He’s got to climb over the backs of a million health

He’s got to climb over the backs of a million health workers to get to the door of Number Ten. How will he escape the storm of criticism in ten years’ time when it’s clear his grand, over-arching, 10-year strategy to reduce health inequalities has failed? By being Home Secretary.Jenny Tonge made a good point. Your brain has fallen out, I’ll wait while you put it back in.Mr Milburn had been saying that health inequalities had widened over the past 50 years and to prove it, a boy born in Manchester will live ten years less than a boy born in Dorset.”Isn’t he being stupid?” Mrs Tonge asked the House – cries of “woo!” She told us that these morbid statistics are less to do with health care and more the result of housing, education and diet – and the prowling packs of homicidal 12-year-old cannibals that Manchester is so known for.Mr Milburn is not being stupid however, but cunning. His rhetoric is the forewarning of a massive transfer of public funding from hospitals in the south to hospitals in the north, a sectarian power shift dressed up as pursuit of equality.Dr Fox did perfectly well, countering each of Mr Milburn’s rosy statistics with its nasty opposite. He also produced a critique of the practice of Foundation Hospitals.Bear with me. To the House, it seems, Minister Milburn talks about patient choice and declares the money will follow the patient.

At the same time, however, he tells the chief executives of Primary Care Trusts they’ll have five to seven-year bulk contracts, whether patients come to them or not.You’re wilting, be honest. You only have to believe that the two statements are wholly and totally incompatible.The Tories also managed to point out that there’s been a 10 per cent increase in funding already with only 1 per cent increase in outcomes. Money can’t buy you love, or public health care, it seems.simoncarr75 hotmail
More from Simon Carr. The reappearance of Osama bin Laden has, at least, answered one question: why the dramatic increase in communications traffic among al-Qa’ida ranks, which in turn has set off Tony Blair’s warning earlier this week that “something big is about to happen”? The text of Bin Laden’s message has also confirmed why the British, in particular, have become so nervous. Contained in it is the clear warning that it will be a European country that will be targeted as a “punishment” for supporting America. Terrified of being blamed for not having acted on warnings, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have resorted to generalised warnings that do nothing to tell the public what to do but everything to enable ministers to cover their backs come the next terrorist outrage.”Thank God this lot weren’t in charge in the last war,” as a retired senior civil servant put it this week. “They’d have had the entire populations of the cities streaming out to the countryside, the factories unable to work and the tubes and trains all shut down for fear of an air attack.”The comparison is not entirely fanciful.

It was not that the general population weren’t nervous of air raids in the war, nor that they did not have every reason to be. Indeed, Winston Churchill (rather distrustfully I’ve always thought) had teams going out to give regular reports on civilian morale. They did not bring back heroic answers.Most people feared for their lives and took a dim view of toffs and politicians whom they thought (rightly to some extent) were looking after themselves rather better than their poorer fellow citizens. Evacuating children was unpopular and rationing was approached with anything but a spirit of fair play. But in the end the best approach was felt to be one of a stolid determination that life should go on as normally as possible, coupled with a peppering of humour.Compare that with today, when Mr Blair and George Bush have actually increased the air of unease by talking of generalised threats and intelligence traffic without detailing what it amounts to. Worse, they have tried to give the impression that they are doing something by upping the ante on the entirely unrelated issue of Iraq, and they have globalised fears by giving credence to the idea that the explosions in Bali and Moscow are all outpourings of a single worldwide campaign.We don’t know that.

We don’t know how strong al-Qa’ida is, or indeed, how it is really run now. We don’t even know for certain that Bin Laden, should he be alive (which we should probably assume he is), is in charge or capable of running a worldwide terror network.What we do know is that Bin Laden would very much like to create an air of general fear in the West and that he would like to wrap up every local Muslim dissatisfaction in a general conflict between Islam and the West. He would also want America and Britain to invade Iraq and Israel to continue ever more violent “incursions” into Palestinian territory in order to prove his point.He doesn’t have to try too hard, the way we’re behaving. It is astonishing that, having cornered Saddam Hussein and forced him to give in to a ferocious UN resolution, both Washington and London are saying that they don’t believe him and that the war plans are still on, for all the world giving the impression that the object is forced regime change whatever he does.