Doctors who let views on Gaza dictate remedy needs to be struck off

Have you ever wondered how to jump the queue in an overrun NHS ­Accident and Emergency department? The answer has been provided by the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, Jess Phillips.

As my colleague Richard Eden revealed last week, at an event titled An Evening With Jess Phillips, the Home Office minister told her audience at a London theatre that, when she had recently sought treatment for breathing difficulties at an overcrowded ­Birmingham hospital, she managed to get to the front of the queue ‘because of who I am.

‘Also, the doctor who saw me was a Palestinian, as it turns out. Almost all the doctors in Birmingham seem to be.’

Why should this be relevant to her preferential treatment? Phillips, last November, had resigned from Sir Keir Starmer‘s shadow cabinet in protest at the Labour leader’s refusal to back a vote in Parliament for a ‘ceasefire in Gaza‘: that is, for Israel to cease its military pursuit of Hamas, barely a month after they had ­murdered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more.

Jess Phillips resigned from Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet in protest at the Labour Leader’s refusal to back a vote in Parliament for a ‘ceasefire in Gaza’

Or, as Phillips described her encounter with that ‘Palestinian doctor’ in ­Birmingham: ‘He was sort of like, ‘I like you. You voted for a ceasefire’. [Because of that] I got through quicker.’

Jess Phillips appears to think this speaks well of either the doctor, herself, or both. Otherwise, why would she show off about it?

In fact, it is scandalous. Not just because preferential treatment in the NHS on purely political grounds is ­morally odious as well as medically inappropriate, but because a decent MP would refuse to jump the queue ahead of her own constituents.

Dr David Jeffrey (not a medical ­doctor, admittedly) tweeted about the Mail story: ‘So what Jess said is that the NHS in Birmingham will see you quicker if you’re Pro-Palestinian… Which begs the question: what type of care will you receive if you are perceived to be Jewish?’

Indeed, my thoughts immediately turned to an incident at Royal ­Manchester Children’s Hospital in March. It was reported that nurses wearing pro-Palestinian badges forced a Jewish child out of a hospital bed while he was receiving a blood transfusion (for a rare blood disorder).

The nine-year-old was wearing his ­kippah, so was identifiably Jewish.

His uncle, Elliott Smus, said that the nurses told the boy he could not sit on the hospital bed and ‘forced him on to the floor’.

Healthcare workers wearing medical scrubs stage a protest outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London to highlight the plight of Palestinian healthcare workers detained by Israeli forces

Mr Smus went on to say that the next time the child went there for his treatment, he did not wear any sign of his Jewish identity and was treated well. 

Afterwards, Manchester University NHS Trust said: ‘Following on from a family’s recent experience at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital . . . we have taken action and offered prompt reassurance.’

What that action was, we do not know. But as the Jewish Chronicle observed at the time: ‘The evidence suggests that this is far from a one-off.’

It noted that in 2022 not a single ­doctor had been reported to the ­General Medical Council over alleged anti-Semitism, but in the four months following Hamas’s massacre on October 7 last year there were 66 such incidents logged.

They included the case of Dr Najmiah Khaiessa Ahmad, who shared a video asserting that the Rothschild family ‘made up the so-called ‘Holocaust’ to serve as a mind-control trigger to thwart and resist any criticism of their Zionist ways’.

Dr Ahmad may be an extreme case but it is clear that a large number of medics have been on the pro-Palestinian marches in London – and last weekend almost 200 of them demonstrated in their medical scrubs outside St Thomas’, Parliament’s ‘local’ hospital.

They are, of course, entitled to take part in such political events in their own time – but not to use their medical practice as an extension of their struggle against ‘Zionism’.

Jess Phillips has yet to respond to questions from the Mail about her remarks to that theatre audience. Last month, she did at least admit to a­ ‘mistake’ after she appeared to defend the harassment of a female television reporter by masked men, some of whom chanted ‘Free Palestine’.

Phillips – whose ministerial responsibility is ‘safeguarding women’ – said that the men were responding to ‘misinformation’. Later, she said she ‘would choose my words more carefully’ in the future.

Such self-restraint, as the later Evening With Jess Phillips demonstrated, is beyond her.

One of her parliamentary colleagues said to me: ‘The challenge in politics is to speak plainly and to be authentic whilst still exercising judgment and being disciplined. She lets the ‘plain-speaking Jess Phillips’ stuff go to her head. None of us can understand why Starmer made her a minister. We are all certain it will end in tears.’

But there is something more important at stake here than the job of a ­politician who seems startlingly unsuited to the responsibilities of being a minister of the crown.

The question is: are doctors in the NHS really allowing their views on the war in Gaza to pollute their clinical practice? Because, if so, they should be struck off the medical register.

Kirstie Allsopp had nothing on my mum! 

Kirstie Allsopp must regret revealing to the world that she had let her 15-year-old son Oscar go interrailing around Europe with a 16-year-old friend.

Some appalling busybody reported her to social ­services for ‘child neglect’ and Kensington and Chelsea children’s services department duly got in touch with a furious Allsopp ‘about a referral we have received in relation to your son’. This made me wonder what would have happened to my mother, at the hands of the same council, if such matters had then been dealt with as officiously as they are now.

When I was six, she decided it was time I walked to school on my own. It was only about three-quarters of a mile away, although, being Chelsea, it involved crossing a number of busy roads (unsurprisingly, my first recorded word as an infant was ‘bus’).

That first morning, my mother drew on my wrist, with a felt pen, a rudimentary map of my journey: very practical.

When I got home that afternoon, also on my own, she asked me how it had gone.

I said that at one point ‘an old lady helped me across the road’. My mother burst out laughing: ‘It’s meant to be the other way around.’

Nowadays, she might have been arrested.