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Then 2004 brought a new cabinet which swiftly cut the top rate of tax from 42% to 20%, leaving multimillionaires paying exactly the same proportion of their income into government coffers as those on an annual salary of less than £500. Special economic zones were created, foreign investment reached dizzying heights ($13bn in 2008) and, in the past three years, economic growth has clocked in at a consistently high 7%. The minimum wage, incidentally, has remained fixed at less than £4 a month throughout. The global business community applauded Mubarak's rule as "bold", "impressive" and "prudent".

The conference was entitled "Just for you". Whom that "you" was wasn't specified, but it can't have been any of the 90% shut out of Cairo's miraculous economic boom. As the eminent Egyptian economics professor Galal Amin argues, "Those who continue to preach the trickle-down theory are likely to be the ones who do not really care whether anything trickles down at all."

The Indepenence List also won total, or near total, control of provincial syndicate boards in Ismailiya, Suez and Aswan – governorates where the Brotherhood could claim widespread support for its brand of politics.

in the last years of Mubarak, a younger generation of doctors started to organise in rank and file militant groups such as Doctors Without Rights (DWR) outside of the Syndicate’s internal body, against both Mubarak’s regime and the Brotherhood’s conservative union policies. In the aftermath of the January 25 revolution, these radical doctors, many of whom actually took part in the uprising against the dictator and were emboldened by their success in ousting him, embarked on organising their co-workers for campaigns to take workplace actions and strikes to improve their conditions.

This contrast between the new attitude of emboldened members and a static leadership was illustrated during the unprecedented national doctors’ strike last May. When doctors in public hospitals took industrial action against the government to demand minimum salaries and increased spending on healthcare from 4 per cent to 15 per cent of the budget, both the president of the Syndicate, Hamdy El-Sayed, and the Brotherhood-controlled national syndicate board denounced the strikers. Dr Mona Mina, a member of DWR who won a seat on the new national syndicate board in last Friday’s election and was one of the organisers of that historic strike, told Ahram Online that doctors found it hard to win that battle because of the Syndicate’s hostile position