We Didn't Join the Army to Kill People

Some of the more penetrable crania in the coalition are beginning to absorb the unfortunate fact that not everything which goes wrong in the NHS can be blamed on the NHS. A couple of Conservatives, Sarah Wollaston (a former GP who evidently prefers cutting budgets to managing them) and Stephen Dorrell (a bland ministerial flunkey from the interregnum which followed the martyrdom of the sainted Thatcher), have issued a rather mystifying statement that the NHS cannot continue to function under present policies. They have been joined by Paul Burstow, a Deputy Conservative who helped them vote through Twizzler Lansley's anti-NHS bill. Somehow or other, despite Lansley's assault and various kicks in the groin from Jeremy C Hunt, the three of them reckon that the NHS is on course to collapse during the course of the next parliament; Dorrell has even expressed qualms at the idea that the sick and vulnerable should pay for the rich and greedy except during a recession. The substance of all this is of course unexceptionable; but it does raise the question of who these people think they are working for. If they don't want the NHS to be destroyed or the sick and vulnerable to suffer then, like the PFI Party's Andy Burnham, they are in the wrong organisation.