One after the other, new public "scandals" come to light. On Monday it was the report into health in childhood which revealed that this has deteriorated to the point where the infant survival rate in Britain is worse than in 60% of 49 OECD countries.

    Then on Wednesday this week NHS dentistry came under the spotlight. There is virtually none. The image which said it all was the queue of hundreds of people winding round a block in Bristol on Monday, hoping to register with a just-opened NHS dental practice. The picture went viral.

    But NHS dentistry isn't in crisis because of Covid, as the prime minister claims. It has been in crisis for at least two decades, when dentists first started to refuse NHS patients on the basis that the government's subsidies to cover their time and costs in the then "new" dental contract, weren't generous enough. Many went into private practice, made a lot of money, and bought a Porsche. Or two.

    And now they say that the government's Dental Recovery Plan is just not going to do the trick of luring them back to the NHS (which anyway, for working adults and pensioners was never "free at the point of use"). Compare the £20,000 one-off incentive offered by the government's so-called Dental Recovery Plan, to work in deprived areas and the £15-£50 payment to treat new patients who haven't seen an NHS dentist in 2 years or more, with the cost of a new Porsche at ~£300,000...

    In the meantime, 13 public inquiries continue into other unresolved public scandals for which the government directly and indirectly bears responsibility: obviously first, there's the Post Office inquiry (26 years late: Fujitsu's Horizon software was known to be full of bugs when it was installed in post offices in 1998); the infected blood scandal (blood products given to patients by the NHS in the 1980s infecting thousands with HIV and hepatitis C); the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry, still not concluded after 6 years; the Covid Inquiry, ongoing into the government's mismanagement of the pandemic... etc., etc...

    And these are only the statutory inquiries; there are numerous ongoing public inquiries into the NHS, the Home Office and even into the army, which between 2010 and 2013 during the War on Afghanistan covered up extrajudicial killings...

    The idea is that by staging these public shows, the government can salvage the credit of the capitalist system it presides over, which is the real master-criminal behind this catalogue of recurring social failure, and which in Capital's declining years can only get worse. And that's why it's more urgent than ever that the working class organises itself, in order to take on the task of overturning capitalism and replacing it.