Unhealthy Noises

Twizzler Lansley has been let out for a bit of a blather on Newsnight about how his anti-NHS bill is wonderful and his colleagues are wonderful and the Deputy Conservatives have been wonderful and la la la la la. The Twizzler noted that a Conservative government would have "started out in a different place" to the present Conservative government, and proclaimed that the anti-NHS bill has been much improved thanks to the treachery of the Liberal Democrats. Of course this is all encouraging evidence of occasional contact with reality; but the Twizzler let himself down a bit by lapsing into self-pity: "there is no way of undertaking major reform imagining that you're not going to be misrepresented and distorted" by the kind of rotters who claim that giving forty-nine per cent of NHS beds to the private sector is the same thing as privatisation, for instance.

The Twizzler drew a careful distinction between "priority setting" or triage, the consequences of which ought properly to be blamed on doctors and nurses; and rationing, or "depriving people of services", which is a Bad Thing and therefore will not occur except possibly as one of the direr consequences of interference by the nanny state. Presumably those who cannot afford one of those private beds will be prescribed a more appropriate perspective as to whether their health is really all that much of a priority compared to, say, a tax cut for the likes of Bob Diamond or a nice little war on the wogs.

Still, the Twizzler showed his usual postmodernist wit by complaining about the noise and disinformation being spread by the few million people who want the bill abandoned: "people are saying things that are literally not true", whereas Daveybloke's promise not to impose any chaotic top-down reorganisations on the NHS was almost literally true when he said it, or very nearly.