The State of Us, by Wiggia

To start, a classic example of one of the reasons the West is in terminal decline; when government appointees can waste time on utter crap like this we know we are in the death throes of western civilisation:

Samantha Smith@SamanthaTaghoy

“MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” The Canadian government just dropped this absolute monstrosity (and no, it isn’t satire).

1:33 AM · Apr 9, 2026 · 95.9M Views

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9.59K Replies · 9.41K Reposts · 83.2K Likes

Nothing should surprise us any more. After all, they declare that a 5-year-old is apparently old enough to decide they’re the opposite gender but a 15-year-old is too young to use social media. The people in charge of this country have completely lost their minds.

The rise of the Greens is no surprise either. With all the parties failing to grasp what is fundamentally wrong in the country, with the possible exception of Rupert Lowe who currently can only loudly point out the obvious, the Greens have taken the space to supply a safe haven for all those virtual signallers that ‘care’ about things. The fact that the party has been taken over by complete lunatics somehow escapes scrutiny.

NHRN

We currently have a government and indeed the majority of the HoC filled with people of a standard that is so far below that which is needed in these troubled times, that I can’t see any future for the country unless a Churchillian figure emerges from nowhere and saves us. There is no one or no party that has any power that inspires anyone at the moment. A nation that along with Allies saved Europe during WW11 is rapidly becoming a backwater. We are not alone, Europe is in the same boat but I don’t really care about that in these times. Never have I heard so many people with negative doubts about the present and the future and the feelings of being betrayed at every turn by the powers that be.

With people like this, and she is not alone by any means, representing the public, what chance of any advancement do we have?

For months now the “Liebore” lot have been boasting about falling NHS England waiting lists. Apparently, the number on the waiting list fell by 80,000 in November, the last month the numbers were published. But how was that achieved when the same figures show a drop of 10% in operations and people seen in appointments?

And now this……

Concerned Citizen@BGatesIsaPyscho

🚨🇬🇧 UK National Health Service Meeting “We’ve lost almost 2 years of life expectancy” “It’s disappointing to see life expectancy decreasing the way it has” Wait what⁉️ What could’ve caused such a dramatic drop in life expectancy over a short period of time? Don’t answer

6:48 AM · Feb 17, 2026 · 22.1K Views

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58 Replies · 237 Reposts · 636 Likes

I personally on another visit to the local hospital came across yet more nonsense in the way the trust is run. Two visits actually. The first required an ambulance; four hours after the initial call it arrived despite urgent calls in the meantime. On arrival at A&E a further four hours were spent in the car park awaiting a vacant bed in the emergency ward.

A chat with the ambulance crew revealed all : they are being used as an overflow ward in the car park. This means their main purpose, to get to people and take them to hospital is now a secondary requirement. They are well aware of this but cannot speak out for fear of losing their jobs! So they request that patients complain!

This system means that crews are stuck in the car park for hours and not out doing what we consider ambulance crews should do. It not only endanger lives but is a waste of manpower and dangerous to waiting patients. Who thinks these decisions are good practice?

A second item came to notice on my second visit, something that had caught my eye several times before but was not a priority at the time. This occasion resulted in a move to a ward in the evening. It is obvious that hospitals have become 9-5 operations and Monday – Friday, matching GP surgeries: it’s not a good idea to become unwell on a weekend in this country.

The change of ward meant a long journey through the corridors and up two floors. It became very obvious that the general silence was not because of a desire for quiet at night but because there was nothing happening. Why? A large number of wards were closed, no lights, no activity at all. This did not make sense when the same hospital has patients in corridors, so why?

It appears that when the Norfolk &Norwich hospital was built about fifteen years ago, replacing the old hospital in the city centre, it was as is usual in this country massively over budget. The trust could not afford the many alterations and improvements that were added to the original plan and Serco actually purchased the hospital and leased it back to the NHS trust.

Serco of course also provide all the services, so though the hospital operates under the NHS flag it does not actually own it.

Quite extraordinary that this situation exists, and naturally further extensions and improvements are announced but seemingly never finished within the time frame stipulated or the original budget. As they are PFI projects we should not be surprised that contractual ‘issues’ pushed the price up.

Still as with most things it is good to see that the NHS has got its priorities right…….

Doctors told to avoid phrases such as ‘raining cats and dogs’ and ‘the early bird catches the worm’ to avoid offending foreign patients

It is amazing that when anything is built in the public sector the cost and time frame for completion go out of the window. None of these problems ever arise if a new superstore is built and penalty clauses are part of the deal; perhaps, in fact I am sure, we would be better off if Tesco were put in charge of these projects.

Now it would be easy to state this is a one off, but apparently not as regards closed areas. My sister for instance attends two different west London hospitals and one of them has closed areas. How many others are there ?

I also had a long chat with a newly qualified nurse who was giving me details about those who qualify not being able to get jobs in the NHS as they prefer the cheaper labour they import. This gives rise to the false belief the NHS would collapse if they banned all immigrant staff; it wouldn’t as there is a large pool of qualified Brits waiting for the jobs, so another lie.

Mr Streeting of course like all before him is all mouth and trousers. So called improvements in waiting lists have been proved to be simple juggling acts with the figures and methods of calculation. His pledge of no more money without changes have been shown to be just words.

The NHS is at the point of being not fit for purpose in many departments. We all pay for this sub standard service and it is not lack of money or personnel, far from it with the latter, but unless someone gets a grip on it and makes real change and not cosmetic, we are in trouble. The NHS is now at the bottom in many areas of care compared with equivalent health care systems. The scare mongering that we will follow the American system is just that, scaremongering. It is all the other systems that are superior that should be studied and if an insurance model is proved to be better so be it.

Otherwise the decline will continue and we will resemble, as my earlier piece described in the local A&E for example, a scene from a third world country. The acceptance of corridor care in the NHS as the norm shows the way.

As light relief from all this we face a week of “he said, you said” in Parliament and everywhere else over the PM’s disastrous choice of Mandelson as UK Ambassador. He (Starmer) really is clueless but we will have probably to suffer more of him as the alternatives are worse. The state of us!

It’s good to know that our PM is on the ball, see this on the day the straits of Hormuz reopened, and he went to Paris to announce his ‘plan’, God help us:

I’ve just discovered through FOIs that Bracknell Forest Council has spent over £74,000 on translation services for Afghan arrivals since April.

Why is that level of translation needed when residents were told they had served our armed forces as translators?

I’ve also been asking the council, MoD and Home Office for months now how many actually served our armed forces, but they’ve refused to release the information.

What is going on here?

Why are translation services needed for translators?
How many of the Afghan arrivals actually served our armed forces?
And if not many, why was it implied most had?

Because right now it’s starting to look like the public’s admiration for our armed forces was played on to stop debate and push this policy through.

Bond markets react:

The highest they were during the Truss government was:
10-year - 4.3% (today 4.78%)
30-year - - 4.8% (today 5.49%)

Why No Xmas Wines? A Matter of Taste! by Wiggia

I normally manage to put together an article on the best wines for Christmas according to what I have tasted, but this has been a strange period in my imbibing journey and I explain below why I have had to pull the plug on this year’s edition.

Some of the following has been published before but it was written for the blog on the Wine Society of which I am a member. Nonetheless I thought it was sufficiently interesting to be seen here. I could be wrong of course but decided to give it a go, so bear with me for the intro which may seem familiar.

I haven’t commented on here very often in the last three years, for a variety of reasons one being health. I have written in detail about my experiences within the NHS organisation, the good the bad and the ugly-plus an extra ingredient I won’t elaborate on again just about covers it.

Three years ago I collapsed and woke up six weeks later having undergone two brain operations within 24 hours and a serious bowel operation a week later. Fortunately I was sedated during my time at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge so knew nothing about what had happened and the subsequent procedures. I was then transferred back to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital where I eventually started to recover, after catching Covid and contracting a bowel infection that was supposed to finish me, a change of doctor - long story - and a change in medication, and treatment.

The reason I mention all this was that what happened to me and what happens to other people if brain surgery is involved one suffers a change or loss, temporary or otherwise of faculties, memory, smell, taste.

At the time wine was not on the list of things I should be worrying about, far from it. Various tests and exercises brought about improvements in memory function. At first even my birthday was beyond recall and constant illusions muddied the progress - seeing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at the bottom of one’s bed as I did earlier is not to be recommended when you are trying to be positive!

After rehab home at last and the question of food that I could eat and the thorny question of what I could drink came to the forefront. The food was relatively easy: no spicy items, very little green stuff and a lot of trial and error was involved.

Now to the drinking. I was told no problem with wine in strict moderation, so I started to sample and the fun started.

At the start red wine caused problems so was cut out completely, later to be reintroduced a little at a time, so white wine was my staple, again in moderation.

All my long held preconceptions went out of the window. Some had no smell, some had no taste, those that did have one or both had changed completely from my inbuilt conception as to what they should taste or smell like. In many cases the taste or smell was amplified way beyond that which my memory could remember, particularly fruity reds such as certain Rhone varieties with matching sometimes glorious over the top aromas.

As for my extensive Riesling collection many, but not all of the trocken/dry wines became dull and lifeless and it became a case of suck it and see.

Two things came out of this for me. Firstly there was after a period of seeing where all this was going, i.e. would my tastes get back to something like the previous normal. They did with most foods, and did settle with wine, but not as before, so after much consideration I made the decision to sell all that which was obviously out of kilter with my new tastes. Out went what was left of my Bordeaux; I had previously off loaded nearly all my EP, en primeur, in storage, of the region anyway; Chianti tasted like battery acid and Barolo not far behind. The list is too long to expand on here but you get the picture. In whites many became just dull; for Riesling spätlese seems to be the sweet spot, no pun intended and buttery Chardonnays over the leaner versions, acidity over other components is now a no-go area, though not totally, which is strange.

The second part is interesting in that it assumes there is a right and wrong appreciation of wine virtues/values, but if I had been born with the appreciation of wine I have now my outlook and taste would be totally different from that which has guided me for the last fifty years. No longer can I say that such and such lacks x because now it doesn’t. Is it a dilemma? No, it is simply another’s view of the same product; in some ways I have been lucky to have two bites of the same cherry.

This is no different to the way the brain interprets sound and vision. Illusions cause the brain to come to different conclusions. It all brings the tasting both amateur and professional into focus: it matters not a jot what someone else says about a wine food music etc, it is what gives you pleasure at any given moment in time.

To finish a short story, my oldest fiend died of dementia recently in Adelaide, Australia. We had known each since we were five years old so it was a long relationship. In ‘95 my wife and I managed to get three months of holiday during the winter and went on a world wide trip including six weeks plus in Australia and stayed with my friend for three weeks-plus in Adelaide.

He was not into wine other than drinking it! but we stayed in the Barrosa for some days and visited some forty wineries in the Barossa and sub regions…

Back home the following Christmas a case of wine arrived from my friend from Oz. He knew little of wine but a friend of of his did so it was selected by the friend on his behalf. At the time it seemed a good idea if this was made an annual event, so a sum was agreed which I sent him and some suggestions for the case; wines unavailable here in the UK would be included.

This worked well for years but recently as the dementia took hold he started to make mistakes and his friend was longer involved, and the last case before I stopped the exercise showed why. Virtually the whole sum allocated was spent on one bottle, I had to make good the shortfall.

The bottle as below:

Out of curiosity I looked up to see if this was available in the UK, and B&B wine merchants have it at around £350 a bottle. I would never pay that for any wine, though in the past I pushed the boat out before wine prices hit the stratosphere.

Was it any good? A lot of hype surrounds it. In my current phase of appreciation the nose was phenomenal, a glorious sniffer; in the mouth for me it was a tier class Bordeaux so I’m probably not the best person to judge that aspect now, or maybe I am?

And yes it is a screw top.

Anyway a glass was raised to my old friend.

And a glass was raised to my consultant who explained it all to me.

It is now over three years since the operations so not much is likely to change now and I have to accept that my receptors have a different slant on the things and will remain that way. Not the end of the world, as I said earlier I should in many ways be grateful as certain wines and food that did nothing for in the past now are very acceptable. Funny old world.

Wiggia's Week: The lost ‘art’ of lying

 

Politics has always contained statements and speeches riddled with untruths, adjusted facts, downright lies and hypocrisy, being economical with the truth has become an art form. That of course was in the days when we had political figures who could carry all that off to a degree lost in today’s ‘amateur’ world of the current incumbents of Westminster.

The belief among them that nobody will notice their deliberate distortions is in the case of the current Labour government off the scale, lies are trotted out at such a rate that the use of u-turns to reverse the obvious faux pas, has everyone in a spin as daily we get fed evermore untrue and manipulated ‘facts’; even those with popularity ratings in the minus section continue to trot out the same garbage.

None of this is helped as the “here today, gone tomorrow” minnows in the political spectrum attempt to make a mark during the short tenure in a post, a post in most cases that they have absolutely no connection with in any form. They are all mediocre non-entities promoted above their abilities.

“Out of touch” is a phrase frequently lobbed in the direction of these nonentities that have by some strange means ended up in Parliament and even Cabinet positions. Nearly all have never had a job outside of politics or charity positions so it is not unexpected when they lie to cover their inadequacies having never had to deal with everyday living on a personal basis.

This recent interview with a former Labour supporter says it all about being out of touch. Not only was she a Labour supporter but he had visited her before, so a safe meeting, or so he thought. He didn’t like what she said about the changes in her area and resorted to his standard fall back phrase and called her racist, quite extraordinary that this person is leading (?) the country or supposed to be.

Much is made of the advisors and civil servants who do the heavy (?) lifting in the background as without them these inadequates would be no different to those cardboard cut-out figures one used to see outside of the likes of butcher’s shops and petrol stations - at least they served a purpose, to show the way in.

Our current PM is possibly the worst example of this genre. Not having the wit charm or guile to make any speech or statement believable he flounders and the following day makes things worse by either lying again or u-turning; in his case it is the total lack of any feel for what the nation thinks or believes. Surely his advisors cannot be of the same ilk to a man, but that is how it appears, they are all cut from the same cloth.

Albert RN - would anyone notice the difference if he was installed as PM?

Ed Miliband runs the PM close in the ‘economical’ stakes, he would be top if given more air time. His ‘the public will save £300 on energy bills’ has morphed into an increase of £150 and rising. Strangely he believes our most expensive energy costs, the highest in the western world, are the result of outside factors. These outside factors have no effect on any other countries to the same degree but we are supposed to swallow a blatant lie: his end of the world scenario is borne out by the science. We have heard it all before but he still spouts the same drivel. Naturally these ‘end of days’ statements have been official folk lore for a long time.

The Health Secretary and the PM have joined forces in lying about the millions of extra (?) appointments the NHS has provided this year, when if you speak to anyone who is waiting for any of the aforementioned they will tell you they have had cancellations and re-appointments a-go-go this year. I personally know of two recently that have had up to five cancellations for procedures in a short space of time, others have said similar. The only way you can get a firm date for a procedure is to arrive in the country in a dinghy and get your teeth fixed while you wait.

These people are not lied to. Agreements drawn up without the public’s consent see illegal migrants looked after with every detail fully adhered to, no lying in that area, but by now we know all that.

At all levels people tell porkies, as I said it is now so common that they can be seen through at first utterance. When Yasmin Alibhai Brown says she goes into pubs to argue with white people about how they are failing to integrate - I don’t think I believe her; when the Home Secretary talks as she did the other day about her many Jewish friends after the synagogue murders I don’t believe her.

When a recent Labour advisor during the Birmingham bin strike said that she knew what was behind the strike as she knew many bin men! she fell into the things that never happened category and lied.

TTK (Two Tier Keir)’s obsession, along with Blair about digital ID to stop the boats, was always just a fig leaf for other uses. He lied as a week on we have before being released, mission creep! Last week it was to stop the boats, now its bills and benefits, next week it’ll be your movement licence in and out of your 15 minute ghetto, followed by your carbon tracker and digital ration book plus how many of your Tesco Club points you can use on non-eco items.

This is her ‘frighten the children’ look

When Darren Jones, Labour minister, states on Question Time that 80% of the people on the boats coming across the channel are women and children! has he spent too much time in the sun? No one of sound mind could come out with that and expect to be believed; such a blatant lie.

Misleading is the replacement word used most. One would have to be very kind of heart to use that word in the situations shown and many others. The amount of misleading statements put out by our Chancellor are really just one gigantic lie, but then she lied about her CV so shame is another word that has been discarded.

It is very noticeable that when interviewed our Chancellor or her predecessors never have a real life accountant from the public sector that actually works daily in the sector interviewing them. Understandable really when the quality of those in charge is of such a low standard and that has been a trend for some years. When a lie becomes the stock answer to a problem we are in serious trouble, and we are.