Thursday 14 February 2013

The real scandal of today isn't about horses...

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Think for a minute of the hours dedicated to picking over the carcass of the horseburger scandal. Look at how every politician - left, right, loony and sane - has had a say on the matter. The worst example being the ghastly metroliberal love in between Mary Creagh and Nicky Campbell on Five Live yesterday morning - a veritable festival of bias, platitude and ill-informed judgement.

Don't get me wrong. It's a major failing of our food safety system (wait for the evidence of corruption - there's some of that involved) and the responsibility lies with retailers to ensure that they're supplying what they say they're supplying. However, no-one has died or been made ill and, since horse protein has the same nutritional value as beef protein, no-one is likely to die. It needs sorting and, so long as government's doesn't get involved (especially the EU with its corrupt entourage of special pleading and corporate interest), it will be sorted. Those big, rich retailers won't want to be caught out again.

However, while thousands of hours are spent about horses cropping up in the beef lasagne, there isn't the same attention to this:

The public inquiry was ordered after a separate report revealed that between 400 and 1,200 more people died than expected at Stafford Hospital over a four year period between 2005 and 2009.

Patients were left for hours sitting in their own faeces, food and drink was left out of reach and hygiene was so poor that relatives had to clean toilets themselves.

Where are the special Newsnight reports, the queue of politicians calling for heads on poles, the in-depth Guardian reportsand the calls for "something to be done"? Why aren't the politicians responsible for this system dragged kicking and screaming into the studio to account for how they managed to create a system so useless that it resulted in over a thousand deaths at one hospital and untold numbers at dozens of other hospitals?

Why is no-one - no think tank chap or academic - popping up on the telly or the radio saying that the NHS has failed and continues to fail ordinary folk? And why is no-one asking whether there's a better system - one that doesn't kill thousands of people with bureaucracy?

And finally, no-one asks how those "caring" nurses and doctors walked past patients starving, thirsty and lying in their own waste - and did nothing.

Forget about the horsemeat - this is the real scandal.

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2 comments:

Billy Bowden said...

Just wait till they find out what is in kebabs...... http://kebabtime.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/what-ingredients-in-uk-burger.html

Anonymous said...

Couldn't agree more. My sister died in a filthy 'rehabilitation unit' (I imagine the irony was entirely lost on anyone who worked there - it was a geriatric unit where nobody appeared to give a damn about the patients). HMG wants to 'nudge' me into a healthy lifestyle? Hell, I've no wish to end up in the 'caring' hands of the NHS or a care home. Anyone who believes that Government is paternalistic is mad. Those in power seem to have abandoned the pretence that they serve the people, instead putting in place provisions of spin to the detriment of those they are supposed to serve.

Jay