A Jolly Good Wheeze

British expendables are being detrimented in record numbers by increasingly severe and increasingly prevalent asthma, and this in the very midst of such brilliant incumbencies as those of Owen Patterson, Andrea Leadsom, Michael Gove and Jeremy C Hunt. Over the past decade, the annual number of deaths from asthma has risen by more than twenty-five per cent, despite the improving effects of all that talk about leading the world, to say nothing of all those efficiency savings at the NHS. Indeed, mere experts are already seeking to pin the blame on a combination of deteriorating public healthcare and Britain's proudly illegal levels of air pollution. Doubtless they hope thereby to resurrect the long-discredited, borderline-antisemitic idea that the Government bears some sort of responsibility for the health of the country's citizens, and that deserving and undeserving alike should be entitled to endless, economically unsustainable non-contributory privileges of respiration.