The destruction of the NHS and a complicit media

Only a little local affair

You might have missed it yesterday, but some 50,000 people took to the streets to protest about something.

If you did miss it, you can hardly be blamed: it might sound like a newsworthy matter to you, but to the BBC and others, it was – at most – just a little local affair.

The demonstration itself – which the local police force involved went to some bother on social media of pointing out was the biggest it had ever had to deal with and was entirely peaceful – was about what’s happening to the National Health Service (NHS).

The protestors included not just patients, but those working in the health service itself, from doctors and nurses to cleaners and porters.

In a nutshell, the protestors believe that it is being deprived of funds and privatised by stealth using the inevitable consequences of that reduction in funds as the excuse to bring in private companies to make private profit from the service.

The process has been ongoing since the government came to office in 2010. Before the election that year, the leader of the Conservative Party, now Prime Minister David Cameron, sought to quash fears by stating both that: “there will be no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS” and “I will cut the deficit, not the NHS”.

On the former, this would have been welcome, after some years of changes that seemed to come on a weekly basis and left staff reeling. Unfortunately, it was a lie, since his government has subsequently been involved in the biggest top-down “reorganisation” of the service ever.

On the latter, policies have seen him wrong on both counts.

Austerity has helped worsen matters – including the deficit – to the extent that even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), hardly a bastion of anything that could be remotely described as socialist, has criticised the government for its approach.

So you could be forgiven for imagining that the reality behind such electioneering statements would be picked up by a conscientious media: that a prime minister who made them would be help to at least some account.

But no: no more than the reality of statements by secretary of state for work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, who has been caught out by the Office for National Statistics – more than once – playing fast and loose with figures of those claiming benefits or those on benefits for lengthy periods of time.

Indeed, when once challenged over this, IDS retorted that he “believed” the figures to be correct – ergot they must be correct.

Thus we now know that only a belief in it is required for a politician’s statement to be true.

But back to yesterday’s protest.

It took place in Manchester – a sunny Manchester, so presumably God was smiling on the demonstrators and the cause.

It took place there because the annual Conservative Party conference has just opened at a conference centre there. It was organised under the auspices of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and was attended from people from across the UK.

Both the Conservative Party and the TUC are national bodies. The conference in question is for the national Conservative Party, and the NHS is a national health service.

Yet the BBC decided to relegate reports of those 50,000 to regional news pages.

On the other hand, a report of a man being ill after swallowing drugs during a drugs bust – also in Manchester – was linked to from the front page of the website. That, in other words, was decreed editorially to be of national interest.

The Conservative Party conference is being reported as national, headline news – as it should be: it’s a national story.

But mass opposition to government isn’t?

Much of the media will avoid the story altogether for entirely political reasons. Much of the media now works on the basis simply of promoting the core political-economic agenda of its proprietors. It has long since given up any idea of being a fourth estate that holds the other three to accountability.

The BBC should, theoretically, be above this, but it has, over the last 30 years, allowed itself – under pain of losing the licence fee and charter, presumably – to dance to the tune of whomsoever is holding the reins of political power at the time.

It has been dismal on reporting the NHS since 2010, except where there are negative stories.

Now I dislike conspiracy theories, but one does ask whether it is entirely a matter of coincidence that the ultimate head of the Beeb, Chris Patten, has had anything to do with this.

In which case, it is worth noting that Lord Patten seems to have a conflict of interest on the matter.

As illustrated in detail here, he has private business interests in companies that have interests in private health care.

Not that he is alone: Social Investigations has also pulled together information showing that over 70 MPs – and that’s without mentioning the peers – have similar potential conflicts of interest.

Wouldn’t you also wonder about this too?

There have been a number of situations that have occurred in the last few years where hospitals have seriously erred and patients have seriously suffered.

But staffing levels have been reduced and it’s hardly rocket science to say that in health care, there will be safe levels of staffing and unsafe ones. In the last few years, the posts of more than 5,000 nursing staff alone have disappeared. That is not conducive to safety.

Waiting times have increased; accident and emergency units are being strained to the limit – not least after the axing of the NHS Direct service and the 111 debacle that has followed.

Entire units are being downgraded or threatened with closure: the scheme, earlier this year, to close the A&E and maternity units to Lewisham Hospital in London, on the grounds that an entirely different hospital in a neighbouring borough was struggling financially, is just one illustration of the state of the fiddling that’s taking place.

In that case, when you add in the information that Lewisham is a Labour stronghold and the neighbouring borough is a Conservative one, it’s hard to escape the sense of a nasty smell in the air.

A court recently judged the plan illegal.

We seem to be headed back to the halcyon days of the last Conservative government, when elderly people were dying on trolleys in hospital corridors.

That’s not to pretend that the Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown do not have much to answer for.

The eager adoption of the PFI schemes first imagined by John Major’s government was always a recipe for disaster, based on short-termism and an apparent lack of any comprehension of the financial implications of what was being signed up to.

And Labour also continued and expanded the initial privatisation of the health service that had begun under Margaret Thatcher, when ‘soft services’ were put up for sale.

The result of that should have stood as a lesson for all: perhaps it is a coincidence, but after the numbers of hospital cleaners were halved in order for private companies to make any money from the service, there was a concomitant rise in the number of hospital-acquired infections such as c-diff and MRSA.

Which is a perfect illustration of the operational problems that privatisation and fragmentation of the service and workforce produces. If cleaners, for instance, are employed by a company that is outside of the health service itself, who do the staff answer to?

If the nurses on the ward want to call in a cleaner and have a job done – and done now – who do the cleaners answer to?

For some years, the trade union UNISON, which organises in the sector, has been calling for cleaning services to be brought back in house – and for a restoration of ward sisters who had both the responsibility for and the authority to organise cleaning as and when it was actually required on the basis of medical judgement.

Indeed, a few years ago, the union funded research, in a Glasgow hospital, to see what happened if a ward was returned to such a system, with proper numbers of cleaning staff. Rates of infection declined and costs went down at the same time. Report here.

Yet Labour continued down the same privatisation road, selling off the likes of NHS Logistics to parcel company DHL in 2006.

That was an award-winning arm of the health service that delivered everything from beds to bedpans. There was no business case and none was ever given - in spite of demands for one from unions and other campaigners.

None of this is to say that the NHS had or has no problems. It's a vast organisation, so of course it will.

But much of the media has been complicit in spreading the lie that it is failing on most counts, and failing to challenge the other lie that a privatised system such as that of the US is better.

Indeed, the US spends more per person on healthcare than the UK and has worse outcomes. And the reality of private health insurance there, where small-print - or even downright invisible print - can see people consigned, in effect, to poverty and/or death when serious conditions emerge, should warn anyone against following such a path.

But 30 years have seen the UK electorate sold the lie that private is always better than public – and even as we see fuel poverty rising, in part because of the massive rises charged for costs of domestic fuel by highly profitable private companies – the privatisation goes on, even without any massive debate over what it will offer the country as a whole and whether it will actually benefit the national economy.

And nor is it just the likes of the Royal Mail.

In Cambridgeshire, Hinchingbrooke Hospital was handed over to Circle, a private company, which has already had to go, cap in hand, to government for a loan of £3.5 million. Since when did private companies in a market economy get to beg government to bail them out if private is so much better than public?

Yet further hospitals could be headed in the same direction, including George Eliot in Nuneaton.

So yesterday’s protest, which passed outside the Conservative Party conference, was hardly a local story.

A BBC correspondent claimed, via social media, that it had been stopped from filming the demonstration outside the conference centre by security.

Conference security is being provided by G4S, which cocked up mightily last year when it was supposed to provide security for the Olympics, and the state had to sort out the mess, with soldiers drafted in at the last minute – in many cases, straight after tours of duty in places such as Afghanistan.

It’s also the same company that has, since then, been found (along with Serco) to have been overcharging the government (ie the taxpayer) for services in the justice sector.

One wonders why the Tories want such a dodgy company guarding them in the first place. But if the claim of that BBC correspondent is correct, and a private firm that has been awarded millions of pounds worth of contracts (in spite of dodgy or inadequate behaviour), and is unelected and unaccountable, is getting to help censor the news, then that causes another nasty smell to impinge on the nostrils.

Not that this excuses the BBC. G4S couldn’t stop them filming other parts of the demonstration or the rally that followed. And frankly, they should have tried to find some balls and film anyway – the roads around the conference centre are not private property – and see what G4S was going to try to do about it.

Because it would raise further points if a private company tried to start invoking anti-terrorism legislation to stop the filming of an entirely legal demonstration that was following its entirely legal and agreed route.

All of this is a mess – and not least because of the mess that is the UK’s mainstream news media at present, where any belief in the role of informing the populace has been subsumed by an agenda of pouring out uncritical propaganda for, by and large, the neo-liberal agenda.

And that in turn is why the present abject, cowering behaviour of the BBC is of equal concern.

Further reading

Health expenditure across the world.

An interesting analysis of US health spending and outcomes.

Comparison on health funding in the UK and US.

Telegraph report from 2009 on comparing US and UK health care.

Pleasant news on a grey day

This morning, with rain piddling down over London, the day was instantly brightened by two snippets of news.


First, that former home secretary Jack Straw is being sued over – allegedly – allowing rendition and second, that Tesco’s profits are down.


My main problem with the first is: why not Tony Blair?


On the second, let’s be quite clear – Tesco is still making shed loads of money; it’s just a slightly smaller shed.


But perhaps the way in which it was reported at great length, and the reactions to it, tells us most.


From the Telegraph on the political right to the Guardian on the left, readers were leaving detrimental comments by the bucket load. That was perhaps even more extraordinary given the quite frankly advertorial nature of the Telegraph piece.


Now obviously all these comments can’t be dismissed as some sort of ‘usual suspects’ who hate any profitable, successful company. Many – in particular at the Telegraph – were lauding Waitrose, which is part of John Lewis and thus part of its partnership model, where all staff are effectively the shareholders.


It isn’t a hatred of business or profits in general or even of capitalism at large. What it is is a serious dislike of what Tesco has done and is perceived to be continuing to do – riding roughshod over local people in what seems like a drive to have a Tesco on every single street in the country; bullying and ripping off suppliers and producers, and in ripping off customers too.


Some of those in-store offers are, apparently, nowhere near as good as they claim to be. And that’s before mentioning the myriad negative comments about staff, which are hardly surprising if they’re treated as poorly as various people have heard and even as I myself have heard from a long-term Tesco employee.


If you want to defend big business, then this is not the model you want to be defending.


Fortunately these days, I no longer have to choose between shopping at a Tesco or a Sainsbury’s. And my own shopping experience these days is infinitely preferable to those days.


Perhaps if Tesco doesn’t want its domestic profits to simply keep on falling, then it might want to reconsider its approach to business – and not least as it seems to have been well and truly rumbled by large numbers of the great British public.


But in the meantime, two thing struck me.


First, it was a great pleasure to realise that I am far from being alone in my detestation of Tesco – and that it is something that crosses the political spectrum.


And second, that it is still clear that for many of the British public, the central issue when they're buying food is that it should be as cheap as possible – and most certainly cheaper than it is in Tesco.


The widening dislike of Tesco and its methods is positive – but we have a long way to go, methinks.

Of misandrists and men

How long ago is it that women had the debate about whether feminists could wear lipstick?

Like you, I thought that that issue was dead in the water – after all, isn’t feminism supposed, at core, to be about women’s liberation? And wouldn’t any meaningful idea of liberation mean that women could choose things for themselves?

And isn’t it about women taking responsibility for themselves and their own decisions and actions?

Well, unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward, as Irene’s story and the responses to it that she received illustrate.

And it adds yet more weight to what I’ve been noticing in the last few years.

Self-appointed, unaccountable women who have decided that they hold the keys to everywoman’s experience of womanhood – of life – and will do their damnedest to foist their views onto every other woman around.

They’re fundamentalists and, like other fundamentalisms that are on the rise these days, feminist fundamentalism is also rearing its ugly head.

In various places, I find other women telling me what to do: how I should dress, how I should behave, how I should fuck (and whom). I’ve even been told that I should be afraid to walk the streets – and when I respond that I am not, I’ve been told that I’m a fool.

The Guardian newspaper, supposedly a bastion of liberal thought, lends legitimacy to this fundamentalist feminism by allowing its exponents pretty much un-challenged space in its opinion columns and online blogs.

The British government is creating dismal legislation that has comes out of an alliance between fundamentalists of feminist and religious hue.

The whole thing is full of misandry – and misandry is no better than misogyny. Indeed, it’s also full of misogyny – such feminists seem to despise the overwhelming majority of their ‘sisters’.

So get out of my life. If I want to be spanked by a man, I’ll damned well be spanked by a man – and I’ll damned well enjoy it.

If I want to wear a burgundy velvet dress, team it with a studded wrist band and idly contemplate what handbag will work best with it – I’ll do so. And I’ll damned well enjoy it.

I’ve managed to rid myself of the controls of religion on my life and thoughts; I’ve dealt with the long-term consequences of having grown up with an emotionally bullying parent, and the impact on my self image and self confidence of yo-yo and faddy dieting and weight worries since the age of 12. In oh so very many ways, I spent years in an intellectual, emotional and sexual burka, hiding from view, from life. It is absolutely no coincidence that, during those days, I hid my physical self beneath layers of drab, shapeless clothing, embarrassed and ashamed by my own body and by my own physical needs and desires.

So I am most certainly not going to start kow-towing to a bunch of women telling me how I, as a woman, should live my life now.

And it would be such a dull and colourless life, because their dull and colourless little brains are filled with bile and jealousy and the need to justify their own tawdry existences by controlling others.

Like puritans and prudes and prigs everywhere, they live in fear of anyone else having any pleasure – unless they’ve approved it first.

According to a certain view, the whole fashion thing, for instance, is a male conspiracy against women – not least, because it’s about getting women to dress for men; in a way that men like.

Let’s assume for the sake of the discussion that such a simplistic idea has some legitimacy – as we’ve discussed elsewhere, dress is partly about attracting a mate.

So …

So what? If I want to dress to attract, why not?

If I want to dress to ‘play the game’, why not?

If I want to dress a certain way because it gives me pleasure … why not?

If I get a kick out of being aware that I attract male glances on occasion (these boobs are difficult to hide), then what on Earth, in Mother Nature’s name, is wrong with that?

The logical conclusion is that it is wrong for men to behave like … well, men. And that it is wrong for women to enjoy men behaving like … err, men.

How do we ‘solve’ this? How about all females of the species wearing burkas? Let’s stop those looks by removing temptation from men – because we all know that it’s women’s fault that men are sometimes tempted to behave badly, and therefore it’s women’s responsibility to avoid that. We know it, because the story of Adam and Eve made it clear that women are the temptresses who must be kept under control, lest they drag down decent, honest, God-fearing men.

While we’re at it, let’s return to the olden days where, in rape trials, the question of what the woman was wearing was paramount – was that short skirt or low-cut blouse ‘asking for it’?

There are times when these radical ‘feminists’ seem to have an awful lot in common with sexist bigots such as the Taliban. Indeed, they’re quite happy to make unholy alliances with religious conservatives in the West when it suits their ideas on certain issues – Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon are a case in point. What an irony! So-called feminists climbing into metaphorical bed with the very sorts of people who would limit women’s choices!

Feminism is not dead. It better hadn’t be. Because we have many, many important things that still need achieving. In the UK, for instance, equal pay is just one such thing. A real thing. A real, day-to-day, economic issue for millions of British women.

Elsewhere in the world, women are dying because a bunch of dried up old men in frocks have decided that they cannot be allowed to have control over their own bodies and their own fertility.

In parts of Pakistan, as the Taliban gain ground, girls are being barred from education.

But no: the important questions are whether women should be allowed to like handbags and green angora sweaters and lipstick. And whether they should ever dare to allow themselves to sexually play a submissive role to a male Dominant (the other way around is just about acceptable, apparently).

What spectacularly crass priorities.

Simone de Beauvoir must be spinning in her Montparnasse grave. But then again, de Beauvoir understood the value of intellectual rigour – not the sort of self-indulgent wanking that the women who would replace a patriarchy with a matriarchy like to pretend passes for ‘thought’.

Now, if you'll excuse me: I've a clothes and lippy shopping trip to plan for this evening.