Englishman of the Week

David Starkey may remain the Greatest Living Englishman, but this week's inaugural Englishman of the Week prize must surely go to a former heroin addict, Lord Benjamin Mancroft, the Tory peer who whispered the truth that dare not speak its name; to whit, that his local government hospital is a cesspit of filth, bad management, and poor care, drowning in a culture of irresponsibility.

I may never have been in the Bath hospital in question, but I can say from personal experience that the last two hospitals it has been my misfortune to visit, were right up there in the 'dried blood round the toilet bowl' stakes, along with the inane endless chattering at the nursing stations keeping everyone (ill people!) awake all night.

Of course, there is no solution to this gigantic expensive mess, that lies within the ambit of government control, and I bear no desperate grudge against individual health care staff. If you're going to run an organisation for sixty years without economic calculation, we're actually lucky the National Health Service is still as good as it is. Thankfully, there remains a vestigial culture of professionalism, and in life and death situations even the chippiest marxoid drone can still usually find it within themselves to do the right thing by pulling their finger out.

However, the only true solution is to privatize the whole shooting match from top to bottom, including the green field removal of all government laws 'regulating' health provision. Within five to ten years we would then have a health system which really would become the envy of the world. Is it going to happen? Not until we have removed every other plank of socialism in this benighted country first, from the BBC down to the six million non-job parasites we currently tolerate. But this nettlish option of privatising the NHS will continue to exist as the elephant in the room. Maybe one day we will actually be brave enough to notice it and then grasp it. Or maybe one day we will all be dead from multiply-resistant Novovirus infections.

Perhaps this is what the socialist econmentalists want? To empty the planet of the viroid human species polluting the biosphere, thus freeing it up for yet more noxious bacteria? Sometimes I wonder.