Political madness in the extreme

GOING into hospital used to just mean having your temperature taken (they stick those thermometers into some dark and dubious places) and answering 20 personal questions about your habits and lifestyle.

But now staff will be putting you under intense scrutiny — and not only to see if you are really ill, drunk, unconscious through drugs or just looking for somewhere to sit down out of the rain until your taxi turns up.

No, our coalition government (coagulation I prefer to call it as it has exposed many of its members to be clots) has come up with a brilliant new strategy — today’s special offer — called Prevent which wants doctors and nurses to spot whether you are an extremist (of the Islamic rather than the Manchester United kind, I presume).

Quite how they will do this is hard to tell. Is there an extremist rash? Can you spot extremism with an X-ray? Does it make you cough or just grow a beard and wear a mask?

And is a key element of the Prevent strategy the introduction of an extremism-ectomy whereby they can remove extremism in the same way as they remove tonsils, piles and genital warts?

Home Secretary Theresa May, who is an extremist when it comes to big heels, says that the huge number of people who come into contact with medical professionals means that the health sector is “critical” to the Prevent strategy.

However, no mention is made, surprise, surprise, of Bilal Abdullah, an Iraqi junior doctor (NHS of course) jailed for planting car bombs at a night club in London and driving a burning jeep into Glasgow airport. Clearly Dr Abdullah’s NHS colleagues did not spot any signs or symptoms of his extremism. Hopefully they were better at diagnosing swine flu, mad-cow disease or a broken ankle.

Will this ability to diagnose terrorism become part of the latest model (currently we are up to about version 128) of transforming the NHS, maybe by turning the army of clipboard-carriers and calculator-punchers who far outnumber those in hospital with medical knowledge, into extremist spotters? That might, of course, be something worthwhile and is, therefore, unlikely to happen.

So, if you know an extremist, report him or her to the nearest hospital. Once they get those rubber gloves on, they can make anybody admit to just about anything.

IT will come as no surprise to those of you who have discovered a little yellow present stuck under a windscreen wiper of your car that Oldham’s industrious traffic wardens handed out almost 30,000 little presents last year.
As a beneficiary of the wardens’ present-giving largesse on several occasions (I am beginning to think that I have my own warden who follows me about the borough) I have contributed generously to the £800,000-plus which parking fines have added to the council coffers.

I feel sure that I have at least bought four or five of the little L-plate carrying scooters that scurry about the borough’s side streets and alleyways as the wardens look to hit the parking-ticket targets which, of course, they don’t have.

Do the L-plates signal that the wardens are indeed all learner drivers or does the L stand for something else? Perhaps the Chronicle should run a competition with the prize of a promise to pay for two parking transgressions to the sender of the best L word.

Residents of the street where I live have asked for (begged is a better description) a residents’-only parking scheme, for which we would pay, but have been turned down. Looking at the money parking fines make for the council it is not difficult to see why. The rush for revenue beats residents’ wishes every time.

FINAL WORD: The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams (no relation, I am pleased to say) has attacked the Government on the grounds that no one voted for its policies. Dr Williams seems to forget that while we all had a vote on who should rule us (for better or worse as it turns out) no one voted for him to be head of a once great religious institution. And shouldn’t he get the crumbling house that is now the Church of England for which he is responsible in order before poking his whiskered head above the parapet?