Victims of contaminated blood scandal need guilty to be punished for their lethal negligence & callous deceit

Nail the guilty

AS sombre, moving and genuine as they were, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer’s ­apologies for the infected blood catastrophe won’t nearly suffice.

Thousands who had blind faith in the NHS in the ’70s and ’80s were killed by it.

Thousands more lives were wrecked.

Doctors lied, even injected contaminated blood without consent, knowing it was risky.

They covered up the deadly consequences because the truth was too dangerous and costly to admit.

Governments from Margaret Thatcher’s to Tony Blair’s shamefully did the same.

Incriminating documents were destroyed.

But these were not just institutional failures.

Specific people made these calls. Many are still alive.

The vast compensation the PM has pledged to pay is of course welcome.

But justice for all those victims requires the guilty to be punished for their lethal negligence and callous deceit.

That — and not vague promises that the State will learn lessons — is by far the best deterrent to avoid a repeat of such a monstrous and appalling scandal.

Court’s shame

THE ICC’s ludicrous proposed “arrest warrant” for Israel’s Prime Minister is a gift to anti-Semites and terrorism supporters.

From the crank MPs of the Left to the Islamist thugs whose racism pollutes our streets and the idiot students who consider slaughter and gang-rape heroic if carried out by the “oppressed”.

It is an abomination to draw some equivalence between Hamas, a banned genocidal terror group, and the elected government of a liberal democracy.

The force of Israel’s retaliation in Gaza is not above criticism.

But how SHOULD it eradicate the threat to it from hate-filled savages hiding behind civilians?

Unlike Israel, Britain is an ICC member.

We should object to these warrants being sought in our name.

Agenda swap

FOR an example of the incoherence of our “Government in waiting”, consider Labour’s latest pirouette on gender.

Ever since the Cass Report upended the “trans women are women” fantasists, its MPs have lined up to admit they were fools to jump on that bandwagon.

Which reassured floating voters who wanted women-only spaces secured for real women and knew letting confused people change gender solely via self-identification was insanely reckless.

But Labour now wants them to do so with a simple sign-off from a single GP, bypassing panels of doctors and lawyers.

GPs don’t want confrontation — that’s why sick notes are doled out like sweets.

But Labour would ask them to tick a box and change a patient’s gender.

That’s self-ID in all but name.

Is this Keir Starmer’s super-woke position now? Or is he sticking by last week’s?