The Health Secretary is appearing in my nightmares.

There’s a charcoal black tunnel and I’m staggering through it making painfully slow progress, a little delirious and plagued by visions. I’m seeing gaggles of horribly obese children cramming their smeared mouths with fistfuls of greasy pale putty and swigging on flagons of stagnant brown liquid. Middle aged men pull desperately at their collars, scarlet, sweaty, fighting for breath and clutching at their hearts. There are seething crowds of people jammed into the waiting rooms of crumbling hospitals and mounds of stinking, rotten food waste scavenged by rats amidst landscapes littered with the discarded packaging of a trillion meals. Lines after line of mile long warehouses crammed with groaning mutant caged animals with barely the room to exhale and exhibiting ugly abscesses and sores. And in every hideous scene the backdrop is of land to sky advertising hoardings, depicting rosy-cheeked children, frolicking in the countryside by a river where the fish are jumping for joy, the piglets wear beaming expressions and cute little jackets and the farmer has a mop of curly hair, a ready smile and a wife busy in the kitchen cooking. 
 
But always there’s a speck of light visible somewhere way off in the distance at the end of the tunnel, and there is just the faintest whiff of a fresh breeze in the air, there’s a lot of people heading in that general direction and there’s a fragile shared sense that we might be getting somewhere step by little step, there is hope…

And then without warning there’s a deep rumble, a distant clatter turning quickly into an almighty roar and the iron face of an oncoming train which reaches me in  a split-second and the last thing I see before impact is the driver, wearing an expression that says “you’ll thank me for this one day” and I look into the eyes of the Secretary of State for Health.

And then I wake, the visions are gone, the darkness has turned to light and the tunnel and the train are no more. But Andrew Lansley is still the Secretary of State for Health. It’s then I start to feel nauseous.

See Martin Hickman’s Independent article

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/martin-hickman-mr-lansley-junk-food-and-idiocy-2025782.html