As reported in Saturdays Financial Times
‘Gordon Brown quietly slashed by a third this year’s hospital building and equipment budget in one of his last acts as chancellor.
Prompted by the tightness of the public finances, the new prime minister, who has placed the NHS as his “immediate priority”, cut the capital budget of the English NHS for 2007-08 from £6.2bn to £4.2bn. The move could delay the government’s hospital building and reconfiguration programme in England.
However, Mr Brown avoided equivalent cuts to the Scottish and Welsh NHS budgets even though the funding formula for the UK nations suggests they should have shared the pain. That decision leaves him open to criticism that he favoured patients in his home country’.

A few points spring to mind;

A) Is this anyway to treat an area that is your ‘immediate priority’ in the most populous country of the UK? I have always suspected that we often get punished for voting the wrong way (especially in the South / South East – Look at the distribution of grants to local authorities for example).

B) The shocking disparity of treatment between the English and the Welsh and Scottish NHS. This just smacks of looking after ones own, so where does this leave Sauron’s ‘Britishness’ agenda. Especially annoying as it is the English who are already essentially subsidising the service in the Celtic fringe.

And yet as a result of the saturation and uniformly positive media coverage of Gordon’s coup, Nude Labia are reported as being up in the polls today.

“The Management is terrible! We've had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who elected these people! You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you”.
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore