I’ve touched on it before, but the NHS really has become a religious icon. Again, yesterday, the virtue signallers were out clapping the tractor stats like good citizens of the GDR – because that is what it feels like!
I realise that I am out of step with the majority and I tend to keep my opinions to myself when among most of my acquaintances for I know where it will lead. Yet what I am seeing is something driven by emotion not reason. The NHS is merely a system. It isn’t a very good system either. But any criticism of the NHS is immediately seized upon as doing down the nurses.
Of course the failures of the NHS is always the fault of the eeeevil torieeeees who are trying to shut it down. To which all I can say is that they aren’t doing a very good job of it, given that for much of the NHS’ existence they have been in government, so have had more than enough opportunity. Despite the screams of the virtue signallers, the Conservatives have done as their Labour counterparts and poured ever more money into a system that just swallows it up, given that it is poorly managed and is top heavy with that management.
As a nation, we have become obsessed to the point where reason packed its bags, got up and left without anyone noticing. There is a meme doing the rounds that goes something like this:
DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU BUT I WOULD RATHER GIVE THE NHS £160 A YEAR INSTEAD OF THE BBC. SHARE IF YOU THINK THE SAME !
To which I replied:
We already do. It’s called National Insurance contributions. This is conflating two entirely different arguments.
However, let me say that if you feel really strongly about this, there is a simple solution. Firstly, cancel your television licence. Then write a cheque to HM Treasury and send it to 1 Horse Guards Road SW1A 2HQ London. Make sure that you include a covering letter telling them that you want the money hypothecated to the NHS.
Job done.
You’re welcome.
Oddly enough, there was no follow-up, no response, just a deafening silence. I suspect that my advice will be ignored, for that was not the desired reaction to the virtue-signalling post in question. But that seems to be the thing – everyone is out there virtue-signalling about “heroes” but when told that they can certainly put their money where their mouth is, it all goes silent. As is usual, they want the state to step in and do it for them.
There are people who are doing something. However, the £17.5m that Captain Moore has raised is a pointless gesture when we know full well that it will simply be absorbed into the system for no great good. Belief in a system isn’t going to make it magically get better. That is because it is a flawed system run badly in the first place. Nothing will change without the will to do so – and no amount of pointing out fact, such as outcomes being significantly worse than our European neighbours, will change this. It’s like Jesus rising on the third day – you either believe it or you don’t and if you do believe it, no amount of reason, facts or evidence to the contrary will change your mind. That’s what faith is and what we are seeing here is blind faith against all the evidence to the contrary.
Given the lionisation of medical staff into hero status during the Covid-19 pandemic, any possibility of a politician grasping this problem and engaging in root and branch reform has no chance. Not now, not after this. And, no, they are not heroes. They are ordinary people doing what is currently a difficult job, just as lots of other people do difficult jobs in difficult circumstances. It is perfectly possible to recognise their efforts without engaging in cringeworthy canonisation and the ten minutes love-in on the doorstep every Thursday evening.
So there we have it, our new god is the NHS – over bureaucratic and poorly managed such that whatever funding is thrown at it just vanishes into the event horizon of Pournell’s iron law of bureaucracy. There is no chance of a decent system such as the French enjoy now.
Might as well go out and clap for all the good it will do. After all, the tractor stats are better this week than they were last week and will be better again next week.
If politics is the Art of the Possible,
then campaign to have the 4.5 billion a year of PHE rolled into the general NHS budget, shut down PHE and payoff all staff on govt guidelines.
At least ALL that 4.5 billion won’t be wasted as it is now.
In it’s own small way, this blog is a form of campaigning. Encouraging a conversation that is normally unspoken. Blogging changed my mind on topics, so if I change some minds, then it may one day have a ripple effect. You never know.
Spot on there Longrider. Well said. Having had members of my family get bad, including lethal, treatment by the incompetent and wasteful NHS I will not be out there cheering the tractor stats with the rest of the morons.
I was left underwhelmed by my late wife’s cancer treatment, so tend to have a negative view of the NHS. But maybe that’s just me…
Not just you Longrider, I lost my wife to cancer 6 years ago , I was also totally underwhelmed by her NHS treatment.
The ‘sainted’ NHS killed my Mum. A nurse skimped with a dressing on an ulcerated leg which caused the leg to become infected. She was taken to the local awful general hospital where despite the family telling the medical staff there that my mum was allergic to a particular antibiotic, the hospital still administered it anyway taking the view that the medics knew best. The NHS robbed my brother and I of our Mum and my son of his grandmother. I despise the NHS with a passion.
When my late father was in hospital following a fall family members had to spend all day and all nights at the hospital just to make sure that the hospital didn’t ill treat him or forget him as our family suspected that he was of a demographic that was less politically important to the NHS. Also the mother of my child was nearly crippled by the incompetent administration of an epidural by a foreign doctor who didn’t appear to know what the hell he was doing. The NHS is an appalling and terrible way to run a healthcare system and I’m not the only one who thinks so.
My father died of a “catastrophic bleed on the brain” – according the doctors on the resus ward – on a Friday in December. Two days earlier I had taken him to A&E with a note from his GP to ask them to test for neurological problems. They gave him an x-ray, said it was arthritis and that he didn’t need a CT scan. He was 77 and was still driving and working in the office at the start of the week, the coroner suspects the bleeding had been going on undetected for about a month, and 3 previous GP appointments hadn’t spotted it. Inquest set for June.
No – not just you. My wife died of cancer too and my dogs got better treatment from the vet than the NHS. But there again, the vet had to earn his money by providing good treatment otherwise he would have gone out of business.
She died in a privately funded charitable hospice and the difference between the two was as night is to day.
But as I have said previously, the NHS has to satisfy the Government, not the patients as the Government funds them. So they are optimised to carrying out the whims and diktats of the Government of the day.
Listening to the clapping, bashing of saucepans and occasional whoops in our area last night, I was irresistibly reminded of the practice – common to an assortment of less sophisticated peoples or beliefs – of making loud noises to drive out demons and evil spirits.
The veneer of our modern society is, perhaps, rather thinner than we would like to think.
That much has become increasingly apparent.
No clapping, banging etc within earshot here any week – I muted TV to check.
imo this virtue display is BBC/C4 driven, not public driven
Worth reading:
“..In the week ending Friday, April 3, there was an excess of more than 2,500 [Non CV-19] deaths over what would be expected at this time of year…”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8223733/Have-gone-far-fear-lockdown-harming-nations-health-writes-Dr-MAX-PEMBERTON.html
They do here. However it does seem to be dropping off.
On top of all the nonsense, it turn out that if you need medical treatment the NHS is lethal)
Same here – although my neighbour got the hump the other day when I espoused similar thoughts about the NHS (his son is nurse)! But there are clearly an increasing number who are questioning the “New Religion” as you put it. I’ve just posted at James Higham’s site, and other comments are critical, although James points out that Capt Tom’s money is going to NHS Charities, not the NHS itself, so there is hope that it will do some good.
http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2020/04/friday-181/
And John Ward has this to say:
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2020/04/17/covid19-opinion-the-government-is-in-a-corner-caused-by-compromised-advice-it-is-going-to-cost-us-dear/
I’m in the fortunate position where my family and most of my friends tend to agree, so I can complain about the NHS without anyone taking the hump
Family, including extended, are not NHS worshippers and believe it needs major reform and be customer/patient not staff (esp admin/mgt) focussed.
We’re all Brexiters too
Most friends like it as much as any State institution ie not a lot
The #YouClapForMeNow Campaign is Hideous
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dXU-jT1j9k
Hideous? My reaction was: No, you’re abusing a crisis, you came here for you, not us; if you don’t like our lack of appreciation for you preferring UK to where you left then yes Go Home
Insulting. This totally discounts the contributions of the native Brits. Notice how they say “your” instead of our, separating themselves from Britain and it’s people. “I’m a life saver (for now), but my cousin-husband in Birmingham is a Jihadist and our six children are diabetic and autistic because of Tory austerity”
#YouClapForMeNow has to be a hate crime… the hate that it just generated is massive
Yes, I watched Sargon’s video yesterday. It’s vile. As he says, it’s extolling colonialism.
I tire of “hero worship” no matter the profession. “ No farmers no food!” OK, while that maybe true, where’s my adoration? I’m a mechanic who fixes their expensive crap! They’re nothing without me! Clap for me!! A now former friend of mine is a nurse. He works in a hospital in upstate NY where the numbers of the so called pandemic are LOW. At best, a few hundred cases and I highly doubt all of them are needing hospitalization. Yet, he pushed it as if he was in the middle of a war zone. My “spidey senses” started tingling and I smelled male cow plop. This whole putting certain professions on pedestals is just gratin. Be it the military, cops or nurses, THEY CHOSE to do this. So just do it and shut up. You knew what you were getting into.
It’s not even a particularly difficult time for the NHS. Most operations have been cancelled. A&E is quieter than it has ever been. The new 4,000-bed Nightingale field hospital has barely a couple of dozen patients. GP practices have plenty of slots available. Most NHS staff are sitting around with nothing to do. In the U.S., private hospitals (i.e. most of them) are having to lay off staff because operations are cancelled indefinitely. Needless to say, the NHS hasn’t made anyone redundant.
Yes, for frontline doctors & nurses treating Covid-19 patients, there is an increased risk of catching the virus and whence dying. But for the rest of the NHS, they’ve never had it so good.
They’re certainly not all heroes. A friend of mine was recently regaling me on the tale of his wife, who is a nurse and is therefore still working and dealing with patients of all types, not just Covid ones. Apparently, the managers who run the teams of health visitors in her area all took themselves off into voluntary “self isolation” from the first week and haven’t made a single attempt to get into contact with any team members since, leaving them to their own devices to organise their usual visits to patients, as well as covering for their absent bosses and keeping up with all the paperwork and pen-pushing that the managers usually do (and could easily do themselves from home, but won’t).
There’s been not a squeak from any of them – they’ve simply taken themselves off for a nice long holiday and haven’t even bothered to make a few calls to keep contact with the front-liners, not even to say hi or ask how they’re getting on. Thus indicating what many people have been saying about the NHS for many, many years – it isn’t short of money or resources, and it isn’t continually “stretched to the limit” – it just wastes too many funds on useless fools in non-jobs in cushy, back-room offices.
If the NHS has any sense (which is doubtful, but we can all dream), after all this is over, they’ll take a long, hard look at who the service managed to function perfectly well without during this crisis, and will make the necessary savings by telling them not to come back at all!
And if anyone thinks I’m going to stand at my front door clapping like a copycat moron in support of that bunch of skivers (because I’m sure there are plenty of other instances just like this) then they’re in for a disappointment ….
Totally agree but ‘our’ BBC and ‘our’ government hasn’t noticed that there is no such thing, post-Blair, as ‘our’ NHS, it exists in different forms in ‘our’ Scotland, ‘our’ Wales and ‘our’ Northern Ireland.
‘Our’ NHS is a brand, complete with logo plastered everywhere from chemist to hospital, in England created in recent years, to make criticism virtually impossible and to ensure that the funding stream can’t ever be turned off.
It reminds me of the BBC.
My daughter works for the NHS. It has it’s good and bad points.
If you need cancer treatment (in normal times!) it’s there, immediate and effective.
I wear hearing aids. They’re free and they work and save a fortune on private rip off companies’ offerings.
If you want an elective operation – e.g. varicose veins – be prepared to go private or wait forever.
All this from personal experience.
As for the wicked Tories shutting it down or selling it to Trump, that’s just left wing propaganda bollocks. But then all normal thinking people know that.
Also, people conflate outsourcing, which all organisations do – with privatisation. It’s a convenient fiction as it fits the narrative.
Funny how no-one’s clapping the supermarket workers who’ve kept the stores open at personal risk to ensure everyone’s able to eat