The Internet Association for Tree Hugging, Badger Loving, NHS Saving, Petition Signing and Other Worthy Causes Too Numerous To Mention, more generally known as 38 Degrees, has, at great expense, assisted a clutch of learned friends with their mortgage payments. In return, the learned friends have produced an opinion.
A few months back, Dr Death opened his coffin, exhaled a similar set of legal opinions, and retired, the silk-lined lid closing silently behind him. He has since remained as silent as a stiff on the matter.
In both cases, Dr No believes the seekers of the legal opinions have committed an error, perhaps even grave enough to put in some jeopardy the ultimate aim, that of bringing about the withdrawal of the Health and Social Care Bill. He believes 38 Degrees’ error to be especially unfortunate, occurring as it does only days before the Bill’s third reading.
In a word: revalidation.
Dr No is not a hoodie; nor, so far as he knows are any of his friends, or even his friends’ children. He moves in the rarefied climate of relative genteeldom that is upper middle class Britain. Most of the sharks he knows wear suits, and work in the City, or the local private hospital; and the robber barons he knows wear wellies and tweeds. Those times in the past when his medical career has taken him into the sink estates and dumping ghettoes – he recalls once being advised to ‘put his doctor’s bag first through the door’, so that the waiting Rottweiler bit it, not him – have been brief; and despite the portent of his colleague, he conducted his practice in a spirit of Croninian naivety. He came not to judge his patients, but to treat them.
Press News: For Immediate Release
Notwithstanding their superficially opposed raisons d’être, the armed forces, also known as ‘the Services’, and the National Health Service, are remarkably similar. Both are huge and complex organisations, charged with providing services vital to our well-being. Yet, for some reason or other, the NHS in England is run on market principles, making use of the so-called purchaser provider split. The armed services have no such split.