LYING Darwen doctor Ahmed Zaman must be really smarting after the flaying he got from the General Medical Council's professional conduct committee - with the disciplinary equivalent of a feather duster.

The committee heard that this man told not only told lie after lie in a bid to cover up his bungled treatment of 69-year-old Thomas McHugh, but, worse, he had his patient admitted, at a cost of £200 a week, to the residential home he himself owned when the poor man was so desperately ill he should have been sent at once to hospital.

Mr McHugh later died. But what was the fate of this disgraceful GP when the GMC body found him guilty of serious professional misconduct after ruling that, as well as giving false and misleading evidence to the investigating panel, he continued to deny his clinical failings? He was suspended for just FOUR months.

If we had not already been alerted to the GMC's ineffectiveness and incompetence as a regulatory body designed to protect patients from rotten doctors after its failure to clamp down after the scandal of the Bristol baby deaths and the outrage of it allowing serial killer Harold Shipman to carry on as a GP right to the very end, then its slap-on-the-wrist punishment of Dr Zaman will confirm what many already suspect anyway.

And that is that if it is not much cop at protecting patients, it is perfectly capable when it comes to looking after its own. For look how it justified the soft punishment it gave to this dodgy Darwen doctor.

He avoided a stiffer penalty, we are told, because the case "appeared" to be an isolated one.

Well, it wasn't - as readers of this newspapers know. We revealed how he was disciplined and made to forfeit a paltry £250 in 1991 after he refused to come out and treat a sick girl who had to be rushed to hospital with a burst appendix the day after.

We also told how, previously, an official complaint against him was upheld when, despite repeated calls from a neighbour, he refused to visit a sick pensioner who later died.

Right now, MPs are expressing concern that a Masonic network in the medical profession may lie behind the GMC's slowness to act against bad doctors.

Whether or not such a murky set-up exists, the conspicuous existence of too many instances of it pulling its punches suggests that it is high time that this body - for all the leavening of it by a minority of non-medicos appointed to it by the government - was done away with completely and replaced by a totally independent one.

Besides which, what integrity is there in a system that permits doctors to own residential homes to which they can admit their own patients - in this scandalous case, when it was clearly detrimental to the patient's well-being - to enrich themselves even further on top of the handsome wages they are paid by the NHS? Health Minister Alan Milburn should write a prescription for a swift and thorough purge of the whole sick set-up.

Getting the hump over £30 million bill

JUST as we hear that saturation traffic calming in East Lancashire has done nothing to make our roads safer - indeed, it's made some more dangerous, we are told - now we learn that councils will need to spend £30 million lowering the 500,000 humps they have scattered across the country. Half of which are in Hyndburn, if you ask me.

Why is this? It's because the 'sleeping policemen' humps are too high for the new buses which have to have lower floors to allow wheelchair access.

But, hey, if, as we are told, it's reckoned that although the low-floor buses can get over the humps (just about, that is), they still stand to have their undercarriages damaged by these obstructions and also provide a bumpy ride, does not logic tell us that the same applies no matter what the height of the vehicle involved?

I think we must be thankful to wheelchair-using passengers and their new buses for highlighting what many of us knew all along - that the humps damage vehicles and jolt the people in them far too much.

Indeed, we find the AA declaring that many councils have gone over the top by installing the largest possible humps in areas that did not need them. To me, this proves what I've maintained all along - that too many councils are in thrall of car-hating cranks determined to make life a misery for as many drivers as possible in the belief that they are helping the environment by deterring cars when all they are doing is slowing down traffic, increasing exhaust emissions as a result and tossing the occupants of vehicles about unnecessarily. That it will cost £30 million to decrease the folly is one thing.

But, now we have the expensive proof that these busybodies have blundered, has not the time to come to cease the folly forthwith - by getting rid of the humps and their advocates?

Break out the 'No Entry' signs

WHEN you get your council tax bill, it's usual for it to be accompanied by a potted budget statement showing you where your money is being spent - so much for education, this amount for roads, that for libraries and so forth.

Be prepared now for a new item on the list: Accommodating bogus asylum seekers.

Ridiculous? No, it's happening already - in swamped Kent the council tax is going up by an average of £3 a household to pay for the care of the hordes claiming to be refugees.

Other councils are poised to follow suit and, with the plan to spread the asylum seekers around the country, more and more council tax payers look like being landed with this burden. Plan B, I see, is for new claimants to be kept offshore in a couple of converted container ships anchored in the Tyne and the Mersey. But even if that scheme was not torpedoed by the do-gooders, the taxpayer would still have a bill to pick up - and no doubt the DSS giros and vouchers would find their way aboard the supply boats.

Answer: Scuttle Britain's soft-touch reputation that attracts asylum seekers here in the first place at the rate of 6,500 a month, though the statistics show that fewer than one in ten is genuinely oppressed.

The message should go out: No entry - we're full up. And no welfare, not a penny, to anyone who has never made a contribution to the system.

If that was the rule, we'd need to charter ships to take them home, not keep them in.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.