Thatcher starring on Spitting Image

I have no idea how the writers and producers of Spitting Image thought they might bring down Margaret Thatcher as that depict her as being so fearsome, she probably enjoyed it. After all, she relished being dubbed the Iron Lady. She is the centre of the programme; nothing else works as well as when her terrifying figure appears.

Now, I know these are all on YouTube but I couldn't resist to pull these together.

First Thatcher sings My Way:



Here Thatcher hosts a cabinet meeting (poor Geoffrey Howe lost his homework on the bus):



Ignoring Nick Clegg - an easy thing to do - we still appear to have the 'two-idiot party system':



Comic Strip once depicted Thatcher as a dragon - and here's a scientist in Spitting Image discovering she's really an alien:



A forensic Thatcher dissects a Nigel Lawson budget:



One clip I remember but haven't found is of Margaret Thatcher kneeling down to pray and begging for all the little children across the world to be helped. At which point God blows her head off with a lightning bolt. Can't find it anywhere.

Ho hum!

Blather from Mr Hunt

Standing up in the House of Commons this afternoon, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the current system which allows overseas nationals with temporary residence to see a doctor for free is ‘chaotic and out of control’.

But what he proposes to do about it utterly baffles me.

The proposals the government is considering include:

1 – Foreign visitors might have to make a pre-payment to use NHS healthcare

2 – restrict free care to those overseas visitors who are living in the UK permanently, not just temporary visitors.

3 - And end access to free primary care for all visitors or tourists.

How, I wonder, is a doctor or a nurse, tending to a patient, supposed to know whether the person is a temporary or permanent resident in the UK? Will we all have to take along proofs of identification and three bills proving our home address before we can be attended to? Why not go the whole hog and just introduce some sort of universal identification system? We could call it, oh I don’t know, and ID card.

All of this is being considered because Jeremy Hunt doesn’t want hospitals ‘clogged up with people who may not be entitled to free NHS care’. Fair enough. So just how ‘clogged up’ is the system? Surely the government will have done its homework and checked the current status?

Er, no. How stupid of us to presume they might actually try and base a policy in fact.

Squeakily, Hunt told the Commons: ‘We believe we identify less than half the people who should be paying for NHS care and we collect less than half the money that should be collected’.

Interesting statement, this one. How can he possibly estimate that fewer than ‘half the people who should be paying for NHS care’ are identified? By definition they have not been identified. It’s a guess, plucked from the ether.

Sadly, it seems that the ether is Hunt’s best source of information. How much does all this ‘clogging up’ cost the NHS? Well, Jeremy reckons about £200million (remember the annual NHS budget is well over £100billion). Slightly awkwardly, the Prime Minister’s spokesman put the figure at just £20million during the afternoon Lobby briefing.

Hunt cannot explain this big disparity as he has no details or facts to back up his £200m claim. He told the Commons: ‘We don’t know the full extent of the abuse of NHS resources’. The figure has apparently been sourced a consultant’s report written in 2003. So at best he’s relying on figures more than a decade out of date.

Now, I’ve no idea what the true figure is, but I’m not the one putting forward a series of proposals to ‘crackdown’ on something. Before cracking down, one would hope you know whether you need a nut cracker or a drop hammer.

It does, of course, expose how poorly thought out David Cameron's foray into the debate over immigration really is. The Prime Minister is, of course, worried about his election prospects. Labour might have made no progress at the Eastleigh by-election but there were never really expected to. Instead, what should have been a two horse race between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party became one between the Lib Dems and UKIP. The Tories came a very poor third.

Cameron promised not to lurch to the right but it's clear with this economically illiterate and socially divisive attack on immigration, he's trying to steal back Tories who have defected to Farage's bunch of oddities. It's really not a pretty sight.

Bizarrely, Norman Baker isn't a bad singer

I've been away, so I know I'm a bit late to this. But while, I'm not so keen on Norman Baker the minister, Norman Baker the pop singer definitely has potential.

Denis Healey does stand up

He's older, unsteady on his feet and his voice is fading, but Denis Healey still retains his sharp wit and acid tongue. This is from an event held earlier this month with Arthur Smith and it is all rather fabulous.

What a Welsh pub thinks of beer price cut

From a pub in Swansea (ht @JamesShort92)