The Outrage is What Isn’t Seen as Outrageous

Terrific Nick Cohen column today, decrying the feebleness of a new ITV political satire show that oh-so courageously portrays Gordon Brown as some sort of Scottish miser. The truth, of course, is quite different:

Brown couldn’t be further from a Dickensian miser if he tried. For 10 years, he has thrown other people’s money around with the abandon of a Roman emperor or Renaissance pope.. Try a thought experiment and suppose they had more confidence in themselves and their viewers and decided to deride Brown’s Britain intelligently. They might then have looked at the NHS, which Labour promised to save in 1997. In fairness, it has all but doubled the health budget in real terms to £97bn, brought down waiting lists and built new hospitals. But the waste has been out of all proportion to the gains. As Craig points out in his most depressing chapter, the number of managers has doubled to 40,000.