Hospitals can’t cope with the numbers of people seeking treatment. A&E departments are in chaos and yesterday Jeremy Hunt announced that he has scrapped the promise that all emergency patients will be seen within four hours of their arrival. GPs are overrun. Over the weekend one national newspaper had the headline NHS NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE. This is nothing new: that headline might have been printed every day during the last fifteen years.
More money – that’s what’s needed, isn’t it? That has been the cry ever since the NHS was founded in 1948. And indeed more money is exactly what has been provided increasingly year on year. All those hundreds of billions of pounds: it makes you wonder where all the money ends up. Well, despite a significant increase in the population, and a consequent rise in the number of patients, the money certainly isn’t going to provide beds. There were 460,000 available beds in the NHS in 1948. Today there are only 129,000. Meanwhile, the number of senior managers has increased from about 500 in the 1970s to 43,000 today.
So what is all that money being spent on? Here is just one example…
The Guardian’s weekly public sector jobs supplement is regularly a hundred pages long, providing an advertising revenue which, together with the equally gargantuan educational jobs supplement, sustains in existence an otherwise financially unviable newspaper. Last week the public sector jobs supplement carried an advertisement for, “A part-time Assistant Director of Equality and Diversity at the Central Manchester University Hospitals. Salary £46,625-£57,640.”
Gosh, you must have to work hard to earn all that cash! I wonder what the Assistant Director does all day? Helpfully, The Guardian’s advert tells us:
“You’ll look to continually develop (sic) programmes that deliver our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2015-2019 which sets out a powerful vision: valuing the voices of diverse people to be the best we can (sic again). It’s a chance to lead and champion the development and delivery of all aspects of our equality and diversity work. This senior role will see you deputising for the Associate Director of Inclusion and Community…”
(Good grief, how many more of these sinecures are there!)
“…including working with external partners to advocate for the areas of Access, Community Partnership and Equality. You’ll also establish strong monitoring arrangements so we can track our progress.”
The construction of that advertisement has only a very remote relationship with the English language. Really, it’s meaningless to anyone who is not a socialist ideologue, apparatchik or superannuated bureaucrat: parasites all.
The only bit of genuine information contained in the advertisement is the very precise size of the salary. It is more than that of a state school teacher on the upper pay range in Inner London and about the same as that of a major in the British army.
So now we know where the money goes – not to provide for clinical practice but for social engineering. The part-time Assistant Director of politically-correct bulls**t gets between £46, 625 and £57, 640. I should like to know how much the full-time Director receives?
This all goes to show that the recent referendum cannot be treated as an end and must be viewed as a start. The west at large is suffocating in the grip of socialist bureaucracy, pursuing Utopian, self-destructive and treacherous ends with no thought for the suffering these cause. Our Conservative party has been cowardly in confronting and opposing these developments other than under Mrs Thatcher and now large chunks of it appear happier to cooperate with them – witness the idiotic Soubry and the contemptible Maria Miller. It is perhaps time to put sitting Tory MPs on notice that they will not receive our support if they persist in propping up the blood sucking, oppressive quangocracy.
Well said Mr Mullen.
Of course, when we are told:
“there is simply not enough money”…
“the NHS is heavily underfunded”…
“it’s all because of the cuts!”…
we are not exactly being lied to. After all, every profligate believes himself to be of insufficient funds.