Saving the NHS

Retail is detail, as the great shop managers say. So is medicine, but I’ll come to that in a moment.

In the latest GE campaign, the Left tried beating the Tories over the head with the NHS, again. That photo of the boy on a hospital floor was a good one, wasn’t it? Accusations of fake news from one side, of trolling on the other. All I’d observe from this report is that the hospital only apologised for having nothing but chairs to sit on rather than a trolley, so why the lad was on the ground is a puzzle.

I am also mystified by the empty gravity-feed drip bag lying uselessly across him - and tubes not attached to the nose in the second photo:

... especially since he was still waiting to be seen?

Yes, the NHS is under intense pressure. Partly because it can do much more than it used to; partly because demand then rises even faster than supply; partly because of drugs, drunkenness, quarrels ‘getting stabby’, self-harm and all the other symptoms of a country in moral crisis. And I certainly hold no brief for the chirpy Jeremy Hunt or his hapless successor, but the job description of Health Secretary appears to include ‘scapegoat’, as the Bethany case shows.

And yet, however much you spend, you still have to mind the shop. Let me give you an illustrative case history.

My good friend Jim (name changed) was driving a couple of family members somewhere when an idiot in a window-darkened fast car shot out of a side street at him. Having quick reflexes, Jim swerved clear but then hit a series of three unfilled potholes, jarring his spine. Though in his late seventies, Jim was fit and active – a keen archer – and so it was some time before the back pain intensified to the point where he was X-rayed and vertebral displacement discovered.

When you are old, the system writes you off. Jim told me his GP gave him three plan options, all of which amounted to palliative care. He was to slide bedridden down the helter-skelter into the slot, with painkillers to ease the way.

But Jim wasn’t a quitter, and was highly intelligent. He scoured the internet and found a surgeon able to do the operation to fix his back. It succeeded; now for the physio program to get him back on his feet. Jim was moved to another hospital for the recuperation phase.

The first thing was, Hospital Two took his bed – a highly specialised one – and swapped it for another that was shorter, so that his feet were constantly pressing against the end. There was a hoist next to him, to get him to a chair for a couple of hours each day as part of the rehabilitation program. A couple of times, the staff managed to bump his toes painfully in the process; and increasingly it seems, they just didn’t get him out of bed at all.

Jim had suffered from sleep apnoea for many years, and had a CPAP machine to pump air at night. But nurses tidying busily disturbed the mechanism, which then got blocked with its water. So when I first visited him in hospital he hadn’t slept for four nights. The nurses, often clustered around the workstation outside the ward, hadn’t noticed. I got that sorted, and in subsequent visits kept Jim supplied with newspapers and magazines to keep his active brain occupied; and a squeezy ball to exercise his slowly wasting arm muscles.  They were eventually tidied (thrown) away.

Jim didn’t feel safe there, and wanted to go home – and no, he wasn’t demented. So a fresh home care plan was made and he had an adjustable bed delivered, plus a hoist. But soon after that the family were told not to use the hoist, since they weren’t expert and his wife was about his age. Flat in bed he lay, muscles weakening and even a slight angling up becoming more challenging for him.

Then there was the drugs program. The first painkillers tended to have constipation as a side effect, so Jim was also given laxatives to counteract this. But then the pain prescription was changed yet the laxatives continued, causing constant and strength-sapping diarrhoea until the foul-up was realised.

Speaking of pharmaceuticals, there were some he had never had, and should have had. Jim’s X-ray from the year before had also shown a shadow on his liver; but the technician hadn’t noticed. This was the ‘cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’ that was heading his way. I asked Jim what they were giving him to fight the cancer: nothing.

I last saw him in the hospice – he lasted only a few days there. His passing was peaceful. But long premature.

I don’t think money alone would have solved all this. It needed the close attention of a Stuart Rose, or a Philip Green; detail managers. Semi-ignored plans and responsibility sign-offs aren’t enough.

Money, of course; but money employed to best effect.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Juletide Yazz, by JD

A Christmas selection for jazz lovers. Please note that the last video might be offensive to the puritanical youth of today as well as those who have had the statutory humour bypass (available free on the NHS):

A Trendy Moniker, by Wiggiatlarge

When I was young a double barrelled surname would indicate someone from the upper crust, rarely did the lower reaches of society lay claim to such a fancy moniker.

The origins of such grandiose surnames goes back in time to when in this country the second surname was incorporated for heritable reasons, when there was no male descendant bearing the name and otherwise it would have become extinct.

In other countries there are other reasons for double barrelled surnames but that does not concern us here.

The use of a hyphen in all cases is optional and at the discretion of the people involved. Some families have both the hyphenated and the non versions in another branch of the family; the non hyphen versions cause the most trouble as often the first of the two surnames is taken as a forename.

There are even triple and quadruple barrelled versions; almost all involved landed gentry consolidating estates by marriage.

Why would I be interested in this rather arcane practice? Well, strangely I have a brother whose son has a double barrelled surname. Why they inflicted that on him with my surname as it is, is a mystery, but the business name of my brother and his wife (they live in Switzerland) is double barrelled and they for reasons of their own have given the son not just the double barrelled surname but a forename he will not thank them for in his adulthood; strange world.

But the current trend in these surnames has exploded of late. Watching Match of the Day I could not help but notice the number of footballers with double barrelled surnames emblazoned with difficulty across the back of their shirts; it now seems every Premier League team has a least one in the eleven, some have two or more. I am not really sure why; perhaps it has something to do with the growing preference for adult 'partnerships' over formal marriage. It is almost as if the non-primary-carer parent is staking a claim by imposing this naming. I could be wrong but there is a prevalence in that group of players; one of the first I noticed was Arsenal player Ian Wright's son, Shaun Wright - Phillips; in this case it is for the purposes of identity as Ian has eight kids by four mums ! Plus Shaun was adopted, all very complicated.

But I would assume that is not the norm ? and is there now a trend in taking two surnames simply because you can. Football would be a natural proving ground for such a trend, perhaps the tattoos and ridiculous haircuts have had their day, and the more trendy footballers or their parents are looking for the next thing, double barrelled surnames. We have after all had plenty of celebrities lumbering their offspring with forenames that beggar belief: certain pop stars and the likes of Jamie Oliver showed complete disregard for their offspring, planting names on them that should never have seen the light of day and will provide ridicule for years ahead for the poor kids, you have to have a serious deficiency to do that to a child.

Of course in the USA they have had the strange habit of naming kids in subsequent generations with the same name as the father and as the generations also have children we get the addition of Roman numerals after the names, the second third fourth etc. God help us if this is revived and becomes trendy here and is tagged onto double barrelled surnames, footballers will have to have enough room on their shirts for a paragraph.

Having a surname that is unusual, well it is in the South, has its moments and I remember a man I worked with in the sixties whose surname was Badcock who spent his time on the phone pronouncing it as in Cockburn's Port; the problem was nobody ever approached him and said that, it must have been a nightmare.

Names can be fascinating. Often they have a historical context and are a rich source of the English language. But they also promote an image: who after all would go and see a film star called Bernard Schwartz (Tony Curtis), or Archibald Leach (Cary Grant)? Not quite the same ring to them there.

And I finish with an oft told true story from my misspent youth. One of my friends had the use of his governor's MK 10 Jaguar at the weekends, but only for himself and direct family, all else was forbidden. But this weekend it was decided that four of us including the driver would go up west and have a night out in said car. All went well, until returning home: just a hundred odd yards from where we all lived we were stopped by police for the obvious reason - it looked dodgy having four youths in such a car.

The usual questions were asked and the driver was near breakdown as he saw this as a way to lose his job having broken the rules of usage. Anyway it then got to the stage of wanting the names of all the occupants and one by one we furnished them: the driver was Irvin Levy, the next was George Archibald, the third was (later my best man when I married) Lew Finesilver - it was a very Jewish area, you may have gathered - and lastly myself, John Wigglesworth. Having reached myself the plain clothes officer threw his notebook down and said, “Stop f****** about, now give us your real names,” and threatened us bodily harm if we didn’t. After much protest I was allowed to hot foot it across the road to get proof of identity from my parents' flat and all was grudgingly accepted.

Names, they can get you into a lot of trouble !

Election Special, by JD

We know this is just another Whitehall Farce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_farce so there is no point in taking it seriously -











Dozens more at Dutch Wogan - not sure if any of these are libellous!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-DYnJtsTeIYL61yoQrp-0A

Pour yourself a wee dram and look forward to:

GE: Politicians Make A Monkey Out Of Us

On my doorstep stood the chimp and his trainer, asking for my vote. What issues were of concern to me? A referendum on the EU, I said (this was 2010). We had a referendum in 1975, said Bonzo. No! I replied, that was the EEC and we were told it was about trade. The Labour minder’s face – she was obviously the brains of the outfit - betrayed amusement at his ineptitude (Mark McCormack was right: always go into a meeting alone).

This was the first time in twenty years anyone from any party had called in person. Prior to 1997 I had been represented by a Labour grandee and the only time I saw or heard him was when he toured the constituency in a tannoy car to say so long and thanks for all the fish. Then the boundaries were redrawn and the (still rock-solid Red) seat was gifted to a London-based nebbish - even now I have had to Google to get his name.

All went well for the heir, even in 2001, by which time my feelings about Blair had hardened into certainty: Smiler was dangerously mad and so I protest-voted Tory for the first time in my life, not that it was going to make the slightest difference.

Some commenters on my last piece deplored British political tribalism and warned against PR because it breaks the link between an MP and his constituents. I completely agree – and yet, what link? No wonder I went by the headquarters organ-grinder: I never saw the monkey.

Until 2010: another Boundary Commission Etch-A-Sketch job and Lucky Boy was no longer in charge of me. So now a LibDem candidate turned up too, contemplating me owlishly. Issues? Europe: I sensed a sag, a weary contempt. But he got in, and when I emailed him in 2011 about sovereignty he replied ‘The EU has no power over parliament.  In fact the Lisbon Treaty included a change for a provision to leave the EU.  Parliament can simply refuse to incorporate EU law and in my view should be a bit more critical.’ I look forward to expert comment on that.

Aaand… back to the idea of service to constituents. In 2012 I tried to get him to ask a question at PMQs, about restoring public access to NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates. At this time I was still an IFA and was concerned that one of the first acts of a new “Conservative”-led coalition government was to pave the way for rogering the people’s money with inflation – which they did, as you will have seen since (only global recession has stopped it really taking off, to date).

Commenters talk about the electoral system being unfit for purpose. It’s worse than that: never mind the promotion, look at the product. The MP’s first response was to recast the query as an official letter, and the Treasury Lord who responded gave me two pages of what-we-are doing-for-savers guff that absolutely did not address the question. I responded, “It is not at all up to the standard that I would expect from a Treasury mind; in fact, it is little short of a disgrace,” and pressed for an oral question.

Well! Would you believe how hard it was to get a Tam Dalyell-type gimlet thrust at a Minister in the debating chamber? The correspondence ground on and almost a year later the MP’s researcher had drafted the following - I think it’s worth recording for posterity:

'To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what steps he has taken or plans to undertake to maintain the value of savings against increased inflation or devaluations of the pound, if he has given thought to the taxation of savings by the Exchequer in various forms putting off individuals from saving some of their earned income by eroding the investments value, if he shares a concern that efforts to tax the small scale saved income of individuals to rescue financial institutions, such as measures debated by the Cypriot Parliament recently as part of the European Union’s and International Monetary Funds’ bailout terms undermine general confidence and what measures he can or will take to reassure individual savers that their investment will not be used to rescue institutions which have grossly mismanaged their affairs and thus be penalised, via the reduction of the value of their savings, for the mistakes of risk takers on a systemic financial level.’

Most amusing. Of course, it never happened and was never going to, though my representative was happy enough to ask other questions of interest to him and to strain Parliamentary privilege while he was about it. I suppose he was reluctant to sow discord in the Con-LibDem love-match then ongoing.

Let’s face it, whoever you get and however you get them (AV is my preference), who are they going to listen to: an electorate misinformed and manipulated once every five years, or the bosses and buddies they encounter every working day in Westminster?

I do like the suggestion of MP recall – perhaps an ‘annual performance examination (APE)’?

Meanwhile, good luck selecting your own!

A choice between traitors - new post on "The Conservative Woman"

Yesterday's Broad Oak post has been published - very slightly edited - on The Conservative Woman:

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/labour-traitors-v-tory-traitors-the-choice-were-stuck-with/

Brexit and Electoral Reform

As BoJo approaches the polls, brandishing his hastily amended May’s Withdrawal Agreement – still toxic, even with the mould scraped off - Nigel Farage considers rebranding (repurposing?) his party as the Reform Party.

Political reform is an unfinished work. Pall Mall’s Reform Club was founded after the 1832 Act, not before; it was intended as a counter to the Carlton, one of whose founding members the Duke of Wellington opposed both the Act and the extension of the right to vote (when his men cheered him at Waterloo he said it came dangerously close to an expression of opinion). The Reform is now merely a social venue but it is high time it recovered its radical role; perhaps Farage should be invited to the relaunch.

Because boy, is he right. If the Tory party gets its way, then to paraphrase Churchill, their Faux Brexit is not even the beginning of the beginning, let alone the end of it. We’re stuck with a hard choice: a Labour Party that betrayed the working class, or a Conservative Party that betrayed the whole country (never forget who first got us into this mess). The latter are no more freedom’s friend than the former.

For despite the sloganising, we are in a battle not to recover democracy, but to establish it for the first time. Westminster is manifestly not the voice of the People: remember that Parliament’s Civil War against the King ignited the Putney Debates, but when Rainsborough argued:

‘I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sir, I think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.’

... he spoke in vain: Cromwell’s mindset was ‘when we stood for liberty, we weren’t thinking of you morons,’ and not much has changed since then.

Yes, we’ve come a long way from the Old Sarum of 1802, a constituency with an electorate of merely eleven people yet entitled to two MPs, all of whom including the voters were nominated by the landowner.

But as the franchise – universal for under a century – has widened, the struggle to nullify it has become more systematic, and First Past The Post has been one of the greatest tools. Largely thanks to FPTP, 65 seats have stayed with the same Party since WWI and 192 since WWII; yet in some two-thirds of Parliamentary seats, the MP is returned with a minority of votes cast. For example, theoretically with an even three-way split the victor needs only to win 34%.

So we have a large industry built around identifying and persuading ‘the swing voter in the swing seat’; the reward of the loyal moron is to be taken for granted. All that counts is computerised psephology and tailored messaging: pinpoint-accurate bulldung.

The system is so skewed that on average, the UK voter’s pencil cross is only about 30% effective – check how much power you have in your own constituency here. And so much depends on voter concentration: as of 6 December, Political Calculus predicts that with 3.7% of the nation’s votes the SNP will gain 44 seats (6.8% of the House of Commons total), whereas the Brexit Party with 3.1% of the votes will get nothing.

The arrangement suits the major parties very well, of course. What upset the apple cart was holding a Referendum where every person’s vote counted equally so that a white-faced elite has had to firefight an unwanted result. It turns out that the ‘fruitcakes and loons’ were the ones on the green benches, and an unappetising if edifying spectacle they have made of themselves ever since.

And how they fought against the Alternative Vote in 2011, that mess of pottage for which Nick Clegg sacrificed his university fees pledge and his own credibility. Yet 80 years earlier, AV was exactly what Parliament wished to introduce – the Bill passed in the Commons - being thwarted only by the fall of the National Government.

Until we get a fairer system of representation, in my constituency I could vote for the Man in the Moon, but I’d still get Labour.

And until then, what is the legitimacy of a government without the equitable consent of the people?