Labour: addicted to lying
Posted by Simon Stewart
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
I enclose below some end of year thoughts for the discussion page.Glad to see New Labour is ending the year as it began it; rolling in deceit and pandering to the worst possible prejudices!
Is the government now so addicted to lying it needed a quick end of year fix, or was it merely jealous of all the front page attention some earthquake victims were getting it had to do a bit of headline grapping for itself? Or was it, as I suspect, to do with giving some nonentity of a junior health minister his two minutes of fame getting on the front pages to divert attention from Blair's latest little whopper, the previous day, over Iraq and WMDs whilst giving the Daily Mail and its readership something to feed its prejudices on - nothing like a bit of asylum seeker bashing to get the chompers going of a morning? Rather failed on that one though, even New Labour's grubby little spinsters are not going to get on the front pages against a cop killer. They did headline the news on Radio 4 with this piece of speciousness and the minister concerned got neatly taken apart on the Today programme, but then he was only a put up duck to be shot down. I won't give you his name, you will not want to remember it: though putting up someone with the same name as a forthcoming report which is about to drop vast buckets of do all over the government had a certain irony.
Their wholly contrived 'moral panic' around so-called health tourism whereby people are supposed to be coming to this country to join our hospital waiting lists is based on two studies (one of which is incomplete) and falsely projecting the ascertained cost - hence the two hundred million pound figure they are banding around. Even if this notional figure was an accurate approximation it's a mere drop in the overall NHS budget and which it would be even more expensive to chase down and save, and that's before one even raises the issue of the morality of not treating someone, or the treatment that we get when abroad. And that is, also, before remembering the cost of how much their escapade in the Gulf is costing so far - any advance on £5.5 billion anyone - or the projected costs - at least £10 billion, and which will prove to be woefully inaccurate - of Blunkett's latest assault on our civil liberties, ID cards.
Have the scum who govern us really not got better concerns to raise? What happened to social democracy, or is there no room at the inn in Blair's Britain?