DAILY MAIL COMMENT: If Tories are wise, they will listen hard to Wes
DAILY MAIL COMMENT: If Tories are wise, they will listen hard to Wes
Wes Streeting, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, is an unusual voice in his party.
Perhaps because he has actually fought his way into high politics from a genuinely unprivileged background, he can see what so many of his Islington-based, entitled colleagues cannot.
A working-class child of a single mother, who grew up in a council house but made his way to Cambridge University, he is much more like the major Labour figures of the 1940s than those of today, and closer to the ground.
He has experienced the NHS at its most basic and – thanks to a recent brush with cancer – at its superb best.
Mr Streeting, interviewed in The Mail on Sunday today, is without illusions on the NHS, but also free of prejudice.
Mr Streeting, interviewed in The Mail on Sunday today, is without illusions on the NHS, but also free of prejudice
His belief that the service cannot be preserved forever as it is, and that it must make a huge effort to promote healthy lifestyles and healthy diets, is much to his credit.
So it is a pity that he is in the Labour Party, for, as the interview also shows, Mr Streeting will not condemn his leader’s descent into nasty, gutter politics.
And he still defends the unsustainable Blairite splurge on the NHS that plainly failed to find a permanent solution to its problems.
Britain clearly needs politicians of Mr Streeting’s background, experience and breadth at the top.
It is a pity that this particular political figure is in the wrong party. For the country should not have to pay the price of Labour’s class-war, ultra-woke policies to get the benefit of such experience.
There is in fact no reason at all why the modern Tory Party could not listen hard to Mr Streeting, and implement his solutions itself. In fact it would be wise to do so.
Undoubtedly it was only because The Mail on Sunday infiltrated an animal activist group planning to sabotage the Grand National that the authorities were prepared and able to allow ‘the People’s Race’ to go ahead.
Let’s hope yesterday’s success is the first victory in society’s war against all those virtue-signalling anarchists who are wreaking chaos on the lives of millions of law-abiding people.
The Mail on Sunday revealed the plans of an animal rights activist group to prevent the main steeplechase at the Grand National
Derek Fox on Corach Rambler clears the Chair fence to win the Grand National horse race at Aintree on Saturday afternoon
Is there no end to the techno nightmare?
Next week, the misguided spread of ill-named ‘smart motorways’ will at last come to an end, though as yet we have no idea when or whether the existing ones will be restored to normality.
The Transport Department still claims to be researching the issue, and is spending millions on technology that will supposedly make these terrifying highways safer.
The Roads Minister, Richard Holden, is still speaking of ‘pausing’ the scheme, not of abolishing it.
Perhaps his department’s officials, insulated from public anger, wrongly hope that this is a storm that will pass.
For much of Whitehall has fallen in love with the supposed miracles of technology, ignoring mountains of evidence that the marriage of government and computers repeatedly produces disasters.
Ministers, local authorities and private companies alike need to remember that complex technology, far from being the answer to all ills, can make our lives worse (file image)
Computers do not seem to be doing much to speed up the delivery of new passports right now.
It was a new computer system for sub-post offices that led to the tragic and unforgivable shaming and even prosecution and imprisonment of scores of wholly innocent and honest shopkeepers.
During the Covid crisis, an NHS contact-tracing app turned out not to work on Apple devices – a rather fundamental failing.
Most notoriously, the National Programme for Information Technology – the biggest public-sector IT scheme ever attempted in the UK – failed to achieve its target of centralising NHS patient records and was scrapped after swallowing up £10 billion in taxpayers’ money.
Now, as we report today, the techno-nightmare has spread to the rapacious parking monopolies that carpet the country.
Simple machines are vanishing, to be replaced by phone apps that force baffled citizens to fumble for long minutes with tiny keypads, often in rain or wind, just to pay to park.
Whoever benefits from this high-tech obsession, it is not the public. Ministers, local authorities and private companies alike need to remember that complex technology, far from being the answer to all ills, can make our lives worse. Keep it simple, please.
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