DR. MARGARET MCCARTNEY – A SHINING LIGHT FOR LIFE

One of my favourite voices on BBC Radio is Dr. Margaret McCartney, a Glasgow GP who writes and broadcasts on medical issues. Her virtue and her notoriety is her refusal to isolate medical from social and political issues. It’s already scandalously clear that if you are poor you have a greater chance of dying from Covid-19 than if you are well-off. Dr. McCartney has always understood this disadvantage and campaigned against it. “Poverty kills,” she has written, “ and Statins are not a good treatment for poverty.” She has shown that a regime which forces the poor to argue for their right to benefit has added huge numbers of ill people to the NHS, without any recognition of that cause, or any repentance for having destroyed peoples’ dignity and health.

At the same time, she has written beautifully of the vocation of medicine, and of her commitment to it. Any half-decent medical system would place a high value on a skilled practitioner who is also an analytic questioner of what she does, but so far, at least, she lacks any national recognition. She has written,” Problems are more effectively fixed if they’re first understood,” and in relation to commercial medicine’s advertising, “Doctors should call out bollocksology when they see it.” She is a free and joyful spirit, in whom I hear the voice of Jesus. Not that I want to lessen her distinctive identity; Jesus communicates by enhancing rather than diminishing the identity of a prophet. She has described herself as an atheist, so she may be dismayed by my enlisting her as a comrade of the first century healer and advocate of the poor, but she shouldn’t be: they are both on the side of life as opposed to death.

I contrast her to THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNDEAD, which has over the past ten years starved public services of sufficient funds to do their jobs and attacked poor people by claiming that they are a) incompetent and b) lazy. That a bunch of privileged idle bastards should have got off with this imposture without exposure, is almost beyond my comprehension, unless it is due to the extensive networks of the undead in our society.

One of their little-known triumphs is that foreign citizens who work for the NHS have to pay an annual fee of £400 per annum per family person for their use of the NHS. So family of parents and one child will pay £1200 per annum; and if their permit of work is for 5 years, they must pay £60,000 up front, to continue providing an essential service to our nation. This policy arose from the hatred of the undead for foreigners. Obviously for them, anyone on the side of life is an enemy.

Readers should not make the mistake of thinking I am joking with this stuff about the UNDEAD. I admit an element of fantasy, but I am serious about the presence in government of people whose whose allegiance is to death rather than life. This necrophilia led them to the invention of unnecessary AUSTERITY and their cheerful destruction of some of the best public services in the world. A realistic estimate of how many lives were blighted or shortened by austerity is long overdue. Anyone who thinks that the present gang are reformed characters should ask how many lives of NHS staff have already been lost to Covid-19, because of their smiling incompetence.

St. Paul said that followers of Jesus were fighting against the “rulers of the darkness of this world” and “spiritual wickedness in high places.” I think he was right, and my own language in these blogs is an attempt to be faithful to his insight. I hope to continue spotting the shadowy figures of UNDEAD but even more importantly, the warriors for life.