depth. Shameful self publicity’.
https://twitter.com/doctor_oxford/status/1030122574381023232
Disgraceful is an NHS hospice forced to close a *third* of its beds because some its nurses - wonderful, extraordinarily kind individuals - feel so unwelcome now in Britain they have been driven home to Spain, Portugal, Italy etc. 2/n
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
Disgraceful is the racism, abuse & hate unleashed by your foul & toxic referendum campaign - and, in particular, the racism towards EU staff we have witnessed, post referendum, in my own NHS hospital. 3/n
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
Disgraceful is dying patients trapped in their homes, in desperate need of an NHS hospice bed, who I cannot treat - because the beds are closed - because EU nurses have been driven away by post-Brexit hate. 4/n
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
Disgraceful is having to look a World War Two veteran in the eyes, as he weeps and trembles with relief that at last - at last - a hospice bed became available for his dying, desperate wife. 5/n
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
Disgraceful is an NHS *already* short of 40k nurses and 10k doctors, yet haemorrhaging more daily thanks to the hateful impact of Brexit. 6/n
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
Disgraceful is the staggering - and sustained - 96% reduction in applications to the NHS from EU nurses since the referendum. 7/n
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
Disgraceful is people like you whipping up the hate that has caused all this misery - then trolling doctors like me who bear witness to its horrible, inhumane fallout, every day at work. 8/n
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
So, Mr Farage, next time you talk about disgrace, and seek to denigrate doctors like me, wash your mouth out and wind your neck in. 9/n
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
Because patients are vulnerable - so incredibly vulnerable. And if you really were a man of the people, as opposed to the racist demagogue you are, you would show some goddamn humility about the human cost of what you've done. 10/10 ends
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018
And incidentally, @Nigel_Farage, if you want to debate the facts pertaining to Brexit and the NHS, please invite me onto your show to do so, rather than making ad hominem attacks on my profession. @LBC
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) August 16, 2018