Hi
Great site, thought you could add
this.
Labour are up to their old tricks again -
using the "Live 8" event to bury their own damning reports released under
the Freedom of Information Act.....
Here's a couple of excerpts:
While the Prime Minister parades his global social conscience at G8
this week, his government is up to its old cynical tricks.
After
requests made under the Freedom of Information Act, it released more than 500
pages of previously blocked documents produced by the Strategy Unit under Lord
Birt, the ‘blue-skies’ thinker who advises the Prime Minister.
It chose
finally to release them last Friday evening, knowing full well that the weekend
papers would be so preoccupied by Live 8 that they would pay little attention to
much else.
The exercise was reminiscent of the notorious incident when
the former adviser Jo Moore sent an email on 9/11 suggesting it was a good day
to ‘bury bad news’.
The government wanted to bury Lord Birt’s advice
because, despite the fact that chunks of these papers have still been withheld
from public scrutiny, they present a devastating picture of government failure
across the board.
................
One report, written in 2002, states that despite millions of pounds
of extra spending poured into the health service, Britons are less healthy than
in comparable countries and the NHS bears part of the blame. It is short of
virtually everything. Compared to other countries, it has fewer hospital beds,
fewer doctors and a far smaller base of advanced medical equipment.
This
has resulted in far higher waiting lists and poorer results from medical
treatment — so much so that, in a startling admission of failure, it recommends
that more patients should be sent abroad for treatment where facilities are
better.
Another paper on transport says that Britain’s road and rail
network are the least developed of any major country through decades of below
average investment, with the most congested roads in Europe and overcrowding on
many of the expensive and unpunctual railways -- and with improvements in
punctuality made in the mid-nineties now slipping away.
Perhaps the most
startling revelations are in a report written in 2000 by Lord Birt himself about
crime. In this, he states that an estimated 130 million crimes are committed in
Britain each year — some thirteen times higher than the official figure of ten
million, and with drug offences accounting for no fewer than half of them.
At a stroke, this shows not only that the government’s claim that crime
is falling is palpably untrue, but that much of the problem is due to a
combination of two things. First is the revolving door of the criminal justice
system, with half of all crime committed by a hard core of 100,000 persistent
offenders, of whom only 15,000 are locked up — leaving 85,000 free to commit
more crime. And second is the catastrophic failure of drugs policy....
Kind regards
Roger