Broken society

Who the hell does David Cameron think he is to tell Benji Mancroft to think more before opening his mouth? Did Cameron think when he asked us to hug a hoodlum? I’ve been lucky and never had to go to a hospital in the UK but, unless I was bleeding to death and needed emergency help, the last place I’d choose to be treated would be here. Mancroft was right in what he said about the nurses and the sloppy work they do, but, instead of being congratulated by the Tory leader, he’s told to hold back. Like a true-blue phoney politician, Cameron bends over backwards for the soundbite ignoring that what was said might have needed saying. No Lady Thatcher this Cameron fellow. He wants to be popular with the very people who have made British society the most dysfunctional in Europe. In fact it is a broken society, like that nice Archbishop of York said. How can it not be with people like Cameron always taking the soft option and playing nice? What Britain needs is another, tougher Thatcher and Dave boy ain’t it.

I last saw Mancroft 30 years ago, when he was working on becoming an expert on drug addiction, but I took out two of his sisters, failed with a third, and hardly knew the fourth. Benji was strange — he was always on smack, which is not much fun — but he got his act together and even managed to stay in the Lords on the basis of the research he had done on drug addiction. From what I hear, hospitals in the UK are grubby and slipshod, the staff lazy and drunk at times, and what he didn’t say is how many doctors simply kill their patients through incompetence.