No More Heroes

I watched some of First Minister's Questions (FMQs) in the Scottish Parliament last week and while these half-hour set piece events are a lot less boisterous than their Westminster equivalent I have to report that the level of debate is often very poor. 

In this particular case, the Labour spokesperson Kezia Dugdale was banging on and on about the NHS as if the people employed in Scotland's hospitals are all heroes and angels, which they're not of course.

Yet this kind of language is used regularly in parliamentary debates even though  putting the NHS on a pedestal is a ridiculous thing to do, especially when the scandal of Mid-Staffordshire Hospital and the premature deaths of up to 1200 patients is so fresh in the mind.

Now people working in the NHS do a hard job, but so do lots of others in the public services       and elsewhere - in schools, higher education, caring and childcare services to name just a few obvious examples.

I suspect we are in for more of this nauseating nonsense as the Westminster general election campaign gets underway in earnest although if I had my way I'd ban MSPs and MPs from talking about heroic NHS staff and get them to focus much more on the experience of patients.