IT IS BAD enough that you can be refused medical treatment on the NHS for eating, drinking or smoking too much. Now it seems that you can be denied an operation for protesting too much in support of your religious or political beliefs.

Edward Atkinson, a 75-year-old anti-abortion activist, was jailed recently for 28 days for sending photographs of aborted foetuses to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. That draconian sentence was not deemed punishment enough: the hospital has banned Mr Atkinson from receiving the hip replacement operation he was expecting.

Mr Atkinson sounds like an unpleasant crank, and I am as much in favour of legalised abortion as he is against it. But his treatment (or the lack of it) is a scandal. This is about admitting a man to hospital, not electing him to Parliament. Even unhip old bigots need replacement hips.

Ruth May, the hospital’s chief executive, claims that the ban is justified because the “offensive” publications he mailed caused “great distress” to her and her staff and thus contravened the NHS policy of “zero tolerance”. Some may already feel that such policies make it seem as if a hospital’s priority is to protect its staff against the patients, rather than protecting patients from illness. This case goes farther, equating the posting of offensive photos with punching a nurse on the nose.

Why on earth should hospitals be distressed by pictures of the sort of operations that they carry out? An aborted late-term foetus can certainly make a grisly spectacle, and there is no point trying to sanitise abortion. But neither need anybody be intimidated by the handful of zealots who like to wave around such bloody abortion porn.

In any case, that debate about abortion should have nothing to do with decisions about who gets hip replacements. Have hospital authorities been granted the power to turn away anybody who upsets them? It may come as a shock to delicate souls in the upper echelons of the NHS, but some elderly people can be cantankerous, obnoxious and express unfashionable opinions in an uninhibited way. So what? Should the NHS introduce a policy of euthanasia for offensive old gits?

We should take the principle of universal health care seriously, and insist that medical staff make decisions about treatment on clinical grounds alone. After all, so far as science can deduce, a member of the British National Party or an Islamic fundamentalist is the same as you or I under the surgeon’s knife. Even loons who oppose animal experiments should be given the benefits of medical research that they would deny to others.

Many who normally shout about patients’ rights have fallen silent over the case of Mr Atkinson. But you need not be anti-abortion to protest against the notion that only obedient individuals with healthy lifestyles deserve NHS treatment. Perhaps those who would put their own feelings ahead of others’ needs should be advised that if you can’t stand the patients, get out of the hospital.

• THIS NEWSPAPER reports that local authorities are to be given powers to bar ice-cream vans from school gates. Many councils have already imposed strict controls on the ice-cream trade. These measures are justified in the name of the holy crusade against child obesity. Along with police threats to fine kids for playing football in the street, however, they look more like part of a war on childhood fun.

  This is not just nostalgia talking. Children today are supposed to be world-weary cynics. Yet nothing excites my young daughters and their stampeding friends like the ice-cream van’s traditional tuneless jingle. Educational experts pontificate about teaching “happiness” lessons in class, yet seem to want to stamp out the more sensual pleasures of being a kid. When selling ice-cream is treated as pushing an illicit substance, and Mr Whippy risks an ASBO, the warning bells should surely be jangling.

  Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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