Pillars of society are crumbling – teachers, doctors, police… none are what they were
THE doctor will sneer at you now!
“In the same way that Brexit enabled racists,” scoffs Mike Henley, NHS surgeon and cheerleader for strike action by doctors, “Tory leadership contenders falling over themselves to wage war on woke is enabling another section of pond life.”
Henley is deputy chairman of the British Medical Association’s Consultants Committee and symptomatic of all that has gone wrong with his profession.
Consultants are on an average salary of £128,000 a year, according to the Department for Health and Social Care.
But next month they are walking out for 48 hours, demanding a “credible” pay rise after claiming incomes have fallen by 35 per cent in 15 years.
If they receive that kind of raise then many would be paid more than the Prime Minister.
The BMA has advised its members that they are free to carry out private work on strike days.
So the striking doctor WILL see you now — as long as you have private medical insurance or big bucks. Kerching, comrade.
And politically motivated Mike has the front to call the Tories pond life.
There is no other profession where you can be educated by the taxpayer then work in some lucrative side hustle while neglecting the very people who paid for your training.
Some gratitude would be appropriate from the likes of Mike.
But he represents a broader malaise beyond his brazen anti-Tory Corbynista creed.
There was a time when someone like Henley — a Derby-based NHS surgeon — would have commanded automatic respect in society.
But it feels as if all the old pillars of our society are crumbling away.
Doctors. Teachers. The police. None of them are anything like what they used to be, are they?
Woke madness in our schools enables teachers to indulge deluded students who insist that they are, er, pussycats.
The police are plagued by hideous crimes committed by serving police officers.
It sickens the soul to think that Wayne Couzens used his warrant card and handcuffs to kidnap, rape and murder Sarah Everard.
And yet when the green goons of Just Stop Oil disrupt our national life, clueless cops are as timid as a wee church mouse.
During the Ashes Test at Lord’s, it took England wicket keeper Jonny Bairstow to show the bewildered Old Bill what they should be doing.
Of all the professions that we traditionally looked up to, only the Armed Forces still retain our trust and respect.
But the Army has seen troop numbers fall from 97,000 to 76,000 over the past ten years and many veterans judge that if Argentina invaded the Falklands today, we would be incapable of taking them back.
All of our old certainties have now faded.
Teachers whose heads are full of woke rubbish can’t educate our children.
Cops too witless to enforce the law can’t protect us.
And politically motivated doctors bent on bringing down a democratically elected Government are no use to the 7.4million patients — a record — waiting to start hospital treatment.
The 24,000 hospital consultants planning to strike on July 20 and 21 have timed their industrial action to begin two days after junior doctors complete a five- day walkout.
“What you could have is a situation where junior doctors, consultants, specialists, speciality doctors and GPs are all in dispute with the Government during the run-up to a general election,” the BMA’s Professor Philip Banfield gloats to The Guardian. “That is what we are planning for.”
What about the sick who can’t afford to go private?
Perhaps they should consider this strike action their punishment for voting Tory — or just for being poor.
Such a crazy Kari on
KARI-ANN MOLLER, 75, has lived in the UK since she was a baby but carries a Norwegian passport.
Even if the name is not familiar, music fans will know the face, for Kari-Ann was the cover girl on the first Roxy Music LP, the greatest record cover of all time.
She was stopped at Bristol airport in March and told that, post-Brexit, she had three months to apply for EU settled status.
Why? Norway is not a member of the EU. In two referendums, in 1972 and 1994, the Norwegians voted to keep Brussels at bay.
Kari-Ann – married for more than 40 years to Chris Jagger, kid brother of Mick – should be welcome in the country that she has always called home.
Kari-Ann is a national treasure. She should be receiving awards at Buckingham Palace, not being threatened with deportation.
Nerds bout is so duff
WE live in a world where the fights that should be happening – Oleksandr Usyk v Tyson Fury, Tyson Fury v Anthony Joshua, Anthony Joshua v Deontay Wilder – never actually come to pass.
Instead, we get Elon Musk v Mark Zuckerberg.
If they were professional fighters, then Musk (6ft 1in) would not be allowed to share a ring with his Facebook-owning rival Zuckerberg (5ft 7in).
As they are billionaire tech titans, they may actually end up having their much-mooted cage fight.
Despite his bookish demeanour, my money is on Zuckerberg, a fitness fanatic who competes in martial arts tournaments.
But what a shame that 2023’s big fight is between a couple of middle-aged nerds who should be sitting on their yachts.
Waste of our money
THE Home Office confesses that it could cost up to £169,000 for every illegal immigrant to be sent to Rwanda.
“Money well spent,” insists the Government.
It does not sound to me like money well spent.
Look, the Government is doing its best to solve what is an intractable problem.
But they are barking up the wrong third country.
Why do we persist with a scheme that common sense tells us is doomed to abject failure?
Even if the Rwanda migrant plan ever makes it past the courts – unlikely, as on Thursday campaigners and asylum seekers won a Court of Appeal challenge against the Government’s plans – £169,000 to send ONE illegal immigrant to Rwanda is a STARK RAVING MAD waste of taxpayers’ money.
How much to send them 25 miles back to France?
What a shower
THE theatre is getting quite rough.
A drunken woman was kicked out of a performance of Dirty Dancing after urinating in a stairwell.
“We heard dripping,” reported one theatre lover. “Then saw her squatting, legs akimbo, on the cream carpet.”
Gawd! And I remember when they complained about people singing along during the show.
George, Prince, Jacko and now, please not, Madge
THE great icons of the Eighties have not made old bones.
It is astonishing how many we lost too soon. George Michael, dead at 53.
Michael Jackson, gone at 50. Prince, just 57.
Now the last-remaining Eighties icon, Madonna, has been rushed to intensive care with a bacterial infection – though she is said to be back home.
Get well, Madge. You are the last of the line.