The so-called leader of the so-called opposition gave another so-called performance today. Jeremy Corbyn seems to have challenged the Labour party to a slalom race. Target: rock bottom. Go Corbo! his enemies cheer as they watch his hapless figure slithering and shimmying down the ice-floes of public contempt.
Today he came to the Commons with grounds for hope. Which, for Corbo, means a bulletin of despair issued by a public body with a fancy title and some embossed note-paper. The Marie Curie Foundation worries that nurses are struggling to care for dying patients. And the British Medical Association complains that 15,000 beds have been trundled out of NHS wards and left to rust on the scrap-heap. Extra money is the answer. Corbo had more. The professional associations of nurses and of mid-wives also believe the NHS faces a funding crisis.
It’s amazing how many bodies there are with limitless cash to complain about cash limits. Aside from the Kings Fund, the Healthcare Foundation, and other such lobby groups, there are no fewer than nine Royal Colleges in various branches of healthcare: GPs, Surgeons, Physicians, Nursing, Anaesthetists, Midwives, Ophthalmologists, Psychiatrists, Gynaecologists and Obstetricians. Do we need quite so many of these august institutes, each bearing the sovereign’s semi-divine imprimatur, when they’re all devoted to a single heist: shaming the government into giving their members more dosh? Perhaps Her Majesty could wave her magic wand and turn the nine into one. And the money saved might – conceivably – be invested in patients. But it’d probably be spent on a ‘reorganisation impact assessment’.
Many of us worry that the elderly Mr Corbyn will have to move into sheltered accommodation when he leaves office, (i.e. some time this year). He’s never been good at thinking on his feet but now he seems incapable of simple cognitive tasks. When Mrs May gave a plain answer to question about nursing recruitment he stood up and said she’d offered, ‘No reply.’ Mrs May was tempted to strike and sting with deadly effect. But her cobra-like visage softened into a ‘more-tea-dear?’ expression. She gently advised him to listen to her answers. A leader who can’t hear is problematic. A leader who can’t think is fatal. Luckily for Corbo his party can’t think either.
Caroline Flint begged the PM to introduce a national ‘strategy’ for the children of alcoholics. Ms Flint rarely misses a chance to remind everyone that she was raised in a boozy household. But she’s not the only earthling to have ‘survived’ such a childhood. She forgets that kids are naturally resilient and self-improving. Tax-funded aid may make them less so. Ms Flint’s charter is simply a meal-ticket for wily shrinks who want to promote the false creed that an unfortunate kid can’t become a happy adult without a state-aided guru by their side.
Sir Julian Brazier always raises a hearty cheer and today he succinctly contrasted two enterprises subsidised by the public. He deplores both. One is the investigation of army veterans over fatalities that occurred in Northern Ireland four decades ago and which are unlikely to attract useful new evidence. The other is the award of £1m to a con-artist and terror suspect called Ronnie Fiddler. This gifted hoaxer changed his name to make it appear more Islamic. Newly kitted out as Al-Rooni al-Feedlari, he spent the rest of his winnings on a trip to Iraq where he promptly turned himself into a human car-bomb.
This may be the costliest deportation the UK has ever undertaken. But it ended happily. Mr Fiddler is in a better place. And we, without Mr Fiddler, are too.
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