That gave a voice to the victims and ensured action

That gave a voice to the victims and ensured action

Anyone who doubts the essential role of a free of charge, self-regulated Press in exposing horrors so as to would in no way otherwise come up to to light be supposed to heed this weekend’s timely caution from a champion of society’s on the whole vulnerable.

For years, the biased and remedial Establishments bowed a deaf ear to families’ distress greater than routine abuses of the Liverpool Care Pathway, the NHS-approved guidelines on treating patients judged to be days from death.

When troubled relatives told of loved ones gone to crash of thirst, minion listened. When they complained so as to food and fluids had been withdrawn lacking explanation, their protests were overlooked.

From NHS officialdom to the Royal Colleges, from Parliament to the British Medical Association, institutions stopped ranks to silence assessment.

Except single.

When crusader Dr Tony Cole acknowledged this weekend, it was the free of charge Press — led by this paper — so as to gave a voice to the victims and ensured charge by the side of keep up aligned with the horrendous abuses.

Paying abundant tribute to our role, he thought: ‘We would in no way allow got it inedible the ground if it had not been in support of the Daily Mail and the Press.



Indeed, it was recognition to our campaign so as to the vigor region to conclude calibrate up the post-mortem so as to was to confirm the nastiest of everything we had described.

Calling in support of the abolition of the guidelines,  it found the cure of many on the LCP was ‘uncaring, rushed and ignorant’.

Devastatingly, Health Minister Norman Lamb concluded: ‘This is not civilised. It is a countrywide humiliation.’

Yet whilst we at the outset highlighted relatives’ stories, the Royal College of GPs accused us of scattering ‘distress and fear’. The Lancet condemned our campaign as ‘appalling’. The BMA called it ‘hysteria’.


Isn’t it all too comfortable to imagine how a State-overseen Press manager, imbued with the Establishment mentality, might allow reached the same conclusion —silencing us and leaving countless more to suffer under this ‘national disgrace’?

Yet politicians of all three parties are at the moment conspiring to impose precisely such a body on the Press to finish off 300 years of autonomy from state interference.
Modish a speech by the side of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr Cole declared: ‘I am very concerned almost autonomy of the Press and no matter which so as to might endanger it.’