Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

I’m lonely but the Loneliness Minister won’t take my calls

I blame Bercow. The Speaker has introduced a strange new custom to the Commons. He likes to point out his guests in the public gallery and to encourage MPs to join him in saluting them. Now everyone’s at it. Before today’s session Jeremy Corbyn had bagged himself an imam from a north London mosque and installed him in the upstairs pews. He duly greeted the cleric as ‘my friend’ and got his name right at the second attempt.

Today the NHS was on Mr Corbyn’s mind. Mrs May’s austerity U-turn, and her transformation into Lady Bountiful, has converted Mr Corbyn into a raving Thatcherite. He fumed about new NHS funding. ‘Which taxes are going up?’ he demanded. ‘And for who?’. Under a government led by him the answers to those questions would be, ‘all of them’ and ‘for everyone.’

Ronnie Cowan asked an urgent question about medicinal cannabis and Mrs May gave a ploddingly earnest reply. She spoke of efficacy, patient safety, and rigorous testing. What she meant was, delay, delay and delay. She then announced ‘a two-part review’, guaranteeing further delay – and extra agony for patients – before any drugs are administered. Even then she hadn’t finished. She revealed that a third synod of tax-gobbling bigwigs is to be empanelled by the Home Secretary to look at prescription policy. The policy of Mrs May couldn’t be clearer. Keep the sick away from their treatment for as long as possible.

Antoinette Sandbach raised the scourge of ‘rural isolation’ which is the responsibility of the ministry for Sport and Civil Society. However, as an egoistical townie, Ms Sandbach’s question made me think only of myself, and my urban isolation. She then referred to a ‘£20m fund to combat loneliness’. At which point I was consumed with jealousy and greed.

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