JG has been highlighting the MTAS fiasco. Besides the fine illustration it provides of this Government's incompetence and refusal to take responsibility for their mistakes, it also sheds an interesting sidelight on another bad Labour policy. On Thursday's Question Time, Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, explained the necessity to scrap the old system in the following words:
"I have heard, for example, from clinicians about how applications used to turn up at hospitals, they'd put them in a pile and literally pull them out at random. So it was all agreed that that system wasn't right."
A bad system is no reason or excuse to introduce something worse. And one of the main criticisms of MTAS is that it made the selection process more, not less random. But equally importantly, does this not describe almost exactly the "lottery" approach to assigning places in schools to students, introduced by egalitarian Labour councils and approved by this Labour government? Why is a random approach wrong for selecting junior doctors but right for selecting students?
But let's be fair and give credit where credit is due if a Minister manages to be sensible (a task made all the more compelling by the fact that Ms Flint is by a long chalk the hottest minister and probably the hottest MP in parliament, and that is not intended to damn with faint praise). Yesterday's Telegraph reports that Ms Flint has taken a robust and rational stance against the call from Alcohol Concern to make it illegal for parents to give their children alcohol. If parents can't teach their children how to drink responsibly, it is hard to know who should have that responsibility. And how would such a law have been enforced? Ms Flint is to be congratulated on resisting blinkered pressure groups, giving short shrift to such a nannyish idea, and choosing masterly inaction over ill-considered action.
Now if she could only teach the rest of her colleagues to apply the same approach, we might have fewer MTAS-style fiascos.
Comments
"Cheap" alcohol
I should have mentioned that other "alcohol experts" agreed with Ms Flint that Alcohol Concern's proposals were "unworkable" (not wrong in principle, notice, just impractical) and pointed instead to the price of alcohol as the main problem. Dr Guy Ratcliffe of the Medical Council on Alcohol said "Now alcohol is readily available and cheap." Prof Martin Plant, director of the Alcohol & Health Research Trust at the University of West England said "The bottom line is the number of alcohol-related deaths is connected to the affordability of alcohol."
Whilst the laws of supply and demand must apply to alcohol as much as to any other good, this seems a somewhat naive analysis. Britain's alcohol is some of the most expensive in Europe, and yet we have a bigger problem than countries such as France and Italy where taxes on alcoholic drinks are much lower. And one only has to travel to a holiday resort popular with young Scandinavians (I can recommend the ski resort of Badgastein for the spectacular sight of streets awash from the vomit of 1000 teenage Swedish visitors a week), or try some of their ubiquitous homebrew, to see the dysfunctional relationship to alcohol that is bred by a very high cost of domestic alcohol.
Alcohol may be cheaper in countries like Russia and Poland, which suffer the highest death-rates from alcohol-abuse, than it is in the UK, but relative to average incomes it is significantly more expensive (unless you make it yourself, which, as in Scandinavia, is commonplace). If the "experts" of the medical and academic world think that Russians and Poles are drinking heavily primarily because it is cheap, they need to learn a bit more about the world.
Only number two according to
Only number two according to this survey...
http://adamboulton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/2007_top_10_mos.html
Personal preference
She and Julie are clearly miles ahead of the field, when you look at the other runners (and think what that means for the 98% who didn't even make the running). But my money is still marginally on the "perennial favourite" than on the new entrant. We know Julie is made of strong stuff, but her image is that of a soft, English-rose type, against which the school-ma'am-cum-dominatrix severity of Ms Flint seems more exciting.