Saturday, August 21, 2021

WEEKENDER: The poor quality of our representatives, by Wiggia


Yvette Cooper - I always thought with that name she was a cross between a cheap Vauxhall and a Mini Cooper - was reliably typical as she implored the government to include everyone in Afghanistan who want to come here to be allowed to, as she has on every other occasion there has trouble in the Middle East and elsewhere. She did this with her best impression of a wronged-woman-face on. This comes after a day of word soup from our? representatives who would welcome anyone without checks into this country. This has been one of the worst displays of faux concern from a bunch of people that in the main are not fit to run a bath.

Why it is thought necessary to have a full day of these endless speeches, most of which as I said just repeat endlessly on the virtue theme, is a mystery. Is it a type of mutual- and self-flagellation - 'we were all so wrong but that lot were more wrong' or is it the case that if they all gather and repeat the same thing they somehow believe that the outside world will see them in a different light? The irony is that hardly anyone watches these parliamentary debates, so in reality they are virtue-signalling to themselves.

Up to our ears in debt, policies on almost everything that will impoverish the nation further, a health service no longer fit for purpose, laws being put in place at the bequest of minority woke lunatics, minorities of all colours being given preference on all things ahead of the indigenous tax paying population, law and order collapsing among the untouchable minorities etc etc, yet they spend a day scoring political points in an attempt to appear virtuous.

The only certainty from their day in the spotlight is the guarantee we will add untold thousands to the welfare bill and they will be fighting for hotel rooms with the dinghy people. When you add the dependants that will follow and the others who will follow the dinghy route, we will be filling small? towns up or the equivalent on a monthly basis. Yvette of course is well known for her generosity in taking in refugees (sarc) so we shouldn’t feel we are not all in this together the next time one of these children with beards goes on the rampage and kills or rapes someone; after all, 'lessons have been learned.'

The paucity of our representatives was today put on display for the nation. There was never a better example of why we should not vote for the vast majority of them and the bankrupt parties they all represent. The future for us? There isn't one any of us would want coming out of that place.

In the USA Joe Biden has surfaced to put on one of the most appalling displays of defence over a totally failed exit strategy in Afghanistan, blaming all and sundry for his obvious errors; and then twenty-four hours later, or five days according to Joe, he doubles down on the same strategy and again blames everything and everyone else.

Boris has put himself in a hard place as from the start he has brown-nosed Biden and followed the 'net zero', 'build back better', 'Great Reset' line, which now looks discredited, it always was, and as with the rest of European leaders he has been ignored. No good talking of being disappointed in the leadership of the USA in this one when you have failed to speak out about other obvious inadequacies that have emanated from the White House ever since Biden took charge. Bojo’s address to the house was as bad as all that which followed.

Today we have had two of our own talking total b*****. Firstly our defence minister Ben Wallace almost repeating word for word what Biden said: if nothing else you would have thought that seeing the hammering Biden was justly getting he might just have revised his interpretation for his own sake, but no he also seems to think that what happened had nothing to do with any strategy, if there was one, and everything to do with the Taliban moving to fast, so in fact it was the Taliban's fault all along.


One got the impression from this he was fishing for the feeling-sorry-for-him vote, such was the humble ‘we could do nothing’ stance throughout.

And then we had our Chief of Defence Staff Sir Nick Carter coming out with all sorts of woke platitudes in this interview including what I hope will be for him forever remembered as his words, “the Taliban are just country boys” - all that was going on outside the perimeter fence was just joshing, was it?

https://news.sky.com/story/afghanistan-taliban-cooperating-with-uk-forces-and-not-behaving-in-medieval-way-says-chief-of-defence-staff-12384312

Obviously the reports of the chopping off of hands in the provinces and the killings outside the airport perimeter fence had passed him by, such is the state of our intelligence, and he has never read or heard anything contrary to his woke bumbling, such as this from a woman in Afghanistan in 1999:

"Living under the rule of the Taliban regime is like being in an abusive relationship. At first it's good. They make lots of promises, they watch their steps, they even deliver on some of their promises. But while you are being lulled into a false sense of security, they are making their plans.”

Or the reports that the Taliban are now starting to look for collaborators.

https://thepostmillennial.com/taliban-reportedly-conducting-door-to-door-searches-in-kabul-for-us-collaborators

And this man is Chief of Defence, God help us.

Meanwhile the deputy leader of the Greens, one Amelia Womack, behind 'five homes' Caroline Lucas

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/01/09/caroline-do-as-i-say-not-do-lucas/

- made an appearance on Talk Radio where she managed to maintain a smug 'I know better' face for the entire duration of the interview; nyone who has seen Lucas interviewed will have observed the same trait, it’s a Green thing:


See from 2.03 in; she manages to make everything a party political broad cast without ever answering the obvious questions and elephants in the room; they never do.

She is another who has never had a proper job and despite her prominence in the Green party only managed 2.1% of the vote when she stood in the general election last time, hardly a mandate to pontificate to the rest of us how we should live or the direction the planet should be heading in, yet again as with all minorities however small they get more of a say than the majority who really don’t want to be told they will have to pay much more for less, by someone who, I repeat, has never worked in the true sense.

These are just some of those in the spotlight at the moment in the UK and the USA. it has often been said that it takes a crisis to show what leaders are made of; there can be no doubt the current crisis shows we have no one of any value in the top jobs, a vacuum of talent and common sense prevails.

As a bit of light relief: the Daily Mail is on the story about the Australia v Afghanistan test match to be held in November that is ‘likely’ to be cancelled, as good a prophecy as any I suspect. At moments like this it is good to know the press have their finger on the pulse.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9900389/Historic-cricket-test-match-Australia-Afghanistan-likely-cancelled.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490

Friday, August 20, 2021

FRIDAY MUSIC: 'Nine' Songs, by JD

 Last week Mr S. asked "Nine this time ! Is this numerologically significant ?"

I wasn't aware that I was posting nine songs so often, it just happens subconsciously I suppose. But when I looked it was surprisingly easy to find the number nine occurring so often in popular song so here are nine songs celebrating 9.nine.neuf.neun.nueve.nove!

1) #9 DREAM. (Ultimate Mix 2020) John Lennon w The Plastic Ono Nuclear Band


2) THE CLOVERS - ''LOVE POTION NO.9'' (1959)


3) The Blues Brothers - Riot in Cell Block Number Nine (Official Audio)


4) Number Nine -John Martyn


5) Engine Engine Number Nine Roger Miller with Lyrics


6) T-ARA[티아라] "NUMBER NINE [넘버나인]" M/V


7) Paul Ansell's Number Nine - Red light


8) Wilson Pickett - Get Me Back On Time Engine Number 9


9) Wreck Of The No 9 Hank Snow with Lyrics

Thursday, August 19, 2021

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 19 August 1961

 At #5 this week is Petula Clark's 'Romeo':

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

13 August: The first move is made to construct the Berlin Wall - a barbed wire barrier: 

East German soldiers, left, set up barbed-wire barricades at the border separating East and West Berlin on August 13, 1961. West Berlin citizens, right, watch the work.
This photo and others of the Wall over time can be found here: 


14 August: East African Kikuyu rebel Jomo Kenyatta is released from prison. In 1963 Kenya becomes an independent State, Kenyatta its first Prime Minister, and in 1964 its first President.


19 August: Harvard professor Timothy Leary delivers a lecture in Copenhagen titled 'How To Change Behavior.' It is inspired by his experience of taking the psychedelic drugs psilocybin and LSD, both legal in the United States at that time. His first taste of 'magic mushrooms' was twelve months before in Cuernavaca, some 50 miles south of Mexico City; he called it 'the deepest religious experience of my life.' 
    Also at the Copenhagen conference is the English writer Aldous Huxley, who had been experimenting with mescaline since 1954 and who speaks before Leary - a transcript of his talk entitled 'Visionary experience' can be found here: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/visionary-experience (htp: this blog.) Both lectures are later published together in one volume, in 1963: https://www.lornebair.com/pages/books/46531/drugs-aldous-huxley-timothy-leary/visionary-experience-and-how-to-change-behavior . Huxley also uses LSD and takes two doses while he is dying, two years later on 22 November 1963.
    Huxley has been invited to the conference by Richard Alpert, who is working with Leary on the Psilocybin Project at Harvard (both professors are later dismissed, in 1963.) In 1967 Alpert, continuing his spiritual search, travels to India and meets a Hindu guru called Neem Karoli Baba who persuades him to give up drugs and renames him Ram Dass, with a mission to help others on their quest.
    Roughly coincidentally in time and place, Cuernavaca is also the place where Roman Catholic priest and radical thinker Ivan Illich founded his Centre for Intercultural Formation (CIF), originally a training centre for missionaries to Latin America (incorporated March 3, 1961.)


UK chart hits, week ending 12 August 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm


1

You Don't Know

Helen Shapiro

Columbia

2

Well I Ask You

Eden Kane

Decca

3

Johnny Remember Me

John Leyton

Top Rank

4

Halfway To Paradise

Billy Fury

Decca

5

Romeo

Petula Clark

Pye

6

Reach For The Stars / Climb Every Mountain

Shirley Bassey

Columbia

7

A Girl Like You

Cliff Richard and The Shadows

Columbia

8

Time

Craig Douglas

Top Rank

9

Pasadena

The Temperance Seven

Parlophone

10

Hello Mary Lou / Travellin' Man

Ricky Nelson

London

11

You Always Hurt The One You Love

Clarence 'Frogman' Henry

Pye

12

Temptation

The Everly Brothers

Warner Brothers

13

Quarter To Three

The U.S. Bonds

Top Rank

14

Runaway

Del Shannon

London

15

Don't You Know It

Adam Faith

Parlophone

16

The Frightened City

The Shadows

Columbia

17

Cupid

Sam Cooke

RCA

18

The Writing On The Wall

Tommy Steele

Decca

19

That's My Home

Acker Bilk

Columbia

20

How Many Tears

Bobby Vee

London

Monday, August 16, 2021

Health vs medicine and pharma, by JD

 "...if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be so much the better for mankind – and all the worse for the fishes."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art." 
-translated from Greek by Francis Adams (1849) https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hippocratic-oath

Following on from Wiggia's splendid diatribe against the NHS (not his first and probably not the last!) I shall try to add some further thoughts from a slightly different perspective. I was recently a 'guest' of the NHS after feeling unwell with what I thought was some form of chronic fatigue https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-cfs/

This 'fatigue' turned out to be a previously unsuspected heart condition and so I was carted off to hospital for treatment. Three hospitals later (one of them just as a day visitor) I can say with absolute certainty that the NHS is itself terminally ill and its demise cannot be far away!

The Hippocratic Oath referred to above mentions the word 'art' in several places. I was once told by a doctor that they no longer have to 'swear the oath' which is a serious error in my view because that word 'art' is important and is why the oath remains valid. Doctors and nurses are engaged in the art of healing, helping the body to heal itself because that is what the immune system does. It will need help occasionally in the form of pills and potions but unfortunately the medical profession distrusts the uncertainty that is inherent in the 'art of healing' and pretend that 'science' can provide a certainty of outcomes, conveniently forgetting that every person is different and not all patients will respond exactly the same way to whatever treatment is administered. Doctors now follow a mechanical philosophy that people are nothing more than machines and can be mended in the same way that any other machine can be fixed. Doctors have forgotten, in other words, the importance of what used to be called the 'bedside manner' To quote Voltaire - "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

Whether the doctor has a positive or negative attitude is important because this is unconsciously picked up by the patient and could affect the rate of recovery; it is essential to encourage optimism in the patient. If the doctor does not exude confidence in the end result, how can the patient have any faith in his or her 'healer'? (Voltaire also said "Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all," but it is not a good idea to tell patients that!)

My month or so in hospital left a few lasting impressions. It was cold in all three! Perhaps it is just me because I really don't like being cold, at home I have the heating on most of the time. But being cold in hospital meant the nurses had difficulty in taking blood samples from my veins which had mostly withdrawn to seek inner warmth! And the air conditioning, which is another of my pet hates, meant that the atmosphere in the wards was very dry adding to the problem of taking blood samples. None of the blood pressure machines appeared to be working properly, more often than not showing error messages. To be fair they do get some rough treatment being dragged around from ward to ward and between beds. I wonder how many plastic aprons they use in a day? Nurses and doctors would go to the dispenser and tear off an apron from a roll. They would the wear that apron for the brief visit to a patient after which the apron and sometimes gloves would be discarded into the special hazardous waste bin. How many aprons? Why is Xtinction Rebellion not kicking up a fuss about all that plastic being thrown away? Or is it going into an incinerator?

But the most vivid memory was of the food. It was disgusting! I did not see a single piece of fresh fruit bar the occasional banana. Somehow I managed to get a bacon sandwich but I wish I hadn't bothered. There was no butter on the bun, nothing not even margerine and the bacon itself had been purged of fat leaving a very dry slice of tasteless bacon. Verily, a cardboard sandwich!

In the comments to Wiggia's post, Sobers makes some very sound suggestions for ways to reform the NHS or even to start again with a new way of treating the sick. But that would be to continue the current system which is not really interested in having a healthy populace. The pharmaceutical companies need a market for their products so there is no future in curing people of whatever it is that ails them.

It is better, of course, not to become ill in the first place. A friend of mine always used to say "Doctors are best avoided!" until he needed a doctor which he did one day in dramatic fashion: he walked into the A&E department of his local hospital and promptly collapsed onto the floor. "That's one way of jumping the queue!" I told him and he agreed because he saw the funny side too. Fortunately he recovered after a bit of surgical violence, a kidney operation.

Prevention should come from what I call 'psychosomatic wellness' instead of 'psychosomatic illness.' Dr Bruce Lipton has a book called The Biology of Belief and he has many videos with that theme on YT. Dr Joe Dispenza also has many videos on a similar theme. But as my chiropractor once told me "There is no money in that!" meaning the pharmaceutical companies would not be able sell their snake oil to the NHS!

--------------------------
References:
"The Biology of Belief" by Dr Bruce Lipton https://www.brucelipton.com/books/biology-of-belief/
"The Master and his Emissary" by Dr Iain McGilichrist https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western/dp/0300188374
"You Are The Placebo" by Dr Joe Dispenza http://www.youaretheplacebo.com/
----------------------------------------------------------

Sunday, August 15, 2021

The wrong problem

The United Nations has sounded a ‘code red for humanity’ on climate change https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/un-sounds-clarion-call-over-irreversible-climate-impacts-by-humans-2021-08-09/ . There is a well-funded majority consensus among scientists that the globe is warming; not so much money, or liberty to speak, for the minority opinion.

What are we to do?

We in the UK have certainly done quite a lot. Governments of both colours have watched as our manufacturing industry shrivelled while the production was moved abroad. The service sector was already 69% of the economy in 1990, but grew further to 80% by 2018; manufacturing output over the same period fell from 17.3% to 9.9%. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01942/SN01942.pdf

I do not think we are going to maintain an advanced economy and generous welfare state by taking in each other’s washing; but then, I’m not an economist, unlike the 20,000 professionals who failed to foresee the Global Economic Crisis.

China, on the other hand, has seen its industrial production grow by an average 11.2% per annum since 1995 https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/industrial-production-index-growth and they are not going to stop. Their vast country has a long history of collapse and fragmentation and like a fox with its tail on fire, they have to keep running. We must assume that they do not wish to pollute the air and build up CO2 for the hell of it, but the need for momentum leaves them little choice; the coal-fired power stations will continue to be built apace. https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissions-china-goes-on-a-coal-spree

Transition to less polluting and more sustainable forms of energy production are worthy objectives, but it is obvious there will be huge costs involved in the changeover; costs that a steadily weakening economy like ours may not be able to bear.

We also need to look at physical reality instead of the fictions of GDP and the magic money forest that is papering over the irrationality of our privileged normal life. A 2015 article in Forbes by energy writer James Conca analysed Energy Returned On Investment, or EROI (alternatively, Energy Returned on Energy Invested – EROEI). https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-tool-to-predict-the-best-energy-mix/ This looks at how much energy it takes to make a unit of energy – a difficult calculation, because you have to work out everything involved, from soup to nuts. Conca find the returns on coal and gas are great (though they have a limited future); solar, biomass and wind not so much, especially when you factor in the cost of energy storage. Oh, for the days when oil simply gushed out of the ground !

Doubtless technological improvements will raise the EROI, but even then it does not look as though renewables – even if they could satisfy all our energy needs – can come close to competing with nuclear power (with its dangers) or hydroelectric (for countries with lots of mountains and water.)

It looks as though all our Western agonizing over energy is not going to stop excess global CO2 emissions anytime soon – assuming that humans are the major factor in this, rather than, say, vulcanism.

We seem to have forgotten the lesson of King Canute: we can’t stop the tide coming in, but we can move further inland. That is, instead of trying to ‘save the world’ (what godlike arrogance!) we should think how best to save ourselves. If sea levels are going to rise, why are we still allowing property developers to build on flood plains? If we are going to get longer spells of hot weather, why are we allowing our population to grow when our freshwater supplies are limited? If our crop production is affected by heat, or even by cold if Europe cools instead – a possibility, if the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort Gyre collapses https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-a-wayward-arctic-current-could-cool-the-climate-in-europe - was it a good idea for the UK’s strategic food stockpile to have been scrapped in 1995? https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/strategic-food-stockpile/

In short, why are we not working urgently, long and hard on contingency plans and structural changes to reduce our vulnerability to shocks in the logistical systems that supply us with the essentials of life?

Saturday, August 14, 2021

WEEKENDER: The Future of Health Care, by Wiggia

     

This is an advert pre-Covid from one NHS trust trying to sound as though they would actually act on any changes suggested by the public. It is so disingenuous, because nothing ever comes from these surveys. The only item assured of continuance and probably enlargement is the ‘communications team’ that put it together. In the real world the public just want the NHS to do what they are paid for, to protect and treat us, not self-serve.

I have just had a hip replacement at my own expense, with a lead-in time including consultant of 38-40 months. I had to make a decision on the quality of the life I have left. I was fortunate to be able to afford the quicker route or would have ended up in a wheelchair. One has to question after an experience like that the future of health care in this country in its current form.

I have written as have many others before, on the perilous state of the NHS but my short time in a private hospital revealed ever more that professionals in the health care business are not shy any more in sharing their opinions. Not many years ago any criticism would have been greeted with a blank stare or a condescending smile and the words ‘but it is free’.

That last phrase has been a get out of jail card for the NHS for far too long, and latterly so has ‘because of covid’; of course it is not free, we all pay for it in taxes.

The problem - and it becomes ever more obvious - is we have no say in how our money is spent or how the NHS is run and above all we have no choice, something all the other decent health services do have. This you would think would suggest something to those that run this unwieldy monolith.

What has happened since the virus arrived and all else was closed down to combat the virus is horrendous. The waiting lists for care of all sorts is so long now as to be incomprehensible - thirteen million is the current number being spouted - and that is ever growing as despite all the platitudes about getting the lists down they are still increasing as the NHS is still running under Covid restrictions making normal targets and reductions a thing of fantasy.

Covid itself has also become the go-to excuse for doing nothing. Any phone call, and not just to the NHS, will be greeted with the words ‘we are currently receiving high rates of calls because of the virus but hang in there as your call is valuable to us.’ Not really valuable or they would answer the bloody phone; the ‘ because of the virus’ preamble has proved to be a terrific excuse to ignore patients and is continuing to be so.

I am not going to repeat what I think about GP services. They are in many cases non-existent. Our ‘medical centre’ had two people including my wife waiting in a thirty-person area to see a doctor last week and the same nurse area also had two waiting. Despite having a large, mainly unused building, they are not even doing the vaccine jabs; the small pharmacy attached is doing those. There is something very wrong and all this pre-dates the virus; it is almost as though the virus has been used to finally trash what was a health service in decline anyway, this being the most visible aspect.

It is interesting how the NHS is using media such as television to push a vision of how hard they have worked over the last eighteen months and how now they are doing the same to rectify the total basket case the NHS in certain areas has become.

Only this morning (August 11) on BBC breakfast an enthusiastic GP brought in to give advice on whether pregnant women should have the jab went into contortions when asked about how busy they are now. ‘Oh terribly busy, still dealing with virus cases, trying hard to reduce the backlog' etc. I would really like to know where her surgery was: it does not relate to any round here which are still using the virus as an excuse to do virtually nothing and show no signs of upping their game anytime soon. They seem to have found a way of taking the same money for even less work than pre-Covid and that was not a good scenario, in fact it is a disgraceful con of the public purse.

It would be easy to repeat all the endless faults, some of which would probably be criminal in the outside world, that the NHS has managed to perpetuate during and before the virus. The virus merely accentuated the already evident problems, but that has been done to death. If anyone doesn’t get what has been happening to our ‘finest in the world’ health service in recent times they have either not had to deal with it or live in this bubble where the NHS is held in some sort cult status.

Every criticism is normally answered by saying what heroes they were, the pressure they have been under during the virus, they all deserve unlimited pay rises and shopping discounts forever, etc. The truth is very different: front line staff did step up to the plate, did the work and the hours, but they had nothing else to contend with as the rest of the NHS shut down; and how many front line staff out of the 1.3-5 million employed by the NHS were actually involved? A question never answered.

What did become obvious was that those not on the front line, the vast majority, were at home. GPs (my particular bête noir) and doctors are prolific round here as we are not far from the main area hospital; virtually all were at home for months and even on return were not working normal hours. Of course if you shut down a service to deal with one problem that is not a fault of theirs but it does rather dilute the myth about everyone being heroes, not that I can find that word appropriate for people doing the job they are paid for in the first place.

I am just going to give some of the answers I got from health professionals while in a private hospital and before anyone says ‘well they would say that wouldn’t they’ remember virtually all the senior doctors etc. work in the NHS for the majority of their time, or we presume so.

Not many years ago it would be difficult to pry anything from the same people, such was the blind loyalty to the organisation; not so today and not the last time I was in a NHS hospital four years ago, even there it was changing.

The variety of views was interesting as were the solutions, though not so many of those, and in that I concur: in the short term there is no solution. The juggernaut even if willing will take a lot of turning, so what wants changing first? Good question.

The one item above all others that came up in various forms last time I was a patient and also this time is the woeful state of primary care. It was not that many years ago that primary care was given priority in the government's health plans/reform; the minister concerned made much of how this would relieve the strain on hospitals and save money by pre-empting expensive long care conditions. It was also said with ‘conviction’ that everyone should have the choice of doctor and surgery to use.
Bluntly, it was either a lie or the minister was p****** in the wind as no more was heard or done on those two essential fronts, and this is before the GP shortage became a problem.

I will say it again: the GP section of the NHS is in the majority of cases and growing, not fit for purpose. As my anaesthetist said at my pre-op, you now need two GPs to do the work of one because so many are part time.

This of course goes back to the ludicrous ‘you can have what you want’ contract under the Blair government which absolves GPs from out of hours work and weekends. This in turn has slowly loaded A&E with work that GP surgeries should be doing and the hospital workers have voiced this fact for some time, but it increases, with surgeries even trying to offload their work as they did with me four years ago, expecting the hospital to do the regular blood tests needed, after I was discharged; only a stern warning from a very insistent senior nurse that they would be reported achieved a change of mind.

Add in the fact that many older GPs are retiring early because of taxation problems over pensions (we should be so lucky, to have pensions that large) and you have this set up with not enough staff to do the job even if they worked full time (and none of them do, though they still earn even on a three day week - if that is what they really do, we don’t know - up to 130k, a figure not plucked from the air but gleaned from a friend of one such GP.)

There is a way of changing some of that as suggested by the health professionals and others who have put their heads above the parapet: they should not be paid for the number of patients on their books as present and then ignore them, but on each face to face consultation; that just might concentrate their minds as to why they are there in the first place. They are not doing us a favour, they are paid by us to perform a service which currently and for some time they haven’t been.

Whatever the faults in the NHS beyond primary care - GPs - it is currently adding fuel to the fire by its failure to do its job.

We are constantly told the NHS is short-staffed, lack of front line staff is causing problems in carrying out their statutory duties. The official figures show, as I referenced in an earlier piece, that the NHS has had an increase of around 5% per annum for the last two years; no small beer. If they are short-staffed - and figures of doctor-patient ratios show we are as nation behind our western neighbours, as we are with available hospital beds - then one asks the question, how does an organisation which is the fourth largest employer on the planet explain that fact?

The management of the NHS have for years run the organisation for themselves. Even governments are reduced to throwing money at it for it just to stand still or go into reverse. Unless whichever government is in power orders a root and branch reform we will continue to pay for an ever-diminishing service.

I think most thinking people find it obscene to see the NHS still advertising high-paying jobs as diversity officers, advertising and getting involved in what we eat, having input into how parks and playing fields are used, endless advertising on how we can save the NHS, when we who pay for it all (and I have to keep banging on about that as so many believe it really is free, including many who work in it) only want to be able to see a GP at a time that suits us, not them.

In many cities - and again this comes from the horse's mouth - A&E s are swamped with people who have no right to access the health service at all: they are illegal migrants who cannot sign on with a GP as they have no social security number but can rock up with whatever complaint to A&E and be seen free of charge - for them, it is indeed free.

When - rarely - the scale of the international influx that comes here to fleece our NHS is put to health ministers, it is dismissed as an insignificant amount and a small figure is produced. How they can arrive at any figure as these recipients have no papers and are invisible is a mystery, but whatever it is it sucks needed money from those that pay for the service and diminishes the service itself.

Much was heard about how the NHS should be funded and what the NHS should provide. If you cut it all to the nub, the NHS cannot at this moment of time fulfil all its obligations, that is painfully obvious, so going forward what should it be? The consensus opinion was of a slimmed-down NHS providing basic entry level care, emergency cover and a more elementary hospital service. Even with that brief, currently the NHS would struggle, but trying to be all things to all men without drastic change in the way it is funded and run, that is all it can currently manage. It certainly can no longer manage its current portfolio.

Worldwide, health services are struggling; people living longer and new technological advances in health care put ever more pressure on those services. We can all accept that and the population explosion continues, all create problems on top of the day to day running; all the more reason for a total re-think on the way our NHS is run and funded.

That is assuming the way it is run can be changed. Let's have no little trust fiefdoms, no trusts spending on vanity projects, no ploughing on with expensive failures such as the IT project and no unsupervised outsourcing and purchasing, no woke trust boards more concerned with the make up of staff than the treatment of patients and no more world service of any sort; let's dispense with senior managers who would wreck the careers of whistleblowers; and let's reduce overall both the numbers and pay of middle management - not surprisingly a graph that showed the rise of middle management numbers since the inception of the NHS has disappeared, I failed to bookmark it a couple of years back but the increase was staggering.

One thing I didn’t fail to bookmark was the unbelievable amount of money required for negligence claims:


This was something of a cause célèbre for the late blogger and writer Anna Raccoon: not without reason she could see no sense in the ever-rising payments that had to be taken from the care bill. We seem to have gone the American route by being evermore litigious in this area; rightly, poor decisions that affect the life of someone should be compensated, but the sums involved now are eye-watering, enough to sustain a couple of third world countries; there is either gross neglect going on in the NHS or the lawyers are driving a coach and horses through current rulings in the matter; either way, we the public pay and the service is further diminished.

And there is the obscene waste of funds for a problem they never seen to resolve: the locum, a breed of doctor who using market forces bleed the NHS of very large amounts of much needed cash. The same applies to the rise in agency nurses. In both cases the majority were NHS employees before they saw a way of increasing their earnings by margins that could never be achieved by remaining within the organisation; in many cases it has reached obscene levels of pay. It's not easy to blame people for finding a loophole that allows them to do the same work for hugely increased monetary rewards, who wouldn’t do it? But it shows no signs of being rectified.

Funding is probably the sticking point. No government wants to touch the NHS in any way that will harm their perceived handling of the organisation. If you throw money at it, it disappears but for a temporary period makes you look as though you care, and for years that is how it has been. It doesn’t work, the money is never enough, even if all the PFI projects were paid off they would still want more for doing the same; the whole thing has reached level stupid.

You can take two routes on finance in my book. 

The first as above is to reduce the NHS's offering to a more basic but functioning service; the suggestions I heard here are for people to pay extra for any other treatments. I even heard from a surgeon ‘people should give up buying a new car and pay for a procedure instead’ - fine, but what if you cannot access that sort of money? In the current climate the howls about unfairness would be heard the length and breadth of the country, and the exemptions would grossly outnumber those that would be expected to pay, nullifying the whole exercise, in the same way that fewer and fewer people pay council tax and the slack is taken up by those who do; is that fair? In a Marxist society yes, maybe that is what people want, I have no idea any more. I see no future for that route for all those reasons; a minefield of compromise awaits.

No solution is perfect. There has to be a safety net in healthcare but not one that can be permanently abused. The poll tax faced a fate worse than death by having very poor parameters to paying; if it had been introduced with a small charge for the lowest earners it would have succeeded and been a much better system than the current council tax which is now going the same way as the long-gone rates system, forever upwards for the minority who pay it. There was a general feeling that a change has to come. 

The second route is insurance. Few weaned on the NHS wanted to suggest anything really different but a few agreed the most likely and fair way forward was the insurance element. There are two reasons for this: firstly, in other countries, including most of those with a decent health service, it seems largely to work. Nothing is ever going to be perfect but this system in its many guises offers choice and a say in your own treatment, something totally missing from our own.

It also means competition within the insurance area to keep prices competitive, not as now where tendering seems to be done in house and behind closed doors, hence so much waste. Waste is always easy when you are not accountable and the money is someone else's.

In some countries, in a situation such as I have had where the national service cannot deliver, you can get treatment elsewhere and then get a refund of all or part of the price. Why not? You have already paid for their treatment as has everyone else over a lifetime; why should you pay twice when easing the waiting list at the same time for someone else. You are not just helping yourself, but by paying up front you are helping the system. Needless to say that view was not popular though I never heard why. The NHS focuses on the issues of all being equal and the problem of whether you could afford the treatment; they think that however the money was created you are so so fortunate; the upside is lost on them.

So there you have it, my small take on the way forward. No doubt other suggestions can go in the mix, but it all matters not unless a government grows some spine and is prepared to take this sacred cow by the horns and wrestle it to the floor where at the moment it belongs.

To finish, a short Carry on Doctor moment from my short hospital stay: as most people who take pain killers know, cocodamol taken over time causes constipation  and I have been taking it for over six months with results that can be described as decent compared with some.

I had no knowledge that when you go into hospital this fact is acknowledged and a laxative is automatically added to to your medication, which in my case after two days resulted in a rear end crisis.
I told the dispensing nurse my problem and presumed, wrongly, that the laxative had been withdrawn; no, I was still taking it and on the day of discharge (unfortunate word) I got the runs again.
All packed up and waiting for my cab the urge to go again became too strong so I went to the bathroom; with a hip replacement you are not supposed to go to the bathroom without a member of staff being on hand in case of a fall - no they don’t come in with you but are aware and nearby.

I wasn’t going to bother with that procedure as I was on the way home so in I went. Having finished I reached for the toilet roll; this was for reasons unknown fitted facing away and I had already dislodged the roll from the holder several times as I stood up, but this time it was different. It bounced as it hit the floor and kept rolling, leaving an ever growing tail of paper as it made its way to the door. The door has to be left ajar for the same reason, that if you have a fall they have to be able to reach you. It reached the door and carried on rolling through the gap, dragging what remained of the paper tail with it; it went completely out of reach.

Not being exactly Usain Bolt at this moment in time I could not stand up with trousers round ankles and stop the bloody roll with my crutches. I had no choice but to stand, shuffle with aforementioned trousers round ankles through the door until I could drag back the tail of the paper and retrieve the roll and shuffle back with great difficulty to inside the bathroom, all the time believing the nurse would reappear to take me to my cab. No doubt they have all seen it before, but at moments like that one is inclined to say 'why me?' I escaped the ultimate embarrassment by about a minute, too close for comfort in all respects.

Kenneth Williams would have had a word for it all.

And yet in that brief moment of farce that leftover roll of toilet paper summed up the current NHS, as it rolled away out of reach.


As you may be aware, JD of this parish has himself been a custodian recently of the NHS for five weeks. His own experiences will also resonate if he chooses to recant them on here; it all makes very wearisome reading.

Friday, August 13, 2021

FRIDAY MUSIC: Bob Marley, by JD

 Music this week comes from Bob Marley (1945 - 1981) and the Wailers whose other core musicians were Bunny Wailer (Neville Livingston) and Peter Tosh (Peter McIntosh) Together they revolutionised Jamaican music. 

This from Britannica:
"Robert Nesta Marley, Jamaican singer-songwriter whose thoughtful ongoing distillation of early ska, rock steady, and reggae musical forms blossomed in the 1970s into an electrifying rock-influenced hybrid that made him an international superstar."