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The DUP and UUP are at it again today. The DUP aren't impressed a statement from UUP MLA John McCallister. Mr McCallister has criticised the DUP for its "cheap attack" re: NHS and boasted it was an Ulster Unionist government which first brought the NHS to Northern Ireland. But in a text to me a DUP source declared: "Lord Brookeborough and his party opposed the introduction of the NHS in 1948 because they were taking the Tory whip at Westminster."

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The UUP have since added (a day later):

"Our MPs did indeed vote against the NHS legislation, because we believed that it should have given more local control - something that reform (by both Labour and Conservative administrations) over subsequent decades has recognised and sought to address.

And, of course, it doesn't detract from the fact that it was our Party which introduced the NHS to NI.

Time for the DUP press office to go back to the history books ..."

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Posted by DUP in response (one day later) "It is good that the UUP has admitted that they opposed the introduction of the NHS in the House of Commons. A bit less boasting about introducing something that they actually voted against is called for.

Whatever the reasons they are offering now, 60 years after the event, the key point is that they were whipped by the Tories into voting against something which almost everyone, with the exception of senior Tories like their Euro-colleague Dan Hannan, now accepts was a good thing.

The DUP is well aware of Unionist history, that's why we can spot the re-emergence of Big House Unionism in UCUNF wih its anti-NHS agenda"

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