The Last Ditch

Compare and contrast

Sir David Nicholson admits failings over Mid Staffs but refuses to resign - Telegraph.

Sir David Nicholson, were our society organised as the defunct British Communist Party to which he once belonged might desire, would now be put up against a wall and shot. In our wet British version of Soviet Healthcare, however, he avoids all responsibility for the NHS's lethal failures. After all, there are plenty more patients where those came from.

Compare and contrast with one Andrew Mason, who wrote to his staff before leaving;

After four-and-a-half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding, I was fired today ... As CEO I'm accountable.

I rather suspect that Mason has put more efficient and vigorous effort into the success of Groupon than Nicholson has to that of the NHS. Yet he was held accountable by his board on behalf of his shareholders and accepted it with grace. Good for him. He failed this time, but with an attitude like that, I am sure he will yet do great things. I would hire him, if I owned a suitable company. I wouldn't employ Nicholson to clean my boots.

So is the success or failure of a company that organises online discounts more important than that of a whole nation's healthcare system? Should the bosses of an internet start-up be stricter with their CEO than Parliament is with the head of the NHS? What other conclusion, exactly, could a man from Mars infer from these two items of news?

Incidentally, Nicholson claimed expenses of over £50,000 a year on top of a basic salary of £200,000 and benefits in kind of £37,600 at a time when he was in charge of health service "cuts". His current wife, twenty years his junior and a former graduate intern in his office, is the £155,000 a year chief executive of Birmingham Children's Hospital. He wrote references for her during her meteoric rise through the NHS management ranks. Ain't life grand in the public service?

The NHS may not have adopted the iron discipline of the Soviet system, but it seems to have all the other elements. Generally, I prefer gentler market systems of accountability, but for aparatchiks like Nicholson, I could make an exception.

Our uncaring, selfish and cruel NHS

Stafford scandal: Let’s face the truth about our uncaring, selfish and cruel NHS - Telegraph.

For once, one of Britain's mainstream journalists did his job. Years ago I incredulously watched a consultant at our local hospital, asked politely by me to give my sick father some information on his condition, do so at the top of his voice in the middle of Nightingale ward full of similarly anxious families. He neither moved, nor even glanced, towards him to do so. He never looked up from his notes. The only concern he showed was for my impudence in daring to ask. Ever since then, I have seen the "envy of the world" line for the crock that it is.

The Conservative Party has betrayed so many of its key principles that we can now be surprised at nothing David Cameron says to justify his portrait one day hanging on the Downing Street stairs. But can anyone doubt the depth and permanence of his betrayal when they read the words (my emphasis);

In retaining his power, Sir David, who is a former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, had already been endorsed by our political leaders. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, publicly backed him. David Cameron, in the House of Commons, expressed every confidence in the great man. 

Had the revolution come in the way the CPGB originally planned, there would at least have been a way to deal with Sir David Nicholson. The families of thousands slaughtered on his watch might have had the grim satisfaction of hearing that gunshot.

All they will hear under this miserable Frankfurt School communism by stealth is the sound of a political class that will no more submit to a bog-standard NHS hospital than they would send their children to a bog-standard comp., murmuring platitudes as they cover each others backs.

H/T Navigator

The British welfare state has created more invalids than the Great War

 

The video is a little ropey but please persist and view the whole thing. As ever, Dr Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) is both interesting and darkly amusing.

He reports that, under a threat of violence (50% of doctors have been assaulted in the last 12 months) most general practitioners in Britain are routinely filling out fraudulent certificates enabling fit individuals to go "on the sick" where benefits are 60% higher than for unemployment and there is no need to pretend to seek work. More than 2.5 million people have such certificates and he claims that "the great majority of them are fraudulent or at least untruthful." More than a million people have them for "depression and anxiety" alone. He comments wrily that it is an achievement of the British welfare state that it has "created more invalids than the First World War".

Another achievement of the British welfare state is an enormous growth in heroin use. In the 1950s, when heroin addicts were registered with the Home Office, there were known to be about 60 in the whole country. It is now thought that there are about 300,000. He describes an official ideology that heroin addiction is a sickness beyond the addicts' control, which renders them unable to work and drives them to crime. An ideology he says is "completely and obviously wrong."

Every user chose freely to take heroin the first time and most use it intermittently for up to a year before beginning to take it regularly. Most users live in a sub-culture in which the consequences of taking heroin are far better known, as he puts it, than "the dates of the Second World War".

He says it's untrue that medical or other support is necessary to give up heroin. He jokingly calls Mao Zedong "the greatest drug therapist in history" because he told China's heroin addicts that if they didn't give it up he would shoot them. 20 million duly did. Without recommending such a radical approach, he points out that this clearly proves a "conceptual difference between, say, rheumatoid arthritis and drug addiction." Mao's approach, after all, would not have "cured" the former.

For so long as users don't give up heroin he says that's no reason for them not to work. Research shows that in the fifties most American addicts worked normally and indeed most of our own users now lead very active working lives - except that their "work" is burglary.

The growth in heroin use is therefore driven, he seems to suggest, by the needs of the "bureaucracy of care" serving the addicts. Its members need a passive population that takes no personal responsibility in order to secure their jobs. He believes that "at some level" these public employees know full well that they are playing games. In his words;

I would say the addiction services need the addicts more than the addicts need the services.

That's a more shocking critique of welfarism from an insider that I would ever have dared to offer from the outside. To suggest that an army of "carers" has, in effect, steadily built heroin use from 60 to 300,000 to give themselves jobs seems so wicked as to be scarcely believable. But then who would have thought the learned members of our medical profession could be recruited to knowing, if not willing, participation in frauds worth billions of pounds?

For all that its servants justify their jobs by droning on about the supposed immorality and greed of their bogeymen in business, only the state, ladies and gentlemen, can corrupt on such a massive scale.

Doctors out of their boxes

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: The dictatorship of public health.

I am not quite sure how I missed the linked article back in September but I am glad I found it via Chris Snowdon's review of the year at his excellent blog, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. The authoritarians of the medical establishment are in many ways our best hope for liberty. This may seem paradoxical, but bear with me.

The greater the State becomes, the more authoritarians it attracts. Wormtongue types are drawn, as so many of them already have been, by the chance to subvert legitimate authority to their own ends while living on the state's plunder. The more they succeed, the more arrogant they become. They see no legitimate boundaries to their control of their fellow men. Our corrupt political class will offer no defence against these parasites unless and until popular resistance threatens their own power. We cannot count on their principles, if indeed they have any. We can rely entirely, however, on their self-interest.

 Where, however, is this resistance to come from? State education, state broadcasting and the generally emasculating effect of the Welfare State have much weakened the yeoman spirit that made England, for most of its history, delightfully ungovernable. The unthinking majority of voters will never rebel - until it's far too late - against threats to freedom of thought. Attacks on their lifestyle however are another matter. Cromwell fell not because the Monarchy won a rematch of its debate with republicanism, but because, having weakened his appeal by forbidding dancing, aleing and Christmas, his hypocrisy in having his son succeed him (just like a King) tipped the scales of popular feeling.

The state can beat up as many anti-statist intellectuals as it likes and no-one will protest. Let it beat up the smokers, drinkers and pie-fans however and popular resistance can be expected - even from those usually too idle to move further than to the nearest Greggs. Doctors with God complexes may therefore be our best hope. Perhaps as we enter the final phase of end-of-year excess, we should be campaigning for votes to be proportionate to BMI, units of alcohol per week or fags per day?

All organisations funded by force are immoral - Part 2: the NHS

The lethal medical arrogance behind the Liverpool Care Pathway | Melanie Phillips.

Melanie Phillips, not my favourite journalist, has been writing about the "Liverpool Care Pathway." Something Goebbelish about the name of this route to death is enough to make decent people suspicious, but that's modern Britain for you; all marketing mouth and no trousers.

My point is not about the "pathway" itself, but the response from the medical profession to Phillips' criticism of how it is sometimes misused. The arrogance is disturbing but unsurprising. During 20 years of living abroad, Mrs P and I had occasion to use the services of doctors from time to time. We were always pleasantly struck by the difference in their approach to that of their colleagues in Britain. They did not give "orders", they discussed our issues. They looked at us while they did so. They gave us time and treated us with respect. They did not dish out government propaganda and were not subject to government incentive schemes to adopt particular approaches. In short, they treated us like I treated my clients.

At the French-run Moscow clinic we used for a while, an NHS trained doctor came to work. She lasted a few weeks before being dismissed at the request of patients. She treated patients as so much meat, did not give them time or listen properly to what they had to say. Worst of all (and inexplicable to patients with no experience of Britain's Soviet-style healthcare) she reached for some kind of NHS manual for guidance as to approved treatment. Her patients expected more than that. They wanted to see the exercise of intelligent, professional judgement based on reasoned discussion. They didn't want judgements handed down from Mount Olympus by a self-appointed god. 

The NHS is a state monopoly enterprise. As such things will, it has steadily morphed into a worker's co-operative. The interests of staff take precedence over those of the customers-with-no-choice and the attitude to said customers tends to the dismissive. That's inevitable, because of the moral darkness at its heart; it is funded by force. The good opinion of patients is therefore not required. Promotion within the organisation depends upon contribution to its own goals, not those of the sick people it exists to serve. They are indeed routinely and insultingly described by NHS aparatchiks as a "cost" to the NHS, though they - collectively - pay for it.

There's nothing wrong with these medics that would not be fixed by exposure to competition and the humility it brings. You may say that they already have competition from the private health care industry but that's not really true. The doctors in private hospitals are overwhelmingly NHS consultants earning a bit on the side. Their primary source of income - and pension - is the state monopoly. They are with few exceptions trained by that monopoly and imbued with its stale ethic. If the system were fully private, they would have to provide A&E services, but instead they just offer a luxury add-on. I am fully privately-insured, but if I have an accident I will end up in the NHS's tender care. There is no way out of that in Britain.

It is indeed "our NHS" as the Tories feebly insist. I wish it bloody wasn't.

NHS exports

NHS to export death in a corridor.

The Daily Mash is being funny. But why not? The NHS already exported C.Diff and E.Coli around the world. In that context, isn't the idea of "exporting the NHS brand" rather flawed?

Humans are mortal, fragile and in many cases neurotic. There is an unlimited appetite for health care. Like it or not, it has to be moderated, either by pricing or rationing. I don't like that fact any more than the reddest socialist. I too wish there were unicorns frolicking in the streets and free health care for all regardless of wealth. Sadly there aren't and there isn't. I dislike pricing less than rationing however. Why? Because we have some control over how much money we earn, borrow or raise by charitable appeal and NONE at all over the decisions of bureaucrats. And because I don't want strangers to decide what treatment my family and I get based on their opinions of us or our life-style choices.

A national health service begins by nationalising service provision but ends by nationalising our bodies.

I understand the desire to provide universal health care. I think it's a bad idea, but if we democratically decide that we must have the state ensure it, let's at least have some regard to the strengths and weaknesses of government. Let it make health insurance compulsory and regulate it prevent companies from excluding whole categories of people. Let it prevent insurers from refusing to cover pre-existing conditions for more than, say, 1 year so that people can change companies to ensure competition. Let it even prevent deviation from a given pricing curve band over age set by actuaries without otherwise limiting overall prices. Then, if we must, let it tax to provide through social security for the premiums of those who genuinely can't afford to pay. Some variation, in short, of the French model.

But don't, for the sake of our health, our freedom and our relationship with our medical service providers, let it employ doctors and nurses or own hospitals. After all, that's a concept which, despite the British people's delusion that the NHS is "the envy of the world" hardly anyone has chosen to emulate.

If your body does not belong to you, what does?

VM -- Should Participation in Vaccine Clinical Trials be Mandated?, Jan 12 ... Virtual Mentor

I find it hard to believe this is genuine, but it seems to be. Already it seems mad progressives have 'progressed' from claiming ownership of your dead body, to discussing whether they can claim ownership of your live one. Did you ever read anything more chilling than the cold comparison between military conscription and being forced by law to submit to medical experiments;

In both conscription and obligatory trial participation, individuals have little or no choice regarding involvement and face inherent risks over which they have no control, all for the greater good of society.

Where does this 'society' evil end? And where do such people get their confidence that they are infallible judges of the 'greater good?'

h/t Trooper Thompson

Hammond Meets Moss

BBC - BBC Four Programmes - Hammond Meets Moss.

Having complained recently about the poor quality of most modern British broadcasting, let me mention an intelligent show I watched last night. I am a Top Gear fan but have always thought the Hamster (how to put this kindly...?) more charming than thoughtful. Most of his programmes apart from Top Gear have supported this theory. In this case however he surprised me.

Exchanging reminiscences with Sir Stirling Moss about their respective brain-damaging high-speed crashes, 44 years apart, he managed to shed (with the aid of a number of neurologists) a fair amount of light on the workings of the brain. It's on the iPlayer for a while and I commend it to you. I rather suspect that so personal was the subject that the production staff couldn't persuade Hammond to condescend to the viewer in Auntie's usual infuriating, Blue Petery way. Indeed, Mrs P. noticed that he didn't even have his usual laddish accent. To be precise she said, puzzled, "he sounds posh." She is more of a Hamster fan than I am, so she would know.

Ironically, since this really was - in a sense - "car crash television", I found it compelling. Listening to two interesting men intelligently discussing life-changing personal experiences in a scientific context was my idea of a good programme. What's yours?

Criminals suck

Apart from the anti-intellectualism of my Northern school-mates, the worst thing about my school was the way the bad children set the rules. Not that misbehaviour was rife. Those were the early days of the comprehensive fiasco. My "high school" had been a tough secondary modern a year before I arrived and the senior people in charge were serious disciplinarians. Radical leftist young teachers (like the one who issued A, B, C, D and E grades in rotation in protest against "elitism") were still waiting their chance to create today's shambles. Still, school trips were suspended for a while because some bad boys ran amok on an excursion organised by a well-meaning, ineffectual teacher. We shivered outside at break times because a minority would otherwise trash the place, smoke in the toilets (or use them for the traditional bully's version of waterboarding).

I never expected it to spread to the adult world. Yet now, just as in school, the criminals, idlers and wasters are a minority, but everything seems to be done with them in mind. They set our insurance premiums and force us to buy the safes and security systems our insurers demand. Decent adults are afraid to interact healthily with children for fear of being confused with paedophiles. We are all ruled on the assumption that we are like the worst of us.

This week I collected some medicines for my sick wife. They are controlled drugs. We recognise that we are pretty unusual for our generation in never having used drugs recreationally, but we just haven't. Until quite recently, we have generally been quite happy with our reality. Yet the palaver involved in collecting those drugs, duly prescribed, was ridiculous. Mrs P. is not well enough to hang around pharmacy counters, so I had to identify myself and be logged as the person taking possession of this dangerous stuff. The meds were brought out in a bag with a warning tag the size of a table tennis bat announcing their nature and reminding the pharmacist to register them in a special book. While a lady in pain waited, we went through a rigmarole that certainly wasn't for my protection. In fact the security theatre exposed me to a far greater risk of being robbed. Because the drugs make a pharmacy a target for thieving addicts, some were held at a secure remote location, causing a 24 hour delay. Mrs P had to endure a day of unecessary pain because - just as in our comprehensive school - the rules were set by the worst people around us.

Of course, if the drugs were legal, addicts could buy them cheaply, in pure form, from Boots. They need not conceal their habit from their medical advisers or families. The drugs could be taxed just enough to cover the cost of treating addiction, while remaining cheap enough not to stimulate crime. There would be no need for the nonsense that wasted my time this week and, far more importantly, caused such unecessary pain.

I hate criminals. And I hate politicians who criminalise unecessarily. If no individual (or his property) is genuinely at risk from another person's conduct, it should not be a crime. For so long as the stupid "war on drugs" continues, however, the bloody criminals are - as usual - hurting all the people around them, not just their immediate victims. God rot them, one and all.

I'll only be happy if banning is banned

I'll only be happy if smoking is banned | Duncan Bannatyne | Comment is free | The Observer.

You need read no more of this appalling article than this;

"Smoking should be banned in cars, and particularly any vehicle with children in it. On a school visit I met a 12-year-boy who wanted to be an athlete who told me that every morning his mother lit up when she was driving to school, even though he'd begged her to stop. He should be able to report her to the police (my emphasis).

If he could report her to the police, he ought to be ashamed of himself if he chose to do so.

I have never smoked cigarettes, but I have long had my life made intolerable by authoritarians like Duncan Bannatyne. His craving to order the lives of others is a filthy, addictive habit which should not be tolerated in a civilised society.