More on the British election from a New Zealand perspective. Boris Johnson continues an incredibly erratic performance, and the Conservative Party are full of tricky manoeuvres and funny games on social media. Johnson launched the Welsh Conservatives campaign and the broadcast highlights included a diversion on the prospective trading relations with China. He asked the audience to check on-line if Wales was closer to China than New Zealand, ‘as the crow flies’. It turns out this was true, as the crow flies. Why he thinks that this makes any difference to the trade in sheep meat, who really knows. The fact remains that New Zealand is closer to China by sea, and already has a free trade deal.

This means that New Zealand farmers will always be able to out compete little old Wales, no matter what the geography is according to BoJo. And in today’s LBC radio interview, Johnson also claimed that there were more  free trade deals in the pipeline, besides the U.S. one, including with New Zealand. That’s news to us, but maybe the New Zealand government has got high up in the queue. Even with the Labour Party in government here, the free trade fetish continues. Indeed, in the last election campaign they misled progressive voters into believing that they would no longer pursue the Asia-Pacific trade agreement known as the TPPA. This was before Trump threw out his toys over it. But, after the election the Labour Party returned to form, and agreed to a bowdlerised version of the TPPA, the CTTPA, or a similar acronym. The key part of this was that it would not include the clauses allowing for corporations to sue governments that were not allowing domestic market competition, including for pharmaceuticals.

So the major controversy with the TPPA had been over pharmaceuticals, and the role of American drug companies. New Zealand has an organisation called Pharmac which organises the purchase of drugs for the public health system, and therefore can obtain the best prices through this form of collectivism. Of course, this was anathema to the Americans drug companies, who want to extract monopoly prices for their patented medicines. Pharmac is therefore similar to the British organisation that is called Nice, and any free trade deal with the U.S. would always have drug purchases on the agenda.

Therefore the British Labour Party didn’t really need the leaked document, detailing the trade talks with the U.S. Government, to know that the role of Nice would be up for discussion at the very least. But having got an un-redacted version of the Tories trade talks, it would have been nice if the media have covered it, rather than banging on about anti-Semitism, which appears to be far more important than the health of millions of poor people. In the broadcast version of events seen here, via Sky News Australia, Sky’s Diana Magnay was asked every hour about the veracity of Labour’s claims. She was apparently with Corbyn’s campaign in Falmouth, but it could have been anywhere, Magnay stated that the document did not back up Corbyn’s claims, even though she can’t have read it; and went on to say that everything had changed under BoJo. Besides the partisan bias, Magnay could not provide a coherent statement, despite doing it all afternoon for the Sarah-Jane Mee Show. Magnay used to be a CNN correspondent, so really has drawn the short straw being assigned to Corbyn. By contrast, Kate McCann gets to luxuriate on BoJo’s campaign bus. And Sky continued to show footage of Johnson meeting with nurses in Cornwall, but not the audio part of the event, especially when one of the nurses asked where he would get his ‘nurses tree’ (for new nurses).

The other mention of New Zealand last week was also in the context of health, and it happened during the feisty Question Time Special, where a partisan audience got to roast their enemies. Johnson was accused of being dishonest in his first question, and was later called a racist, but otherwise appeared to be doing fine. But the questions on the NHS were difficult. One of the audience was a GP (general practitioner) who stated how onerous the conditions for local doctors were, and compared it to Australian and New Zealand GP practices, which had similar earnings but far less stress. It might be true that health is less of a political football than in the UK, but the picture is not so rosy. The vacancies for GPs are in rural areas, where shortages mean doctors do have to work long hours. In the cities the hospitals have similar maintenance issues, and problems with treatment times for cancer, which vary on a geographical basis. And there are similar shortages of doctors and nurses, even though it is nowhere near as bad as in the UK.

Johnson’s best bit of sophistry must be his claim that there will be 50 000 new nurses over his next term. This was despite the lack of trainees caused by the Tory removal of the student maintenance grant, and the effect of student loan debt; and the claim that more nurses would arrive as immigrants from the EU, despite the fact that Brexit means less immigration to most BoJo supporters. But the real doosie was the claim that 19 000 of the 50 000 figure would be contrived from the number of nurses that would be retained, when they would have otherwise left the NHS. So 19 000 nurses already in the NHS are counted twice, or are not really ‘new’ nurses at all. Maybe they will be receiving offers from American drug companies that they cannot refuse.