folio

“It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?” — Jo Moore, advisor to Transport, Local Government and Regions Secretary Stephen Byers, 11 September 2001.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I’m a realist. What’s the correlation between domestic political turmoil and populist scaremongering? I don’t know about you, but when its a choice between getting angry about a piece of clothing worn by some women and the fate of the National Health Service, I know which one is my priority. In case it had escaped you, one of the many consequences of the latest shake up of the NHS has been the loss of huge numbers of staff and the drift of some of the most talented over to private health providers. Answering questions about NHS redundancies today, our Prime Minister told us that it would be a matter of a few hundred. That may be the literalist answer, but in my NHS trust, we are losing staff every day, as they move on tired of the uncertainty and worried about paying that mortgage, those children’s university fees and earning than pension. The Opposition and campaigners estimate a figure closer to 20,000. Across the country we are already seeing hospital closures. And yet, we’re all supposed to be getting angry about the niqab, falling down on one side of the argument or the other. I’d be interested in somebody mapping the Government’s Muslim agenda against other political issues of the day. Take a look back through the archives. See which stories got displaced by “Muslim Rage”. I wonder if there is a trend. Let me know.