Success of YouTube video criticising Department of Health white paper prompts health minister to respond to rapper critic
Three years ago, when he was 19, a young rapper calling himself MC NxtGen hoped he was on the verge of the big time. Performing at a "battle" at a nightclub in central London, he rapped: "To be found you gotta be loud and have a different sound, step out from the crowd, just rise from the underground!"
The crowd liked him but the title of Britain's Next Urban Superstar was not to be his. He failed to make the final, and returned home to his dreams of superstardom and his job as a binman in Loughborough.
This week, however, Britain might just have been offered a second chance to turn NxtGen into a star, in the very unlikeliest of circumstances. The rapper, real name Sean Donnelly, has found himself a viral YouTube and Twitter celebrity after recording a track that certainly offers a "different sound". Eschewing the traditional hiphop themes of bling, booty and babes, Donnelly has recorded a caustic three-minute rap about the Department of Health's white paper "Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS", and dedicated it personally – highly personally, one might say – to the health minister himself.
"Andrew Lansley, greedy! Andrew Lansley, tosser!" runs the refrain, repeated throughout the song, over a sample taken from The House of the Rising Sun. "The NHS is not for sale, you grey-haired manky codger!" But if Donnelly is far from polite in his political protest, he has certainly done his research.
"So the budget of the PCTs, he wants to hand to the GPs / Oh please. Dumb geeks are gonna buy from any willing provider, / Get care from private companies."
Later, he offers a helpful parse of the white paper, saying Lansley's plans are that "we'll become more like the US / and care will be farmed out to private companies, / who will sell their service to the NHS via the GPs / who will have more to do with service purchase arrangements / than anything to do with seeing their patients."
Finishing his shift on the bins on Friday ("I don't think this is really anyone's career choice"), Donnelly said he'd been overwhelmed by the response, which had seen his Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages "going crazy" and even contact from TV companies. "I didn't really plan for it all to be about me," he says. "I just did it basically so I could speak to the youth."
The song came about, Donnelly, now 22, told the Guardian, because he has "close family and friends" – his girlfriend is one – "who want to work in the NHS in the future hopefully, but they're worried about the cuts. So I researched it on the internet and I just did the song. I feel for the people that are ill in hospital. If they were privatised they wouldn't be able to afford it." And why focus on Lansley in particular? "Because I'm peed off with the guy."
He insists he'd rather rap about "truth" than money, fast cars or sex. "That's what sells, but I'm just not like that."
Donnelly started MC-ing when he was 11 or 12, he says, when he first saw Eminem, whose wit he immediately loved. "It was just the funniness and this complete truth at the same time." The Detroit rapper's influence might be detected in the video to Andrew Lansley – which has been viewed on YouTube more than 30,000 times in 24 hours – in which he enlists shoppers in his home town to wave placards, wear David Cameron and Nick Clegg masks and mouth "Tosser!" and "greedy!" at the camera at apposite points in the song.
At one point, railing against Lansley's involvement of the fast food industry in formulating health policy, Donnelly dons a mask of the health secretary and throws crisps at his face.
He even riffs on the health secretary's expenses record, and – in what has a reasonable claim to be the unlikeliest rap lyric ever – on the controversial donation to Lansley's office by the chairman of a private health company. "He's been given cash / by John Nash / chairman of Care UK, / a private healthcare provider, / who, if they have their own way, / will be the biggest beneficiaries / of Conservative Lib-Dem policies / to privatise healthcare, pull apart the welfare state …" It's some distance from 2 Live Crew's Me So Horny.
He is now trying to release the track on iTunes – "I've had so many people saying, 'Let's get it to number one!'". Then he'd love to quit his job on the bins. "The older I've got the more I've been worried, thinking I'm not going to make it."
He's made a wider impact now. By Friday night the viral video had infected the Department of Health, and Lansley himself was moved to comment. "We will never privatise the NHS," he told the Guardian. "But I'm impressed that he's managed to get lyrics about GP commissioning into a rap."
Artists against the cuts
A recent campaign against cuts to arts funding opened with an animation by the Macclesfield-born, Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley. "The arts employ a lot of people, and they bring folk in from all over the world to this country," a farmer tells his son in the short film. "The arts are to Britain what the sun is to Spain."
Nicky Wire
The Manic Street Preachers' guitarist, consistent with the band's political songwriting over more than two decades, has been outspoken in defence of "the soul of the country" – libraries, the subject of the band's song A Design for Life, and which he called "the soul of the country. "The closure of libraries in conjunction with tuition fees, the sell-off of our forests and radical reorganisation of the NHS are symbolic of the blatant power grab of this fiasco of a government," he wrote in this newspaper.
Mark Wallinger, who won the Turner prize in 2007 for a recreation of campaigner Brian Haw's political banners, produced a new work last year based around an image of Turner's painting The Fighting Temeraire with a large slash in the canvas, and the text "25% cut". It even comes already captioned: "If 25% were slashed from arts funding the loss would be immeasurable."
Dozens of well known actors and theatre directors, including Jeremy Irons, Mike Leigh, Helen Mirren and Kenneth Branagh, wrote to the Observer this month expressing their concern about arts cuts, including the abolition of the UK Film Council. "Before the last election the government promised to usher in a 'golden age' for the arts. The reality couldn't be further from this... We are currently facing the biggest threat to funding the arts and culture have experienced in decades."
Thumbs up for NHS
The health secretary has caved into pressure and published survey results showing record satisfaction with the NHS after claims that the figures would undermine his case for sweeping reforms. Lansley faced criticism this week over his failure to publish the results of an Ipsos Mori study documenting satisfaction ratings with the NHS, after accusations from Labour that the government was trying to "bury good news" in order to make the case for its radical health reforms.
The report, dated December 2010, found that 72% of people polled said they were satisfied with the NHS – up from 63% when the poll was last published in 2007. It said: "Satisfaction with the running of the NHS remains high at 72% … suggesting that there has been a decisive positive shift in the public's perceptions of the NHS."
"Pride in the NHS also continues to climb and is at its highest recorded level; 71% agree Britain's National Health Service is one of the best in the world. However, the government do not appear to be getting credit for these positive perceptions."
An aide to Lansley said the survey was published after it was discovered that it had already been released it into the public domain when an MP requested it in parliament last December. She said: "He wanted time to consider the reports before they were published. These are polls from the Labour government that were not published by them. The government would not benefit from suppressing these."
Polly Curtis