Corbyn did quite well today. He got all frothed-up about the NHS and put some real oratorical venom into his closing attack. It began as an incomprehensible ‘battle of the budgets’ between the Labour leader and Mrs May. They were like a pair of drunken sailors comparing scars. The PM claims to have added a £2 bn premium to the NHS’s requested total of £8 bn. No you haven’t, said Corbyn, you cut it by £4.5 bn. The full tally of reductions, according to him, stands at £22bn. Mrs May upped the stakes and said half a trillion (£0.5 trn) was being spent on health during the lifetime of the parliament.
She accused Labour of concealing their blunders behind a flurry of green papers, Royal Commissions, wafflesome reports and pompously titled quangos. But the Tories have the same strategy. What on earth is the Better Care Commission? Who seriously trusts the Social Care Precept to improve the system? These bodies are linked, in some obscure way, to a new initiative, ‘the sustainability and transformation process’. The latter has been reduced to the more opaque ‘STP Plan’. Clearly this meaningless cipher was dreamed up during a session at a Soho mood-board or at a brain-storming weekend held by marketing gurus in a country-house hotel. If medics want to pursue something called ‘STP’ they could try Saving Their Patients.
Angus Robertson and the Scots Nats had a grand old time today. For them parliament isn’t a legislative body but a drop-in centre where they can indulge in a family psycho-drama. Robertson and Co are the narky teenagers engaged in an endless war with their parents (on the Treasury bench) whom they regard as evil and stupid. The cocky kids grab all the goodies they can while complaining that their wicked guardians are hellbent on curtailing their liberties. Mr Robertson told Mrs May that the ‘UK government’ enjoys punishing invalids for being invalids. His Aberdeen colleague, Kirsty Blackman, suggested that the main goal of Tory housing policy is to evict rent-defaulters in her constituency and watch as they freeze to death on the granite streets. ‘How can you sleep in your warm bed?’ she quavered at Mrs May. The irony is that the SNP aren’t confederates of the sick and oppressed but trustafarian elitists living handsomely on the public purse.
Barmy intervention of the day came from John Woodcock. This noted diplomatist believes that peace in Syria depends on the World Cup. He ordered Mrs May to strip Russia of its right to host the event and thereby to force a cowed and humiliated Putin to cease bombing Aleppo and to reconfigure his entire Asian strategy. Had Woodcock been around at the time of the Great Game he’d have conquered Afghanistan by withdrawing its invitation to the Empire Croquet Championships.
There was bad luck for Tim Farron at the end. Mr Farron, as older readers will recall, runs a semi-extinct pressure-group known as ‘the LibDems’. He made a decent joke about Mrs May ‘just about managing’ in government. Sadly a heckler ruined it. Just as Farron’s name was called. ‘Is he still here?’
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