Our Family Values

Despite fourteen years' stewardship of the nation's health by the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat accomplices, the rate of women dying during or soon after pregnancy has risen by a fifth. Not even the omnipresent eagerness of our lords and masters to breed more Britons for soldiering and shelf-stacking has brought about any obvious concern for the well-being of the nation's incubators and brood mares, despite a pledge by a sometime minister for medic-bashing to halve maternal deaths by 2030. Similarly, despite the well-known British absence of institutional racism, death rates were higher among black and Asian women; and despite the infallible British instinct for fair play and helping the underdog, those in the poorest areas were twice as likely to die as those living among the real people. Despite everything, there still remain some who profess to be shocked.