British bomb plot and Michael Moore-style health care

Mark Steyn reports:

Aneurin Bevan, the socialist who created the National Health Service after World War II, was once asked to explain how he'd talked the country's doctors into agreeing to become state employees: "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he crowed. Sixty years later, no amount of gold can persuade Britons to spend their working lives in the country's dirty, decrepit hospitals (they spend enough of their nonworking lives there, waiting to be seen, waiting for beds, waiting for operations). According to a report in the British Medical Journal, white males comprise 43.5 percent of the population but now account for less than a quarter of students at UK medical schools. In other words, being a doctor is no longer an attractive middle-class career proposition. That's quite a monument to six decades of Michael Moore-style socialist health care.

So today the NHS is hungry for medical personnel from almost anywhere on the planet, so hungry that the government set up special fast-track immigration programs: Mohammed Asha, Mohammed Haneef and their comrades didn't even require a work permit to come and practice as doctors in state hospitals. You don't have to be the smartest jihadist in the cave to see that as an opportunity, any more than it required no great expertise for the 9/11 killers to figure that the quickest place to get the picture IDs with which they boarded the planes was through Virginia's "undocumented worker" network. Everyone else from the Venezuelan peasantry to the Russia mafia knows the vulnerabilities of Western immigration systems, so why not the jihadists?

Great moments in socialism.