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What about an MRSA debate?
WITH a sense of his great office defence minister John Reid stressed yesterday (Wednesday) in the Commons that any announcement of the deployment of troops to Afghanistan would have to go before parliament because it was a life and death issue affecting soldiers.
Yet, rarely is there a debate in the Commons about the hospital bug, MRSA, that kills about 5,000 men, women and children a year – a figure that in one year alone exceeds the number of soldiers killed in the past 50 years.
This is not to diminish the seriousness of troop deployment. But, tragically, Britain is at the bottom of the league for MRSA rates in Europe, even behind poorer countries like Estonia and Bulgaria!
Much of this is lacking in Britain where the old style spick and span ward, dominated by a matron, is a thing of the past, and cleaning is carried out by private firms who cut corners.
Schools folly
A COALITION of the willing is building up in the Commons among the usual leftish suspects, centre MPs like Holborn MP Frank Dobson and the former Tony Blair acolyte Fiona Millar, a one time Downing Street advisor. And rooting for them is Fiona’s husband Alastair Campbell, once considered to be Blair’s Svengali.
They are circling the wagons against Blair’s last stand before his retirement – a new Education Bill thought to prise schools away from accountable local authorities and place them, effectively, in private hands. The end of comprehensives is nigh, declaim Blair’s opponents.
While education secretary Ruth Kelly – who has been unfairly pilloried by the tabloids – leads the charge for Blair, the PM himself is becoming dangerously detached from his own party. He said: “I speak as a parent first, and a politician second.” But he could have said ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’. Or, I am right, my party is wrong.
If a man can be judged by his friends, what judgment can be made for Blair, who, on education, is being supported by Rupert Murdoch, Thatcherite MPs and their leader David Cameron!
While the politicians squabble, the only losers are parents, teachers and children, and municipal authorities whose powers over their localities are being eroded to the point where they could end up as commissioners of contracts for private companies. |
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