The SKWAWKBOX yesterday published an analysis of the S*n‘s (henceforth ‘Scum’) article claiming that 93% of junior doctors would support privatisation of the NHS if it meant a pay-rise – analysis that showed the poll’s self-contradictory claims are almost certainly as fictitious as that same rag’s thoroughly-discredited and wholly-invented claim that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn danced on the way to a Remembrance Day service.
A commenter on that article pointed out the similarity between the Scum‘s ‘poll’ by “a medic from Hull” and an article that was run by the Telegraph and the Scum earlier this year, with the same aim of discrediting the junior doctors’ strike against the awful Hunt’s awful, unneeded contract.
In that article, Dalby claims to have gone “from centre-Right to militant Left and back again”. In the space of “a few months”. He also claims that the dispute began as “a friendly debate” between doctors and the Health Secretary. Right.
But it’s in the Tory rag’s description of Mr Dalby that our real interest lies for the purpose of this article:
We’ll come back to ‘will work’ shortly, but a September article in which Dalby reprises his ‘I used to be but no longer am’ shtick for the Daily Mail (he really does frequent the most salubrious publications) shows that the place he moved to is Hull:
In this article, Dalby regurgitates his Telegraph/Sun piece, including the accusation that the strike is purely driven by greed on the part of doctors:
The rest of the article continues in this tenor, with Dalby’s entrenched right-wing views and contempt for striking doctors dripping from every line.
It’s clear from the online evidence that Dr Dalby is anything but the disinterested, carefully neutral professional that has any business conducting a ‘poll’. The chances of a ‘questionnaire’ devised by him – which neither he, if he is the source, nor the Scum appear willing to subject to scrutiny – being properly constructed and designed to lead to an honest conclusion rather than a predetermined one would appear to be less than zero.
Dr Dalby’s bias, if indeed he is the Scum’s ‘pollster’, is self-evident. His own words also raise significant questions about his credibility.
In the ‘about’ section of his own blog, Dalby claims a high level of expertise as a doctor, while making a revealing admission:
An ‘FY1’ doctor is newly-qualified and Dalby admits he has only 5 months‘ experience – yet he feels able, on this basis, to claim ‘clinical diagnostic skills’. As recently as April, the Telegraph was stating that Dalby ‘will work’, so even assuming he started work the following day, he’s inexperienced – and he had only the 5 months when he made his claim, regardless.
As for his ‘background in leadership excellence’, the paragraphs shown above are followed by a series of claims in carefully-constructed language that would have my BS-antennae twitching were I to read it in a job application.
Whatever the facts about his ‘other’ work experience, his own claim of expertise and admission about his lack of medical experience raise concerns about an apparent tendency to, let’s say, ‘re-frame’ the truth for his own purposes.
In any event, Dalby’s track record with right-wing rags suggest he is the ‘go to guy’ whenever one of these nauseating publications want a quote from a pro-government stooge in order to attack public support for junior doctors.
His own words in his various articles, which I won’t link to here but are easy enough to find if you want to search for them, show plainly that he is deeply-biased against the junior doctors’ action and therefore would be an untrustworthy person for a ‘poll’ of doctors’ views and feelings.
Assuming of course, that the ‘questionnaire’ ever actually existed and isn’t made up wholesale by the Scum, which is not something I’d want to put money on given its record.
And if it does exist and Mr Dalby is the Scum‘s “medic from Hull”, the claims made about it are no more reliable or meaningful than if the whole thing is an invention, whether of the Scum, of Dr Dalby or of any other ‘medic’, from Hull or anywhere else.
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Just for the record, the poll was undoubtedly complete fabrication, concocted and contrived by the Sun for the obvious reason!