People seriously in need of medical help on both sides of the Atlantic have been proving just how serious they are about medical help by voicing their opinions on 'Twitter'. In the US, jocks who loathe free healthcare have been comparing the NHS to Bolivian death squads and the Lubyanka. They have posted tweets such as 'The NHS kills more people than it cures' and 'Being treated in a British hospital is like being tortured in the Gulag Archipelago' and 'Lenin was treated by the NHS and look where it got him.'

Meanwhile, in London the Prime Minister Gordon Brown has come out guns blazing by saying, "The NHS, it is quite nice. Honestly." And in a shock tweet tonight the Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, showed the depth of his feeling for free healthcare by tweeting that he loved the NHS about as much as Everton Football Club (which in some parts of Northern England is about as close as you are ever going to get to a witty riposte).

So will the battle for free healthcare really be won on the playing fields of Twitter? Will we seriously 'fight them on the internet' where once upon a time we would have fought them 'on the beaches'? And what hope have we when the men at the top and the men in grey suits and the bureaucrats and the management consultants and the PRs and the scumbag hangers-on now tell us: In soundbites we trust?

Maybe the last word (or last 'tweet') should be that of the wife of the British Prime Minister, herself a PR, who entered the fray this evening with this lofty meditation (quoted verbatim in actual fact):

"We love the NHS more than words can say."

With that level of profundity, who needs 'the beaches'?

Politicians of all parties are becoming rather excited about a research paper published by a team from Hong Kong University and Fudan University in Shanghai that suggests that 'invisible gateways' like the one in Harry Potter, are becoming a step closer to reality. With the help of a technique known as transformation optics, the research team has found a way to alter the pathway of light waves that could eventually allow them to develop portals that are invisible to the human eye.

Published in the New Journal of Physics this month, the article offers new hope that touchy political subjects such as government debt, MPs expenses, 'mission creep' and state surveillance could yet be hidden from the public gaze. Since the time when the government of Gordon Brown was caught massaging public debt figures by employing 'off-balance sheet' accounting, and since the time when excessive expense claims put in by MPs were uncovered thanks to the Freedom of Information act, the Westminster Pillage has been seeking new ways to hide its racketeering and extortion.

Gordon Brown said today, "New Labour always has been and always will be very excited about the way in which physics can benefit politics, and in particular government, of course. We realised early on that the modern computer would be useful to us in the monitoring and guidance of our citizens. But as spin and illusion move into the Twenty First Century and as science increasingly becomes a tool of public relations - look at swine flu, for example - we firmly believe that these worthy physicists can have a role to play in giving people, let's say, a better vision, a more positive vision... the kind of vision that will allow them to see the light... or, of course, to see the lack of light... whichever the case may be."

"As Albert Einstein himself noted, E=MC Squared... Or to put it another way, 'Electioneering equals Manipulation times Chicanery to the power of two (the two being me and the Dark Lord, Peter Voldemort, of course.)"