Whenever I hear the word “consultation” I smell a rat.
In the mouths of politicians, this weasel word means: “We are going to do something really nasty. But first we’ll ask a few people if it’s OK – and then go ahead anyway.”
That’s the truth behind the Government’s promise to consult on raising the free NHS prescription age from 60 to 66. It’s a sham.
Health minister Lord Bethell (more on this specimen in a minute) has already calculated that his “tax on the sick” will claw back £300million from patients by 2026/27.
The hit will apply to millions of old folk in England, where charges have just gone up to £9.35 per item. Six out of 10 of all free scripts go to patients over 60.
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Pharmacists say they see people every day who are unable to afford all the medicines their doctors prescribe.
Free prescriptions for women over 60 were introduced by Labour in 1974, and for men in 1995. It is inexcusable to withdraw this exemption for the elderly as they struggle to recover from the pandemic.
Who is this Lord Bethell, medicine-snatcher? An old Harrovian hereditary peer who once ran a nightclub, he’s a big pal of disgraced ex-Health Secretary Matt Hancock, whose absurd 2019 bid to become Tory leader he chaired and financed to the tune of £5,000.
Milord James is currently under investigation by the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards for sponsoring a Westminster security pass for Gina Coladangelo, lobbyist lover of Hancock.
He also faced calls for his dismissal for using private emails for official business, something which No 10 first denied and then admitted.
To my mind, he’s unfit for public office, much less for the momentous task of revitalising the NHS as it emerges, exhausted, from the Covid nightmare.
Robbing oldies won’t do the job.
And nor will he.
Write, call or email your MP, I urge you, to stop this tax on the sick in its tracks.
Spiteful dig at miners
They closed the pits, sacked the men and trashed the mining communities.
So you’d think the Tories had finally got revenge for losing the 1974 election over a mishandled coal strike.
But no. The pitmen may be old, and sick with hideous industrial diseases, but they have one last asset: their pensions.
In a final act of spite, the government snubbed a call from MPs to put right a “historic injustice” that confiscates half the scheme’s annual profit for the Treasury. The all-party Commons Business Committee proposed a cash transfer to lift the average pension by £14 to £84 a week – scarcely a king’s ransom.
Ministers rejected the appeal. Labour voters in mining consituencies who backed Johnson should remember next time whose side the Tories are really on.
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Denmark won. No, not the football, but the competition to create the world’s tallest sandcastle. Fashionably decorated with coronavirus balls and hypodermic needles, it stands 69ft 4in high and took 30 sculptors and 4,860 tons of sand to build.
It will stay in place at Blokhus, a popular beach village, until the winter.
Unless it rains on their parade, like Wembley.
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“The new statue of Princess Diana is a remarkable likeness,” observes Mrs R, “...of Theresa May.”
