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Political football: Now National Health Service, then Corn Laws

By Jim Sheng
As Chinese, I always wonder why there are so many NHS (National Health service) news on TVs and newspapers. MRSA the superbug seems the focus of those debates, speechs, comments of party leaders and common people. In my view, hospital in UK is cleanest in the world, most important, it's free!

I am puzzled by this untill I read Victorian Derby, a portrait of life in a 19th-century manufacturing town, by Harry Butterton. On page 107, he said, "Just as the Health Service has been a mighty political football in recent years, so in the early 1840s were what were known as the Corn Laws." Wow, NHS is a "political football", no wonder why Conserative Party leader David Cameron so fiecely attacks the Labour party's failing NHS Policies, the superbug is as deadly a political weapon as fatal to health.

The Corn laws has been passed by Parliment when it was controlled by landowners and farmers. These rules kept the price of wheat artificially high by preventing cheaper corn from abroad being brougt in unless the price of English-grown wheat went above a certain level. The farmers in the lovely country would be all in favour of the Corn Laws. The people of city, bosses and workers alike, would mostly want them cancelled (repealed) so that bread could become cheaper.
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