Healthy Increase

Despite the superb ineptitude of just about everything to do with Twizzler Lansley's anti-NHS bill, Daveybloke the Cuddly Conservative still seems to believe he can make some sort of a show of caring what happens to the little folk when they can't afford private health care. Yesterday he had a bit of a burble about waiting times: "I refuse to go back to the days when people had to wait for hours on end to be seen in A&E, or months and months to have surgery done. So let me be absolutely clear: we won't." As might be expected, it now emerges that, to be absolutely clear, we are. The number of people waiting more than six weeks for diagnostic tests has tripled, and the number of people waiting more than three months has gone up sevenfold. The number of patients waiting beyond the target time in accident and emergency departments has gone up by fifty per cent. This has all happened within the space of a year, which by a remarkable coincidence is about as long as Daveybloke and his chums have been in office. A spokesbeing for the Department of Health Twizzlerisation said (I paraphrase somewhat) that everything was more or less satisfactory, which was why the NHS needed reforming, and that the growing demand on the NHS justified the Government's cuts.