A clip of the Shadow Health Secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, talking about Labour re-nationalising the NHS has been removed from John Pilger’s documentary ‘The Dirty war on the NHS’, aired for the first time on ITV last Tuesday.
Controversy surrounding the broadcasters scheduling of the documentary has already raised a few eyebrows and Pilger has himself been highly critical of OFCOM’s decision to block the film from being shown until after the election campaign had ended. Pilger has in fact questioned whether political bias might have had some part to play in OFCOM’s decision.
Today we’ve had reports that the ITV version of the documentary has been edited and that a clip of Jonathan Ashworth talking about reversing privatisation and re-nationalising the NHS had been removed from the film. In the clip, Ashworth is highly critical of Virgin Care’s involvement in community health services (i.e. health visitors, children’s health services etc) and said that if Labour were in power they would end all Virgin Care contracts.
The clip starts at 1hr 38min 48sec into the video, as you can see here…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlJGL8Z52YE
But is edited out of the ITV version, available here… https://www.itv.com/hub/the-dirty-war-on-the-nhs/
Spotlight has attempted to contact John Pilger for comment and will update if and when we get a response.
