CRUMBRIA: 03/05/2025
THE Fighthaven News (formerly The Whitehaven News when it had a pulse) appears surprisingly sedate about the closure of a mental health ward at the West Crumberland Hospital.
The shifting of inpatient services nearly 40 long miles away to Carlisle has led to some noise in the local rag, but rather than a howl of outrage, the articles have been written with all the gusto of a dying cat stifling a last yawn.
Had this decision occurred under a Conservative Government and a Tory MP, you can bet your bollocks that activist hacks on the paper would have been foaming at the mouth with front page articles tearing a new arse in the ‘Nasty Party’.
The severed head of the local MP would have been demanded, the immediate castration of the Tory Health Sec, and guilty Trust members tried in the Kangaroo Court of Public Opinion.
Not anymore! Has the paper now got a blind spot for tough questions and rigorously holding Labour to account? (Read it & sleep: Inpatient mental health services to move.)
Could this be because Whitehaven & Workington is now served by party poster boy ‘Tosh’ MacAlister and this bed reorganisation occurs under a Labour Government?
Because the paper hasn’t launched any big campaign to stop the closure and no mention has been made that the local Labour MP is close friends with Wes ‘Tweeting’ MP, Secretary of State for Health.
(The bosom chums only visited the Whitehaven hospital in January to roll up their shirt sleeves and pose for the cameras to “hear directly from staff about the challenges they are facing!”)
Forgetful hacks on The Fighthaven News also appear to have not remembered Tosh’s bold and lofty new ‘Plan For West Cumbria‘.
See Priority Two below.
Funny how last year the failures of the NHS “lay at the door of Number 10 and the Conservatives”. Yet now Labour is swanning around Downing Street, the blame has nothing to do with the Government, and all falls on the shoulders of hospital trust bosses.
As the MP was at pains to forcefully point out and make clear to readers of The Fighthaven News in his statement this week.
In the same way that Barrow’s self-styled “NHS rescuer”, Michelle Scrogerm MP, couldn’t reverse unpopular bed closures coming in at Furness General Hospital, gullible voters in W&W may now be realising that Josh’s plan for “Protecting and improving local NHS services” is also political posturing.
Deep in their hearts, MPs know that hospital decisions are NOT in their gift but it serves them no good telling the public this at election time when “saving the NHS” makes such a good sales pitch.
A bit more honesty on the campaign trail wouldn’t go amiss?
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