Liberal's Labor Lost ..........

Last Tuesday was my school reunion. It was interesting for several reasons including the fact that some people seem to remember a few of my exploits better than I do and one or two of them seem to be infamous to the point of notoriety.

I managed to evade further confrontation with the liberal academic who decided, a few weeks ago, to take me to task, not via this medium which would have been fine, but rather by emailing my distribution list. Well he won’t have that opportunity again as now the list does not contain visible addresses.

Prominent in the lapel of my blazer was a pin of “Old Glory” and I do hope it irritated some as much as it gave me a sense of pride for surely both were my motivations for putting it on in the first place.

Many of the attendees were liberal while we were at school but, whilst a few seem to have grown out of that phase of adolescence, many others are still stuck in a kind of ideological time warp.

The ideology reached it’s most obvious manifestation in a speech given by the organizer of the event. After making the obligatory puns and thanking the attendees he launched into some reminiscences not just about our schooldays but about that period of our lives in general and the politics of the time in particular.

As I posted yesterday, the Labor Party appears destined for ignominious defeat in the next general election which must be held sometime in the next 8 or 9 months. Despite the valiant huffing and puffing of one of the minority parties, the Liberal Democrats, it seems almost certain that a new government will be formed with the Conservative Party at the helm.

Now the very contemplation of that is tantamount to Armageddon according to the liberals and to the academics. Now combine liberalism and academia into one person and you end up with some kind of intellectual attack dog. And that became apparent when the speaker decided to launch into a glowing dissertation of the British National Health Service. He waxed most poetical about our good fortune in living most of our lives under the sheltering wings of this monstrous bureaucracy and the part that it had played in our lives.

Perhaps it's all about me and perhaps it isn't but I couldn’t help thinking that somehow the battle over Obamacare and my presence, complete with flag pin, had something to do with this performance because it was so completely out of context at a class reunion. Anyway, his rhetoric reached a rousing crescendo when he exhorted his audience to be ready to man the political barricades when, “Those Tory Bastards get in!” It wasn’t clear to me then, nor is it now, just what “those Tory Bastards” were going to do that could provoke such vitriol but perhaps it’s enough for a liberal that someone voices dissent.

It becomes more and more clear on both sides of the Atlantic that liberals cannot tolerate dissent or variation from their left-wing dogma. They claim to be the “progressive” movement; the one that celebrates diversity while actual empirical experience suggests precisely the opposite.

I got ample proof of this when I asked some friends at my table whether I should enter a dissenting vote. “You’d better not”, they said and, considering the ovation the orator had received for his clarion call to action, they were probably right. So, discretion being the better part of valor, I left instead and I don’t think I’ll be back!

It is, therefore, with some glee, albeit tinged with a healthy doses of sadness, sympathy and anger that I relay to you an event that happened that very evening.

The daughter of a friend here in England is pregnant and due to deliver in about 6 weeks. Anyway, on that evening she showed signs of going into labor early whereupon the British National Health Service sprang into long-established lethargy. She lives in a fairly large town called Chesterfield and major cities such as Sheffield, Derby and Nottingham are all within 40 miles of her home. But in all this geography there were no facilities able to accept her and her potential family. She wound up in Leeds and a cursory scan of any atlas will immediately make the point that only bizarre bureaucratic logic or desperate necessity could have driven that decision.

As I’ve said before, the problem with socialized medicine in this country is not the existence of clinical excellence, it’s the availability of, and access to, it.

That’s how medical rationing is done here and how it will be done if the “Great Leader” gets his way in the U.S.

Finally, another sad note. When I've relayed this story to other Brits since, they've raised not one eyebrow; no surprise whatsoever.

It’s par for the course!