Public Health for the Deserving

Well, here's a thing: the Minister for Health and News Corporation has been allocating more money to rich areas than poor ones, and this despite having promised to do the exact opposite. Imagine that. When it comes to the fight against smoking and obesity, Kenneth Clarke's Cabinet colleague has favoured boroughs such as Kensington, Chelsea and the City, where life expectancy is among the highest in the country, at the expense of places like Liverpool, Manchester and Waltham Forest, which are full of proles and northerners. With superb Bullingdon Club reasoning, the allocations are based on what each area already spends on public health programmes, so that the councils which have least will get the smallest grants. Although one hesitates to accuse Jeremy C Hunt of anything so non-pondlife as actual calculation, the results are likely to be favourable, since the aforementioned proles and northerners will be all the more opportunified to die early. The savings on pensions should be considerable, to say nothing of the additional strain on the hated NHS while the undesirables are making their way out.