I've Lost My Child, Can I Gamble With Yours?

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, will be waving his dead child around yet again today in order to try and justify Andrew Lansley's twizzlerisation of the NHS. "I don't want anyone to doubt how important this is to me," Daveybloke will burble, because nothing makes an ideological gamble with the nation's health go better than the knowledge that the bloke at the top is all dewy-eyed about it. "The doctors who cared for my eldest son, the maternity nurses who welcomed my youngest daughter into the world, the teachers who are currently inspiring my children, all of them have touched my life, and the life of my family, in an extraordinary way, and I want to do right by them," Daveybloke will burble, because patently the doctors would have done much better had they but had the opportunity to moonlight as accountants, the maternity nurses would have touched his life even more extraordinarily had they been on harsher schedules with fewer rights, and the teachers' inspiration of his children would be yet more inspired if the school were being run by a consortium of Macdonald's, Rupert Murdoch, the Vatican Bank and a few neighbourhood meddlers. "Of course, these changes have to be carefully worked through," Daveybloke will burble; this is, mirabile dictu, "exactly what we have done through our years of preparation in opposition", which explains why the voters before the election heard so much about the chaos to be unleashed, instead of a lot of guff about the NHS being safe in somebody's hands and frontline services being unaffected. "These reforms aren't about theory or ideology, they are about people's lives," Daveybloke will burble, apparently under the impression that whatever affects people's lives cannot be theoretical or ideological, and that those who have spent their entire adult existence in restaurant demolition societies and political sinecures know something about how the little people live. "When we're done with these cuts, spending on public services will actually still be at the same level as it was in 2006. We will still be spending 41% of our GDP on the public sector," Daveybloke will burble, doubtless only moments before he makes clear exactly what percentage of that percentage will be spent on doctors, nurses and teachers.