Peter Hill

SIXTY-ONE per cent of adults now say they are willing to pay more tax to fund the NHS, up from 41 per cent in 2014, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. The favoured option is a separate tax that would go directly to the health service. A growing belief that NHS care has worsened in the past five years is behind the change.

I might be in favour of paying more if I thought that would make a positive difference but repeated evidence of gross waste, refusal to take advantage of bulk buying power and management muddle suggests otherwise.

Once a special tax is established it would grow and grow and, like road fund licence revenue, disappear into the giant maw of state spending.

There is, however, a readymade source of cash that could be used to offset the NHS deficit: the overseas aid fund.

Britain is the only leading economy to devote the UN’s recommended 0.7 per cent of GDP to foreign aid, a massive £13.3billion and rising, compared with America’s 0.18 per cent.

Officials are hard put to find enough beneficiaries and scramble to use up their budgets. Much of the money is wasted or finds its way into corrupt pockets. Worse still, aid discourages recipients from shifting for themselves. It’s patronising.

The daft law that enshrines aid spending should be scrapped and a slice of the money diverted to where it might help our own citizens. q NO GOOD has ever come from Britain’s foreign interventions or any other country’s. In fact every instance has proved disastrous and the gesture bombing of Syria will be no different.

It won’t deter President Assad and even supposing we get rid of him the new regime will probably turn out worse. And yes, that is quite possible given the brutality of religious fanatics.

If there is any retaliation from Russia it will be Britain that gets it. America is too big for Putin to bully but he sees us as vulnerable.

Significantly the Russians claim Britain staged the chemical attack on Syrian citizens, as it claims our agents poisoned ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Lies and nonsense of course but fake news is apparently believed by more people than truth.

In a world where the leading players are macho egomaniacs I fear a missile exploding over my head is a real possibility. Hopefully it won’t happen but we will be the first target. q A SRI LANKAN refugee who could not speak English is set to receive damages from the NHS because, a judge ruled, she was not given instructions on the importance of feeding her baby, which sadly developed cerebral palsy having not been fed for 15 hours after being delivered by caesarean at a London hospital. This seems to be an extraordinary ruling.

I attended the birth of both my children, the first a home delivery, the second an emergency caesarean, and can’t remember anyone needing to tell us that feeding the baby was important. Isn’t it the most obvious, natural thing imaginable? q ENOCH POWELL’S notorious “rivers of blood” speech has been debated for years but until Saturday few had heard it in full and I used to think he had a point. But I was utterly appalled when I heard the extraordinary reconstruction of Powell’s words on BBC Radio 4 by actor Ian McDiarmid.

Even for 1968 it was a shameful racist diatribe loaded with cruel references to “negroes” and “piccaninnies”. In his harsh, scornful accent he dismissed any hope of integration and repeated the bigoted view that soon “the black man will have the whip hand”.

The BBC was right to air it because it allows us to make a proper judgment. I once accepted that Powell was an intelligent, decent man. Like the vile garbage he spouted, which has set back race relations for decades, that was a myth. q CHINA plans to land a probe on the dark side of the moon that will grow potatoes and rear silk worms in an experiment to see if life can be sustained there.

I hope they have more success than I did when I had an allotment. At first my vegetables grew beautifully but the second year disease and rot infected the plot.

The final blow was two carthorses which jumped the fence from the neighbouring field and trampled my deep beds. As far as we know there are no horses on the moon but then we have never seen the dark side. q DOGS are entitled to pee on lamp-posts thanks to a High Court victory against Richmond council in west London which had sought to make it a criminal offence with fines for owners.

“It is another example of overzealous councils using their powers to unfairly penalise dog owners and to freeze them out of public spaces,” says Kennel Club secretary Caroline Kisko.

If the council had won it would in effect have made keeping a dog impossible in built-up areas. Although it’s absolutely right that owners must clear up excrement they can’t be expected to prevent pets from their natural function of cocking a leg.

Thank goodness the judges have defended our right to be a nation of dog lovers. q IN YET another dire warning from the health police we are told that even one glass of wine a day will knock two years off our lives.

In the words of the great Victor Meldrew, I don’t believe it. But even if true I will happily settle for 98 instead of 100 in return for a modest tipple.