Tractor Stats Are Up

If you fancy celebrating the improved tractor stats, the Mirror has information for you.

This weekend marks the 72nd anniversary of the NHS, which was launched by Labour Health Minister Aneurin Bevan on 5 July 1948.

Bevan established the National Health Service with three key principles – that it meet the needs of everyone, that it be free at the point of delivery, and that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay.

On the face of it, those were noble ideals. Is that what we have, though? The problem with socialised healthcare is that there is pressure to make people conform, hence the obsessive anti-smoking bullshit. The withholding of treatment until people quit or lose weight or whatever, so, no, I don’t think those ideals have been met. It also gives every prodnosed busybody an excuse to claim that they are paying for someone else’s treatment, while ignoring the taxes that the patient in question might have paid throughout a lifetime – drinkers and smokers paying even more, for example.

The NHS has been indispensable to the UK in the 72 years since – and never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Okay, now you are having a laugh. Across the Channel, they have a healthcare system that is more efficient and provides better outcomes. And what we have seen in the pandemic is pretty much a cessation of routine care. I am still waiting for a minor procedure and I’ve no idea when I will finally get the treatment. I may yet pay privately, but will effectively be paying twice because of the gross inefficiency of this wonderful system. And I have already mentioned the callous treatment the late Mrs L received. All of which means that not only am I not a fan of the NHS, I am not a fan of the principle of socialised healthcare.

Numerous events are planned this weekend to celebrate the NHS anniversary, and to thank staff for all they they have done.

Given that I am up to date with paying my taxes, I believe that I have already done this.

As it gets dark on Saturday 4 July, people are asked to put a candle or light in their window to remember all those who have lost their lives to coronavirus.

More than 43,000 people in the UK have died of the disease since the pandemic began – including an estimated 400 health and care workers.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Emotionally incontinent wank. No. And those figures are gerrymandered, so take them with a healthy dose of scepticism.

At 5pm on Sunday 5 July, people will take to their windows, doorways and balconies for one final Clap for Carers.

Not me.

The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 will pause normal transmission to encourage people to participate in the applause, while Premier League and Championship games will clap before kick-off.

Given that I won’t be watching anyway, I won’t notice.

Still, I’m sure you will be pleased to know that yet again, tractor stats are up. All praise to the glorious NHS.

34 Comments

  1. Was it yourself who commented a while ago about a tweet from some guy who said that idolisation and worship of the NHS would have reached ridiculous levels by the time this was all over? There was an immediate angry response that pretty much made his case for him, but the passage of time has proved him to have been spectacularly right.

    • I don’t think that was me, but the point stands. It’s become a religion – as, indeed, the whole Marxist Woke agenda is.

      • I felt sure is was here that I read it so I went back and had a look for it. April 13th it was and how very prescient that guy turned out to be. Incidentally I wouldn’t expect you to be able to remember every single thing that you had ever posted about.

  2. As a sickly child I grew up using the NHS quite a lot but grew out of most things with time, bar accidents all I need now is an annual Salbutamol inhaler in case of extended contact with cats. As a smoker I should be grateful since my severely Copid neighbour is denied an oxygen supply because he still smokes.

    10million procedures from initial consultation to urgent operations are on the waiting list which is how the NHS has always rationed its services hoping that you will fix yourself, go private or die in the meanwhile.

    NICE reckon one quality year of life is worth £30,000, a conservative estimate is £600,000 for each Covid Survivor whose death has been delayed for a bit.

    My mum had just qualified as nurse and was delighted when Labour nationalised her. By the time she took early retirement she was of the opinion that NHS Management had squandered 4 decades of goodwill, and she was right in predicting hospital disease when I told her they were replacing in house maintenance with contractors.

  3. Since about February, my 16 year old son has been suffering from first a bacterial, and then a secondary fungal, skin infection. Though he has been very brave and stoical throughout, it’s been painful, humiliating and confidence-sapping for him. He’s seen five GPs, A&E at Kingston Hospital and a specialist NHS dermatologist. Their diagnoses, courses of treatment, antibiotics and numerous creams all failed to get on top of it and, frankly, it was driving all of us to despair and low spirits.

    Finally, I did what I should have done right at the very start, and booked an appointment with a very good private dermatologist. It took him about ten mintues to listen, look (really look) and diagnose that there had in fact been no infections, bacterial or fungal, and that the persistent symptoms were actually an allergic reaction to the cream they had given them at the start. We sat there in slack-jawed silence. He recommended putting all the medicines, creams and so on into a bin and setting light to it. We duly did so, and he’s been proved absolutely correct in subsequent days. I can’t convey here how much better and happier my son has been, getting back to his old self.

    Come 4pm I won’t be clapping, chanting, crying, lighting candles or otherwise showing my fealty to the new order (same as the old order) if you put a gun to my head.

    • For the past seven years, I’ve had a persistent dry cough. I’ve been tested for asthma, had an X-ray or two and nothing found. They eventually decided that it was acid reflux, so put me on omeprazole. That hasn’t worked. I eventually spoke to a different GP. She suggested that it was eosinophilic bronchitis and prescribed a cortisol steroid inhaler. It was gone within twenty four hours. Seven bloody years I put up with that cough.

      • Well all know that to err is human, and that medicine contains as much art as it does science, but what really irked me was the almost-visible lack of engagement, a seeming refusal to take proper time and engage their brains in active thinking and problem solving. Our private specialist actually talked about confirmation bias, and that once one GP has made a diagnosis, in error or no, almost every subsequent GP will be very reluctant to offer a different one or think again from first principles. How very encouraging.

        • Well, I’m still suffering the enlarged prostate. I’m supposed to be on a list for prostatic arterial embolisation, but lord knows when that will happen now.

  4. Some years ago I had a troublesome gall bladder. The symptoms only lasted a couple of days but such was my discomfort on the second day that I went to the local GP. That was it. I became the object of a NHS box ticking exercise. They were going to have my gall bladder by hook or by crook. The operation would be carried out by keyhole surgery and then they informed me that I would be signed off work for a fortnight. When I informed them that I was self employed I was told to “Just take it easy for a couple of days then”. I read up on the procedure and, from the comments, it seemed that the cure was worse than the complaint so I refused the operation. Needless to say I have had no symptoms since.

  5. Premier League and Championship games will clap before kick-off.

    Will they also be taking the knee? And, should anyone sufficiently famous shuffle off this mortal coil in the interim, would they also observe a minute’s silence?

  6. Wait: 400 out of 43,000 dead are NHS workers? That’s less than 1% representation. And 1.68 million people are employed by the NHS out of a population of 66 million, that’s over 2.5%. So it’s apparently much safer to be an NHS worker than not.

  7. I think that part of the problem in convincing people that the NHS is a bit rubbish is that it quite often isn’t. Quite a few people get good healthcare from the NHS, and so they don’t see what the problem is. Even those who get fairly indifferent service think that it is acceptable as they don’t seem to know any better, indifferent service is what they have come to expect. I would always ask these people whether they have any pets and invite them to compare the service that they get from the vet to the service that they get from the NHS.

  8. Everyone seams to have forgotten the Beveridge Report, upon which the current welfare state is loosely based. The Beveridge Report recommended a system of health care available to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. It was an insurance based system. This was the report on which the NHS was based. Beveridge was asked to do his report in 1941, and the report was published in 1942. The Prime Minister who appointed him was Winston Churchill. (Conservative). The comments about Labour inventing the NHS just show how propaganda has swamped out fact.

    • Indeed. The crucial bit was insurance based. If that was the case, they might have had a decent system. As it is, the money just went into the black hole of general taxation and we got a Ponzi scheme.

      • It was set up as an insurance based system. I think that it was the Wilson government that changed it to general taxation, so he could steal some of the NHS money

    • Everyone also forgets that one of the key pillars of the Beveridge Report was the elimination of ‘Idleness’, yet the resultant welfare system has done the reverse, by ensuring that the terminally idle maintain an adequate standard of living, thus ensuring that idleness will never be eliminated.

  9. Dr Vernon Coleman once pointed out that –

    The NHS budget is £139.3 billion a year.
    There are 67 million citizens in the UK.
    So the NHS costs £2,074 per man, woman and child.
    But you can buy health care insurance for £1,500 per year per person.
    So, if we got rid of the NHS we could all afford private health care and have £574 left over to put in our pockets.

    I’m old enough to remember when, if you were ill you went to the doctor and sat in the waiting room – you didn’t have to make an appointment to see someone in a week’s time.
    And now I read in the papers that they want you to make an appointment to visit A&E?

    We’d be better off without this bloated bureaucracy, but I doubt if the Government will do anything about it.

    • Years ago the local Nuffield was doing hip replacements for the NHS, not on the basis of clinical need but to keep up to waiting list Targets.
      I asked the Surgeon who told me this if it was expensive for the NHS to contract out like that.
      “Nope, once they take their overheads into account we do it cheaper than they do themselves”.

  10. All the European, Skandi and antipodean countries operate some form of Bismarkian social insurance system.
    What is remarkable about the NHS is how poor it is in comparison with German, Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Australian etc etc etc health care systems.
    Its almost as if they all took one look at the UK and said well we’re not doing that-its a f*****g disaster.

    • Yes the NHS is so wonderful that virtually no country in the world decided to emulate it, and the one that did (Singapore I think) rapidly concluded the model was cack and transitioned to another less Stalinesque healthcare system.

      I have often said I now consider that there is literally nothing the NHS could do now that would result in a groundswell of opinion that it must be reformed in root and branch, or even abolished. It has already be found to be actually murdering patients (the Gosport Hospital scandal) and this resulted in not a peep about how anything should be changed. If murder doesn’t tarnish the NHS, what else could? Mere inefficiency and criminal neglect isn’t going to cut it, we’ve seen plenty of documented cases of that and still the cult continues. Perhaps if they were taking every 100th patient out the back and shooting them, that might ‘just’ provoke a reaction. But I bet even then it wouldn’t be ‘Raze the thing to the ground and start again’. I would fully expect the usual suspects would instead complain about ‘underfunding’ and ‘austerity’ driving the ‘angels’ to extreme methods.

      • It’s funny how an organisation that has been in receipt of increasing monies every year since inception has been underfunded by the evil Tories. If that cognitive dissonance isn’t going to cause people to stop and think, nothing ever will.

        But believing two contradictory things simultaneously seems to be a thing these days – along with deciding that facts and science are now beliefs. This, then, is the product of our appalling education system. A generation of emotionally incontinent morons.

      • An article in either Spiked or UnHerd last week pointed out that the NHS response to Covid might have delayed the deaths of a few thousand infected but at the cost of thousands of extra non-food deaths. This might seem sort of morally acceptable but would shooting two random people on the street be acceptable if that somehow proved to ‘save’ three Covid infected?

  11. I don’t know what it was like round your way, but the clap was all a bit pathetic here. Hardly anyone bothered.

  12. Just noticed on Delingpole on breitbart:

    The National Health Service — “Our NHS”, as we’re supposed to pretend we call it because it’s such a beloved national treasure — is so sclerotic, inefficient, and corrupt that it charges the taxpayer £200 to administer the same antibody test for which Pyser testing charges £96. Just to be clear for those who can’t do the maths, a Covid-19 antibody test with the NHS — paid for by you and me, through the nose, through our taxes — costs twice as much as the same one done by the private sector.

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/07/05/enjoy-your-pint-before-the-nanny-states-next-inevitable-lockdown/

  13. Bugger! I total missed this. And we were watching a film, lights down with a few candles lit on Saturday night. I hope none of my neighbours thought we were doing it for this twaddle

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