Health Planning

While overstretched services and danger to patients constitute a necessary and meritorious corollary of fiscal restraint, efficiency savings and controlling inflation, they attain a subtly different order of convenience when they occur as the result of strike action. Comfortably pursuing their now thoroughly accessible dream of being the administration that does for the hated NHS what the sainted Thatcher did for the mining communities, Fishy Rishi and his chums are sitting back, rubbing the hands whose well-manicured applause should be enough for anyone to live on, and waiting for deaths, injuries, chronic pain and other plebeian discomforts to be splurged across the right-wing (viz. the British) media. Meanwhile, conscious of the advantage in demonstrating foresight, and no doubt vaguely aware of the need to avoid excessive gloating in public, one hapless ministerial flunkey was extruded to warn the common folk against contact sports, running on ice, and other such vulgar rough-housing.