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This used to be the state of Britain in the 1970s; a reference to the relative economic decline that accompanied the imperial scuttle. Now, we should use the term in another sense: the transition of the National Health Service from modernity to the Middle Ages.
If you enter a National Health Service hospital, there is a high risk of contracting an infection caused by a dugs resistant bacteria called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which the tabloids have dubbed “superbug”. There are numerous stories of patients, who have no choice but to use state provision, due to its monopolistic powers, and have contracted this infection as a consequence. There is one poor unfortunate who has been MRSA positive eight times.
A grandmother who has contracted the MRSA superbug eight times is refusing to return to hospital for a vital operation.
Doctors warned Marjorie Evans, 69, she could die or be bedridden for the rest of her life if she is hit by the infection again. She plans to travel abroad for her hip replacement rather than trust a British hospital. Mrs Evans has caught MRSA during inpatient stays at Morriston Hospital in Swansea since 1992.
One of the major causes of these infections is the inability of NHS hospitals to maintain minimum levels of cleanliness, such as insisting all visitors wash their hands. Once drugs-resistant bacteria have taken hold, they are difficult to eradicate. However, there is an alternative, the private sector:
BMI Healthcare is one of the biggest private hospital groups in the UK, with 47 hospitals. During the course of a year, the group has a quarter of a million in-patients and three-quarters of a million out-patient visits. How many patients in BMI hospitals have acquired MRSA in the blood? None. In fact, over the years, the company has “never” had such a case.
If you do come to Britain, avoid the NHS. For if they do manage to kill you, a task they achieve with ease, you may still not be given last rites as the religious affiliation of your dying husk cannot be disclosed under the Data Protection Act.
The Hospital Chaplaincies Council has criticised several NHS Trusts for their “hysterical” refusal to disclose the religious backgrounds of their patients. The trusts claim that such information is “too sensitive” to share with chaplains.
Candida Moss, writing in the Spectator, suggests that ‘presumed consent’ ought to apply for donating organs. On the basis that my comments my not appear in the magazine, here’s what I wrote:
Presumed consent is not consent. If it were, then minors or people suffering from dementia might not enjoy the protection from sexual assault that they do at present. Sexual predators could no doubt claim “presumed consent” for their crimes.
There is a difference between medical expedience and morality. There can be no doubt that there would be enormous medical benefits from performing vivisection on human beings, instead of on animals: dosages, differences in metabolic rates etc. would be far easier to calculate.
Rightly, we abhor this and consider controvertial using the results of Nazi experiments on Jews, because it can be considered the partial condoning of horrific actions.
Is it Candida Moss’s wish that the state (probably at EU level) ought to nationalize our bodies and redistribute organs according to need? At least Gordon Brown only wants my money.
I might add that the issue of designer babies giving their own consent to being used as experimental animals is another current topic. It seems pretty sick to me.
Some time ago President Bush offered 15 billion dollars of American taxpayers money for ‘the fight against AIDS’ in various nations.
Yesterday the Secretary General of the UN denounced the United States for not spending enough money. Now this anger could be dismissed as the Secretary General being upset that so much of the money was going to be spent ‘direct’ in the nations concerned rather than put through the UN (where the Secretary General’s son and his friends could steal some of the money), however this does not explain all the anger directed against the United States at the AIDS conference in Bangkok.
I think the explanation for the anger is very simple – people are never grateful for loot.
Everyone knows that President Bush is not giving his own money when he hands out the 15 billion dollars (assuming that Congress goes along with this idea), he is just taking (by the threat of violence) money from the taxpayers and dishing it out.
Why should anyone be grateful to him? He is not making a sacrifice; he is just handing out the money of the taxpayers. Why should he give 15 billion dollars to the third world, why not 50 billion or 500 hundred billion? It is not costing him anything.
So the various political activists feel no reason to thank President Bush.
It is the old story of ‘conservatives’ and government spending. No matter how much they spend the activists will always think they can get more money from the ‘progressive’ politicians and so will shout and scream and stamp their feet.
I am going to have to find some new term to adequately describe the condition of ignorance that renders its sufferers unable to comprehend the inevitable truth that state-control means political control.
A shining example of this tragically far-too-common form of myopia can be found in one of today’s letters to the UK Times [note: link may not work for non-UK readers]:
Sir, Once again the NHS is set fair to become the filling in the Labour and Conservative policy sandwiches, and yet neither party recognises that the biggest problem besetting the service is the very political control each espouses.
Health, like broadcasting, is too important to be the political football of major parties during the first skirmishes of an impending general election. The NHS needs a charter, it needs sensitive management, it needs to value and cherish its long-suffering staff and, above all, it needs to be isolated from the political process.
The man who wrote this letter is a doctor and is, therefore, unlikely to be either dim-witted or uneducated. Yet, he passionately demands (and no doubt expects) a government-run health service that is somehow ‘isolated from the political process’.
I have penned a letter of response to the Times pointing out that the only way to get politics out of healthcare is to de-nationalise it and allow provision to be bought and sold on the free market. However, I do not expect the editors of the Times will be inclined to publicise such heretical and ‘extreme’ views.
The great canard of the collectivists holds that a free-market in healthcare will assuredly result in healthcare providers hungrily pursuing maximum profits while abandoning the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable to a wretched and untreated fate.
So often and so passionately has this big lie been repeated that it is now accepted by most people in this country as an incontrovertibe truth. Nationalised healthcare, they say, puts people’s needs at the top of the agenda where there is no room for ugly money-grubbing.
Only they forgot about ugly bed-grubbing:
A nurse has been jailed for five years for trying to kill two elderly patients at a Cheshire hospital.
Barbara Salisbury, 47, was found guilty of trying to kill them to free up more beds at Leighton Hospital, in Crewe.
Rationed resources require desperate measures. In fact, and given the governmental obsession with reducing waiting times for hospital treatment, I am a little surprised that the Department of Health has not pinned a medal on this woman.
When she finally emerges from her time in stir, Ms Salisbury may well find herself being offered a job back in the NHS as a senior consultant.
It is strangely comforting to see that the ‘class war’ instincts of old Labour are not entirely dead yet:
John Reid, the Health Secretary, yesterday dismissed the demand for a blanket ban on smoking as “an obsession of the learned middle class”.
Speaking at a Labour Party event, he said he was reluctant to use compulsion to outlaw something that was a source of pleasure, particularly to working class people.
That Mr. Reid has to fight the corner of working-class people at a Labour Party event speaks volumes about the evolutionary path of the modern left.
Earlier, Mr Reid expressed his views even more bluntly when he took part in a round-table discussion with some of those invited to contribute to the consultation.
Told that they were discussing a smoking ban, Mr Reid said: “Let me play devil’s advocate. What enjoyment does a 21-year-old mother of three living on a sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they get is having a cigarette.”
One participant objected quite strongly, telling Mr Reid her mother died of lung cancer.
But Mr Reid, a former chain smoker who has now given up, said it was best to provide people with information and let them decide what to do for themselves.
Now, perhaps, Mr. Reid can take the next logical step and denounce the levels of tax that working people have to pony up in order to enjoy their smoking habit. Then the bien-pensant can safely re-classify him as a ‘right-winger’.
Compared to the length of time it took to hike up the taxes on tobacco, alcohol and petroleum, the great ‘junk food’ shakedown has been completed in remarkably quick time. HMG is clearly honing its modus operandi down to a fine art: [note: link to UK Times may not be available to readers based outside the UK]
BRITAIN’S biggest food companies are to be told by the government to pay an “anti-obesity” levy to fund new sports centres or face punitive laws restricting advertising, marketing and labelling.
Firms such as McDonald’s, Walkers and Cadbury Schweppes are to be asked to contribute tens of millions of pounds towards the sports facilities. The government is set to provide £1m for the scheme for every £3m pledged by the food industry. It will be used to build sports centres, gyms, football pitches and tennis courts.
The food industry confirmed this weekend that it was preparing to co-operate with ministers and could provide hundreds of millions of pounds to fend off regulation.
Of course, I knew this was coming but not even I was prepared for the ugly truth to be revealed quite this rapidly. The Treasury must be desperate for the cash. → Continue reading: The big pay off
Growing up in the 1970’s I recall being rather spooked by dire warnings of an impending ice age and the threat that I would spend my adult life shivering in a cave. Some twenty years later that apocalypse vision had been melted clean away by the dire (and considerably shriller) warnings about global warming and, according to everyone who is anyone, I now face the threat of spending what remains of my adult life sizzling like a sausage.
Two decades in which to manage a complete polar reversal in doomsday-scenario is pretty good going but it pales into ‘also-ran’ status by an eerily similar polar switch in the rather more mundane field of eating disorders.
This is from the BBC website in July 1998:
Doctors have hit out at the media and advertisers for encouraging anorexia by portraying skinny supermodels as the beauty ideal instead of ‘more buxom wenches’.
The British Medical Association’s annual conference in Cardiff voted overwhelmingly for a motion condemning the media obsession with ultra thin supermodels.
Dr Muriel Broome, a former director of public health, said “the constant image of very thin models” encouraged girls to develop eating disorders. “We urge the media to be more responsible and show more buxom wenches,” she said.
I know not whether Dr Broome’s advice was acted upon, but I am now informed that we have, indeed, taken on the mantle of buxomness with some considerable gusto. From the BBC website today:
Improving children’s eating habits is the key to tackling an obesity “timebomb”, MPs have warned.
The Commons Health Select Committee attacks the government, food industry and advertisers for failing to act to stop rising levels of obesity.
From ‘ultra-thin models’ to ‘obesity timebombs’ in the space of slightly over half-a-decade. Now I am no statistician but I think even I am qualified to regard that as a quite remarkable national metamorphosis. → Continue reading: Fat of the land
It is official: food is the new enemy of the international left.
While the crashers were doing their stuff on the neatly-manicured lawns of Geneva, dark plots were being hatched inside the gleaming towers:
All 192 countries in the World Health Organisation have tentatively agreed to an unprecedented policy on diet and health to tackle global obesity.
Did that include the Ethiopeans?
The voluntary plan was hammered out at talks in Geneva in the face of stiff opposition from lobbies such as the sugar-producing nations.
We are privileged indeed to witness the birth of a brand, new imaginary straw-man. Ladies and gentlemen, making its debut on the world stage, but soon to making regular appearances in the columns of every angry, left-wing polemicist in every media venue on earth, please give a warm welcome to….. “the Sugar Lobby” (boo, hiss). Stand right here in the spotlight, Sugar Lobby, and take your place among right-wingers, big tobacco, industrialists, zionists, gun manufacturers, motorists and George Bush.
Nearly one in six people worldwide is now considered overweight.
Amazing is it not? Seems like only five minutes ago that the battlecry of the social-working class was “feed the starving”. Now, in the blink of an eye, they have changed it to “starve the fed”. Astonishing stuff!
The BBC’s Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says this is the first ever attempt to regulate the world’s eating habits.
And we all know that it will not be the last.
Dr Kaare Norum, a Norwegian obesity expert who advised the WHO on the development of the plan, said the agreement was a victory for public health.
DR. NORUM: “I have been studying obese people for many, many years and the incontrovertible data I have collected as a result leads me to conclude that these people are very fat”.
WHO: “You are obviously an expert. Come join our committee”.
Honestly, the whole article sounds as if it has been lifted from an old issue of Pravda. Mind you, it comes courtesy of the Beeb.
So be warned you choca-holics and doughnut-dunkers: your stodgy, sticky delights are on the hit list. Lock them away in secret bunkers while you still can.
The May 1 issue of New Scientist contains an item ‘Why our fears about fat are misplaced’ written by Paul Campos, a Professor of Law from the University of Colorado. We have often stated our belief fat is the new job frontier for government bureaucracy and Professor Campos seems to agree with us. He states unequivocally that no research directly links fat to shorter lifespans. Sedentery lifestyles and other factors, yes. Fat alone? No. In his own words:
Ultimately the current panic over increasing body mass has little to do with science, and everything to do with cultural and political factors that distort scientific enquiry. Among those factors are greed (consensus panels put together by organizations such as WHO that have declared obesity a major health crisis are often made up entirely of doctors who run diet clinics), and cultural anxieties about social overconsumption in general.
He notes that in one recent study:
It added up to just one extra death per 10,000 “overweight” women per year. The authors still treated the findings as strong evidence of a causal relationship between weight and cancer
Professor Campos also has a book on the subject, The Obesity Myth.
Like a lot of folk who spend much of their time working in an office in Central London, I try to grab what exercise I can by going to a gym. I have been visiting one of these places in London for about eight years, and, gratifyingly, my once pencil-thin physique has acquired a bit more muscle. (I have a long way to go, mind, not that I remotely want to look like the Governor of California). I have also acquired other benefits, such as being able to sleep much better, better chance of avoiding injuries in everyday life, and a better pallor… The benefits have not gone unremarked by my girlfriend, either.
Gymnasiums are now a major business. Their success in the West speaks of an ever-expanding desire on our part to live the healthy life and do something direct about it. I find it amusing that at a time when we are constantly told by our masters that we need new laws, taxes and the like to avoid obesity and other problems, that more folk than ever before are getting off their backsides and working out. Screw the nanny state, put on some gym shoes! It is a rather encouraging sign that the spirit of self-help, at least when it comes to developing a flat stomach or a nice torso, is well alive.
The gym culture also I think shows just how secular British society has become. If you lack faith in an afterlife, and want to squeeze the most out of life on this Earth, then get fit! Also, if you do not believe that pride is a sin, as I do not, then there is nothing wrong in doing one’s best to look good and feel physically on top of the world, and enjoy that fact.
Dave Barry links to this:
Phil Henry said he went to Helen Ellis Hospital in Tarpon Springs and was admitted for abdominal pain. A few days into his stay, his I-V malfunctioned causing his right arm to swell.
“On Tuesday night my right arm started hurting. I rung for a nurse. I didn’t get anyone and my arm got swollen up about the size of two golf balls and started bleeding,” Henry said.
After ringing for a nurse several times, he decided to take matters into his own hands.
“I took my urinal can and threw it out in the hallway, still got nobody. I hollered two or three times. Nobody came so I picked up the telephone and dialed 911.”
He said he told the dispatcher his name, where he was and described the problem with the I-V.
He then asked the dispatcher to call the hospital.
“Then I got a nurse. After that they took good care of me.”
Warning to British people: Do not try this with the NHS.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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