GP is sorry for linking ‘rickets rise’ to poverty
A GP and a council chief have been forced to apologise for wrongly claiming there had been a surge in cases of rickets and linking it to poverty.
Labour supporter Dr Andrew Knox is said to have claimed that 31 people in one town near his practice had the condition, which causes bone deformities in children.
This was repeated by Eileen Blamire, the Labour leader of Lancaster City Council.
But after a Tory MP and NHS body challenged Dr Knox’s figures he issued an apology for the ‘misunderstanding’ and admitted rickets has multiple causes, including lack of sunlight. Mrs Blamire apologised, saying she had been ‘misinformed’.
Dr Knox raised fears about rickets in Morecambe, Lancashire, in a Granada Reports documentary on ITV last November. He said the ‘Victorian’ condition is ‘usually associated with poverty’. His claim was repeated in a February report by Mrs Blamire, who said Dr Knox gave the figure to the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission.
But the area’s Tory MP David Morris claimed the accusations were part of a conspiracy ‘orchestrated by hard-Left campaigners opposed to welfare reforms’. NHS England figures showed cases of rickets almost halved from 99 in 2011/12 to 558 in 2016/17. Mr Morris said: ‘I’ve been told there have been seven recent cases of rickets in Lancashire related to genetic reasons and vitamin D deficiency, none to do with poverty and none in Morecambe.’
Mrs Blamire’s report led to an urgent ‘clarification’ being issued by Morecambe Bay’s NHS clinical commissioning group, saying it ‘did not recognise’ the figures.
Dr Knox, 37, of Ash Trees Surgery in Carnforth, said his statement had ‘caused some upset and misunderstanding, for which I am sorry’.
‘Opposed to welfare reforms’
ARROGANT and self-righteous – with politically correct priorities and a huge sense of entitlement – Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders epitomises everything wrong with the quangocracy. Speaking on yesterday’s Today programme, she was wholly unapologetic to those whose lives have been laid waste by the blunders of the Crown Prosecution Service on her watch – mercifully drawing to an end after the announcement that her contract will not be renewed this October.
Not a word of remorse did she utter over her treatment of those such as Liam Allan, 22, cleared of rape only at the last minute after evidence proving his innocence was not disclosed for months.
Instead, Mrs Saunders blamed everyone but herself for a 70 per cent rise in two years in the number of cases collapsing through disclosure errors – at one point suggesting funding cuts lay behind her failures.
Yet isn’t she personally responsible for encouraging unfairness to defendants, after declaring her determination to increase the conviction rate for rape?
Indeed, wasn’t this same feminist agenda behind her prosecution of three innocent men over the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation – thankfully so rare in the UK that there have been no convictions?
As for her hounding of journalists caught up in the £20million Operation Elveden – which led to a string of acquittals over payments to whistleblowing officials – how much better the money would have been spent protecting the public from criminals.
This paper hopes that with Mrs Saunders gone, the CPS will set grandstanding aside and focus on the demands of justice. But there’s one aspect of the DPP’s departure that will stick in every taxpayer’s throat.
Isn’t it sickening that she will be waltzing from her £250,000-a-year post into a highly paid job for a leading private law firm – taking a £1.8million pension pot with her? In the world of the quangocracy, is there no limit to the rewards for failure?