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Samizdata quote of the day – NHS exodus edition

“If the NHS is so wonderful, why do its staff keep threatening to emigrate?”

Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph (£).

As an aside, while a lot of media and political commentary these days is about immigration, the emigration of talented people from the UK is likely to be a problem that becomes more significant, with potentially political effects. I am just about old enough to remember the “Brain Drain” that was a Thing in the 70s.

9 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – NHS exodus edition

  • jgh

    “net 700,000 migration” obscures that fact that it’s actually 1.2 MILLION immigrants and 500,000 people leaving.

  • Kirk

    The statistics people really don’t ever bother to ask which specific people are leaving, and why. You have a bunch of your technically-trained and productive population pulling up stakes and leaving? You’ve got a problem you need to be acting on.

    None of that matters to the people in charge, these days. They don’t care about the actual detailed issues, like whether or not they’re bleeding productive citizens whose loss is significant vs. gaining useless burdens that are never going to contribute to anything but the crime rate and welfare rolls. See California for example, where the current state government is claiming California is growing, while productive citizens flee for the hills and are being replaced by illegals whose contributions to the state economy are nearly all negative.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Since the article is beyond a paywall, perhaps somebody can enlighten us as to why NHS staff are dissatisfied?

    Is it the low wages, the working conditions, the wokeness, or what?

  • John

    Snorri, I hope this helps.

    IMHO the leaders public statements leave no doubt that these are highly politicised animals albeit ones who the majority of colleagues are all to ready to fall into line behind.

    There is zero possibility that dissatisfaction with ever more encroaching wokeness within the nhs is driving them overseas. Chances are they love it.

    Occam’s razor yet again, it’s mostly about the money.

    There is a bizarre contradiction in what junior doctors’ leaders tell us. On the one hand, they point to figures showing that thousands of clinicians are going overseas, where working conditions are less stressful. On the other, they hit the roof at any suggestion that NHS structures might be brought into line with these other systems.

    Obviously, doctors want to be paid more. Who doesn’t? And it is true that, in common with the rest of us, NHS staff have seen their pay fall as a result of the lockdown – a lockdown, by the way, which the BMA wanted to be even longer.

    British medics are at the upper end of global salary leagues, but not at the very top.

  • APL

    “There is a bizarre contradiction in what junior doctors’ leaders tell us.”

    Talking about ‘leaders’, I see our ‘safe and effective’ Politicians have bunged themselves another pay rise.

    The rationale being, they had to, because the last parliament made them do it. Nothing they could do about it gov,.

  • Chris

    The NHS is the last of the nationalised industries and I can only hope that this will be its British Leyland moment

  • Lee Moore

    Who is surprised that suppliers to a monopsony might be less than gruntled ?

  • rhoda klapp

    If you want to know who is emigrating the ONS will tell you. Mostly it’s foreigners who came in the previous years. It’s all here. Interesting stuff but plenty of important unmbers seem to be absent.

  • Paul Marks

    The National Health Service must be seen in religious, not health care, terms.

    People do not judge it on the basis of the health care they do NOT receive – it is considered a Holy thing.

    Any criticism is met by angry talk of “Tory Cuts” even though funding has been massively increased.

    In Russia, and the Soviet health service (created 20 years before the British service) is really what the “NHS” is based upon (NOT “a Welsh pit village” or “the Friendly Society of the Great Western Railway” – or all the rest of the absurd propaganda that is dished out), the population do not tend to regard the health service as a religious cult-object – but Russians tend to be rather cynical people.

    Will faith in the “NHS” finally break down under the next Labour government? I do not know.

    But I would guess that dissent would be de facto outlawed – after all many people working for the NHS are non white, so dissent must be racist.

    Ditto sexist and homophobic, and Islamophobic, and (quite possibly) a sign of a Climate Denier.

    Remember “Freedom of Speech does not mean Hate Speech” – and “Hate Speech” (as the European Union and the rest of the International Community have made very clear) means dissent.

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