Quote of the day
“He does have some quite eccentric views about some things”
- David Cameron on Dan Hannan, as the ’socialised healthcare’ debate rolls on. Andy Burnham, John Prescott and Peter Mandelson have all attacked David Cameron today on the issue, forcing him to break from his summer holiday to speak to the media and try to calm the situation down. (full story HERE)
That’s as close as we’ll ever get to a Party leader turning round to say ‘Aw, bless his cotton socks but he’s messed his diaper again, the wee tyke!’…
I suspect Cameron wanted to say something a bit stronger than that, Shaun.
Even worse, Hannan has been accused of being “unpatriotic”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8200817.stm
“Unpatriotic” is farcical when it comes from a partisan domestic poltical source. It would mean, ultimately that anyone not voting Labour is unpatriotic and so on which leads to one party state mayhem. Hannan may have egged it up a bit for his US audience but his core points about queuing and waiting times will strike a chord with anyone who’s core interaction with the NHS isn’t Casualty on a Friday night or via the BBC.
Well, one way of looking at this hullabaloo is that it’s the equivalent of a politician saying “homosexuals should be protected by law, and given the right to marry one another”, in the 1960s. Nobody would be interested in a sober discussion of the issue; the reaction would have been entirely visceral and characterised by moral condemnation. Same thing.
@Ian B
Not really. Whether you agree with them or not it is fact that a significant number of people have a moral basis for their beliefs on homosexuality.
Allocation of taxpayer resources to different uses is a political debate not a moral one.
@Charles
The point I was hamfistedly trying to make was that this political issue is treated as a moral issue.