One after the other, new public "scandals" come to light. On Monday it was the report into health in childhood which revealed that this has deteriorated to the point where the infant survival rate in Britain is worse than in 60% of 49 OECD countries.

    Then on Wednesday this week NHS dentistry came under the spotlight. There is virtually none. The image which said it all was the queue of hundreds of people winding round a block in Bristol on Monday, hoping to register with a just-opened NHS dental practice. The picture went viral.

    But NHS dentistry isn't in crisis because of Covid, as the prime minister claims. It has been in crisis for at least two decades, when dentists first started to refuse NHS patients on the basis that the government's subsidies to cover their time and costs in the then "new" dental contract, weren't generous enough. Many went into private practice, made a lot of money, and bought a Porsche. Or two.

    And now they say that the government's Dental Recovery Plan is just not going to do the trick of luring them back to the NHS (which anyway, for working adults and pensioners was never "free at the point of use"). Compare the £20,000 one-off incentive offered by the government's so-called Dental Recovery Plan, to work in deprived areas and the £15-£50 payment to treat new patients who haven't seen an NHS dentist in 2 years or more, with the cost of a new Porsche at ~£300,000...

    In the meantime, 13 public inquiries continue into other unresolved public scandals for which the government directly and indirectly bears responsibility: obviously first, there's the Post Office inquiry (26 years late: Fujitsu's Horizon software was known to be full of bugs when it was installed in post offices in 1998); the infected blood scandal (blood products given to patients by the NHS in the 1980s infecting thousands with HIV and hepatitis C); the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry, still not concluded after 6 years; the Covid Inquiry, ongoing into the government's mismanagement of the pandemic... etc., etc...

    And these are only the statutory inquiries; there are numerous ongoing public inquiries into the NHS, the Home Office and even into the army, which between 2010 and 2013 during the War on Afghanistan covered up extrajudicial killings...

    The idea is that by staging these public shows, the government can salvage the credit of the capitalist system it presides over, which is the real master-criminal behind this catalogue of recurring social failure, and which in Capital's declining years can only get worse. And that's why it's more urgent than ever that the working class organises itself, in order to take on the task of overturning capitalism and replacing it.

It's not usual for the royals to reveal their personal health problems. So one can only assume that it wasn't King Charles who chose to make his cancer diagnosis public, but Sunak's government. Just as it's the government which has gagged him from promoting his green-organic hobbies...

    This obsession with a king certainly helps distract attention from the vital issues of the day, like the situation in Gaza, especially when the Tories are a good 20 points down in the opinion polls, in the year of the general election... and when their hands are dripping with blood.

    In fact, it was the very same day that Charles' cancer "revelation" was made that the Academy of Medical Sciences published the report on child health in Britain. It is shocking. Since 2014, the infant mortality rate (deaths before the age of 1 year) has been rising, to the point where Britain now comes 30th out of 49 OECD countries: Japan, with the fewest infant deaths, has 1 per 1,000; Britain has 4 times as many.

    When Professor Andrew Pollard, one of the report's authors, was asked what the cause of this increase in deaths was, he said in one word: "poverty". And poverty is rising. Since 2019, the number of children living in "extreme poverty" has more than tripled, to nearly 1 million. In Oldham, one of the very poorest boroughs in England, 7.2 babies per thousand die before they are one.

    But for adults there are even more stark differences between rich and poor. Women in the most deprived parts of the country live 19.3 fewer years than in the richest parts. For men the figure is 18.6 years.

    Another shocking fact from this report, linked to the government's pathetic dentistry "initiative",which we discuss above, is that a quarter of all kids have tooth decay - and that this is the most common reason for 6-10 year-olds to be admitted to hospital! And then, due largely to poor housing conditions - the cold, damp and black mould - we read that 1 in 11 kids have asthma, one of the worst rates in Europe. Yes, there are two societies in Britain, one for the rich, with private healthcare, and one for the rest of us, with conditions which have already regressed to those of Victorian times.