The Organ Snatchers

So, Gordon Brown wants to change the way we donate organs - whereas currently organs can only be harvested if you carry a donor card, or with next of kin's permission, under these new proposals, it would be assumed that you do want to donate your organs unless you've 'opted out'. The reasoning behind this proposal is that it will increase the numbers of organs available for transplants and thereby allow the NHS to save the lives of thousands of gravely ill patients every year. Ha! As if we believe that! We all know what the truth is - Brown wants to get his hands on your organs! Yes indeed, he wants to ensure a steady supply of vital organs for his rejuvenation treatments. Damn it, he's waited a long time to be Prime Minister, and he intends going on as long as possible. Either that, or he's fed up with that shower of a cabinet he has and is planning to, quite literally, build a new cabinet. Even as we speak, he's toiling away in a secret laboratory deep beneath Ten Downing Street, stitching together a new Chancellor Exchequer from bits of offal. Let's face it, it can't be any worse than his last effort, Alistair Darling: he couldn't even get matching eyebrows and hair, let alone a decent brain - he had to use one from some down and out he found dossing in a Soho doorway. However, with a regular supply of high quality parts via organ donors, he's sure to do better this time around.

Of course, there could be another reason for this proposed change in organ donation policy. Maybe Brown intends selling the harvested organs to wealthy foreigners in order to raise some more funds. Ironically, it could be a way of financing the NHS. Mind you, cynics would probably suggest that the organs were destined for Labour Party donors - a donation for a donation, so to speak. It would make a change from cash for honours, I suppose - a hundred thousand would get you a liver, two hundred thousand a pair of kidneys, half a million, say, for a heart-lung transplant, whilst a million would get you the full set; a complete organ transplant, with the donor guaranteed to have been an under twenty five teetotaler. Getting back to the original point, and to be slightly serious, these proposals feel like yet another invasion of my privacy by a government seemingly obsessed with destroying the distinction between the public and the private (except where Ministers' indiscretions are concerned, of course). It seems that I'm not even going to be allowed any degree of control over my own body. OK, I know that in the event of organ donation I'd be dead and that it would supposedly save lives, but I still can't help but feel that a line is being crossed. Damn it, it's my body, dead or alive, and surely I should have a reasonable expectation of it staying in one piece? I don't want to spend my final moments worrying that that bunch of doctors lurking behind the screens, trying to look nonchalant, are going to descend on me like vultures and steal my vitals before I'm even cold. For God's sake, Mr Brown, you're already busy stripping me of my civil rights, now you want to strip me of my organs too! Allow me some dignity