Quote of the day
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“I believe there is a demand, now, for [ID] cards – and as I go round the country I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don’t want to wait that long.”
- Jacqui Smith, who would evidently prefer to rely on ridiculous anecdotes than any hard evidence to show support for ID cards (it’s not difficult to work out why)
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Yeah right! I have yet to meet one person that would agree with here. She must truly believe the British public is naive.
Wow.Demand for them must be high.
Where do I pre order. Maybe Jaqui can do a midnight opening like HMV do for a new album or Game did for Gears of War.
Actually, maybe I can use this ID card on my XBox.
That would be terrific.. I could log on to XBox live. Well I could anyway..But hey! I’d have a card!
No, I can’t wait any longer.I’m off to queue up at the local Tesco’s to get my dabs done and sent them off to the government.
It was a truly ridiculous statement. Like Bill said yesterday in the comments for my Hazel Blears post, this was clearly a case of burying bad news in between Obama and the interest rate cut. Suggesting that ID cards are either in demand or on schedule is laughable.
“Maybe Jaqui can do a midnight opening like HMV do for a new album or Game did for Gears of War.”
I can’t cope with two midnight openings! Not with the expansion to World of Warcraft coming out next week…
It seems Labour have offered talks to the PCS too – Monday’s strike action has just been called off as a result.
Capitalising on the Glenrothes result?
I’m reminded of Ken Livingstone, who once claimed people kept coming up to him to tell him what a great job Ian Blair was doing.
Au contraire, the polls showing support for ID cards & 42 days are being undermined as people’s minds are changed by visible evidence of the failure of overbearing state power.
The realisation is that the government should define its basic competences & do them well with the minimum of idiocy.
Glenrothes was more a defeat for the SNP than a victory for New Labour. They are going too far & will get their comeuppance.
I dunno about anyone else but I’m praying (well insofar as an atheist can pray!) that Gorgon Broon is dumb enough to heed the cries for a snap election!
My preferred day would be the same day as the Euro elections.
Hah, mine would be any time soon, tbh!
Just to speak of the shambolic consequences of this govt for a minute, while clambering on to my pet hobbyhorse, I have MS and am interested in the NHS top-up payments. Accordingly I rang WPA today who are, at present, the only insurance company with a NHS top-up policy available.
Now obviously I have a pre-existing condition (Multiple Sclerosis) and at present the NHS pays for the frontline treatments for it (Beta Interferon – aka Rebif – or Glatiramer Acetate) but there are things on the 5-10 year horizon that may prove harder to get hold of such as the cybernetic wi-fi CNS bionic recently used to allow a paralysed monkey to move its arms by bypassing damaged axons in the brain/spinal column or the further fetched genetically-tailored stem-cell packages. Oddly enough the insurance boys, when the woke up to the fact I’d said ‘pre-existing’ 5 times on the phone, they said they couldn’t cover me for MS.
Helpful. They also said that with regards to cancer, they couldn’t cover me if I or any member of my family (to any degree of relation) had ever had cancer (now bear in mind that MS is a 1:750 condition in England, 1:500 in Scotland and Cancer is 1:3 in the Western Hemisphere…). Where it got novel was when I argues that I didn’t want them to insure me against MS, as that would be silly, I wanted insurance against the development of medical treatments for the condition that the NHS could/would not provide. That, they said, they’d have to think about.
What does this have to do with the Govt? Well, nothing, insofar as allowing top up treatments simply means that if I have insurance or money I need not die just because someone else can afford a treatment and the NHS won’t do it BUT it raises all kinds of novel questions about pre-existing conditions and insuring against unpredictable scientific advances. I’d like the government to settle this as it would be cheaper than doing it through the courts (and quicker, when medically time can be of the essence!) but I am distrustful of how this ideologically perverse nuLab bunch could treat this issue and equally worry about how slack the pro-business Conservatives may be. It doesn’t help that MS is a disease on the frontiers of biological, chemical and physical science, let alone what we understand as medicine today. I’m almost resorting to lobbying the MS Society to investigate the issue!
The overall point is that while I am completely in favour of NHS top-ups, something will need to be addressed with regards to long term chronic conditions and the pace of scientific advance compared to the pace of NICE approval and NHS funding. MS is just one condition. Rheumatoid Arthritis (another auto-immune complaint) is much more common but because of the nature of the disease is in the same boat as are may other illnesses…