Cunningham panics over Farage’s NHS privatisation plans

Laila Cunningham is Reform UK’s candidate for the mayor of London, and, in a new interview, she disputed the claim that Nigel Farage wants to force the UK to abandon free health care in the form of the NHS for a US-style insurance model. The problem is that Farage has publicly voiced this opinion on camera, as commentator Farrukh highlighted:

Mick Lynch repeatedly humiliates Reform UK's Laila Cunningham

She then accuses Mick Lynch and Labour of spreading lies to "win the argument" denying that Nigel Farage wants an insurance-based NHS

Here are two clips of Nigel Farage saying,

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1. He doesn't want the NHS funded… pic.twitter.com/joAvIQ2YQ0

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) June 8, 2026

Death to the NHS

In the first clip Farrukh highlighted, Farage says the following to Sky’s Beth Rigby:

I do not want [the NHS] funded through general taxation. It doesn’t work. It’s not working.

In an older clip, Farage says:

I think we’re going to have to think about health care very, very differently. And I think we’re going to have to move to an insurance-based system of health care. Frankly, I would feel more comfortable that my money would return value if I was able to do that through the marketplace of an insurance company than just us trustingly giving £100bn a year to central government and expecting them to organise the health care service from cradle to grave.

What Farage is talking about is a US-style system; a system which offers the worst of all worlds to taxpayers. As Health System Tracker note:

analysis shows that 20 million people (nearly 1 in 12 adults) owe medical debt. The SIPP survey suggests people in the United States owe at least $220 billion in medical debt. Approximately 14 million people (6% of adults) in the U.S. owe over $1,000 in medical debt and about 3 million people (1% of adults) owe medical debt of more than $10,000. While medical debt occurs across demographic groups, people with disabilities or in worse health, lower-income people, and uninsured people are more likely to have medical debt.

The reason we say it’s ‘the worst of all worlds’ is because the US pays more per head for their healthcare.

That’s right.

A private health insurance system doesn’t just lead to inescapable personal debt and worse health outcomes; it also costs taxpayers more than the alternative. And the reason it costs more is because the industry is a massive scam.

As congressman Ro Khanna said in April this year:

The U.S. spends far more on healthcare than other rich countries. $15,000 per person (almost double), 18% of GDP (nearly twice as high), and healthcare inflation is 7% (roughly double others).

Yet outcomes are worse. Life expectancy is lower, infant & maternal mortality higher, and chronic disease like diabetes and heart disease higher. Canada with single payer has far lower costs than the US, and even than Germany & Switzerland, and provides better, universal coverage.

Unimpressive

The NHS point wasn’t the only question that Cunningham struggled to answer:

"Nigel Farage hasn't held a press conference for 40 days, since details of his £5 million gift from his billionaire crypto friend in Thailand was reported in April."

"He's out there speaking to people."@vicderbyshire interviews Reform UK's Laila Cunningham.#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/M9X5pQB9z2

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) June 8, 2026

Farage isn’t just ducking questions, either; he’s also skiving from work. As we reported on 3 June:

There have been 525 votes in this parliament, and Farage has shown up to just 169. At 32%, this means he’s shown up for less than a third of the votes he should have done. Do you think you could get away with missing seven days out of every ten at work?

Further demonstrating how unimpressive she is, Cunningham admitted the following to Lynch:

I don’t even understand what you said.

Generally, it’s better to have politicians who understand things. This is how you end up with something like the NHS. Reform, meanwhile, is how you end up with a chaotic, US-style insurance system.

Featured image via Leon Neal (Getty Images) / Carl Court (Getty Images) / Dan Kitwood (Getty Images)

By Willem Moore

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