Published: Thursday, 19th June, 2008 09:30
42-day windfall
By Maurice O'Brien
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Maurice O'Brien
THE north of Ireland suddenly finds a billion quid and loose change that has been sitting long-forgotten in some mystery hidey hole.
At roughly the same time the lefty dinosaur tendency discovers Gordon Brown’s hearing reaches as far as the wilderness, because out of the blue he’s opposed to sanctions against Cuba, that surviving bastion of hardline Communism just across the electric fence from Guantanamo Bay.
Then health minister Alan Johnson decides to review the pernicious policy of penalising patients for buying so called 'top-up’ drugs, deemed too expensive by the NHS, by denying them subsequent free treatment for cancer and other critical illnesses.
For months ministers had steadfastly defended this stance in the interests of not creating a two-tier health service. Now that all may, of course, be pure coincidence and nothing whatever to do with the way the Government was at sixes and sevens over its 42-day bill.
But it might be worth viewing any other Damascene policy changes over the coming weeks with the greatest suspicion.
What a shame our own Martin Salter’s not a Labour rebel. Just think how many Post Offices we might have managed to keep open.
- THERE’S a simple solution if David Davis can’t attract any opposition in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election; he must persuade the New Tories to put up a candidate. That’s what it’s really about isn’t it?
- YOU might have been surprised to learn European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso wasn’t exactly being straight with us when he declared there was “no Plan B” if Ireland voted down the Lisbon Treaty.
What Comrade Jose really meant was that he and his cronies would be forging ahead with Plan A regardless. After all, since the French and Dutch had the temerity to reject the original Constitution, the commissars have diligently toiled away at “harmonising” all sorts of stuff they didn’t want to worry us with. You know, legal, military, judicial, financial, that kind of trivia. How we used to chuckle knowingly when evil dictatorships in East Germany, Albania and North Korea proclaimed themselves democratic people’s republics. At least their peoples knew 'democratic’ elections were predestined to have a Mugabe-style outcome.
It’s either arrogance, utter contempt, or ignorance of the meaning of some part of the word 'no’, to believe 862,415 Irish votes against the Lisbon Treaty are anything less than the tip of an anti-federalist iceberg.
Instead of patronisingly fostering the image of the Irish as snivelling ingrates, the Barrosista might try reflecting that decades of largesse from Brussels have been more than offset by the 2.5 billion euro the EU sucks annually from Ireland’s coastal waters. Even today French and Spanish trawlers still take 85% of the catch from beneath those fished-out waves.
A right cod, you might say.
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Leader: Honourable honours