Up to 500 people dying every week due to emergency care delays is a terrible, unforgivable scandal.
Years of the tightest NHS financial straitjacket ever imposed on the health service is proving fatal, the otherwise saveable sick and injured condemned to premature graves.
The consequences of criminal neglect for us and the NHS spelled out by doctors’ leader Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, are truly shocking.
This toll is on the watch of unelected PM Rishi Sunak and a Health Secretary, Stephen Barclay, who must be held accountable.
And if either or both of these shameless smearers attempt to blame the deaths on strikes by nurses and ambulance crews, patients and NHS staff will unite against a brazen pair of Tories.
Because despairing workers are the heroes keeping the health service going. Prominent Tories who clapped them during Covid and now slap them financially are prize hypocrites.
Families and friends of the dead have every right to be furious at the cost of Tory austerity.
Unfare Tories
Responsibility rests mainly with stubborn, provocative Tory ministers for rail strikes slowing the return to work after the festive break and Bank Holiday.
When the Tories hold the purse strings, small pay offers proposed late are inciting workers attempting to safeguard living standards when the economic incompetence of the same Conservatives is costing people dear.
Negotiations would give a way forward. Frustrated passengers, and businesses hit by stoppages, know an intransigent Government costing the country a fortune is really to blame.
Another level
Pele's status will be elevated as the greatest ever footballer by occupying the ninth floor of a vertical cemetery.
That his funeral cortege will stop outside his mother’s home is a tear-jerking goodbye to a man who gave the world so much enjoyment.
