I spent Christmas Day with a couple who are living proof of marital love. She’s got a First in Law, he’s a born entrepreneur whose practicality leaves me awestruck, and they both bemoan the absence of decency we once took for granted. Together, they show how 1+1 = 247 if you know what you’re doing, and you have a sense of responsibility.
But hark: are there not candles in McDonalds, 50,000 without power, thousands having to leave their homes. 1970s nostalgia, doncha love it?
Except that back then, there was more genuine Christmas cheer and political truce. Not any more.
LibDems say they’re gunning for Tory seats in 2015, which is like me vowing to aim my bow and arrow at The Shard. Nick Clegg says his only personal feud is with Ed Balls, as if this might be some sort of distinctive oddity. Senior LibDem Sir Nick Harvey breaks ranks to say the Fox hunting law is daft, perhaps not mathematical enough himself to grasp how silly it would be to split the Party’s vote just at the moment. Zero is, after all, indivisible. Which rhymes with risible, and spending cuts to specialist response teams who deal with disturbances in prisons. Labour calls it “an accident waiting to happen”. A riot waiting to happen surely: but this is one to add to the legal aid and fire station cuts…an inability to tell the difference between a cost and an investment.
There was a common phrase in Manchester when I was a kid, “Don’t be a twat all your life…’ave a day off”. But even though it’s Christmas, Whitehall knows not how to take off Seasonal time from being incompetent. So it is that 32,000 Benefit claimants didn’t get their money in time for Santa’s visit. Just put to one side for a minute your agenda about welfare, and think about that one: it is something to which there is in our system a legal entitlement, 95+% of the recipients are poor, Christmas is a chance to be a family again for maybe 36 hours..but the DWP screwed it up. Call me old-fashioned, but I would’ve locked all the exit doors to their office building last Friday night until the problem was guaranteed sorted. Wherever you sit on the spectrum, this was a disgrace.
And there are other things that never change. An enthusiast myself in the 1970s for the idea of fat-cat State sector bureaucrats being bundled into knotted bags and chucked into fast-flowing rapids, I have come to realise over time that (a) one simply exchanges one set of obese tabbies for another (b) the price of the service goes up, and (c) the quality of it goes down. Now that GPs in Britain are as good as privatised (albeit largely at our expense) it was yawn-inducingly predictable that sooner rather than later evidence would emerge of a decline in standards. An estimated 27 million patients will be forced to wait at least a week to see their family doctor in 2014 due to a shortage of GPs, the Maily Telegraph reported today.
I’m not surprised by that, but what staggered me in the piece was the blinkered Barclaygraph bemoaning the ‘loss of balance’ between doctors working in primary practices versus those working in hospitals:
‘Just 11 years ago there were 2,500 more full-time GPs than hospital doctors. Last year, there were 31,700 GPs compared to 38,200 hospital doctors, a difference of 6,500….with a predicted 37,000 GPs and 59,000 hospital doctors by 2022.’
Leaving aside the profound daftness of even predicting there will be a 2022 for a minute, for my money more hospital doctors are a good thing as long as we keep on dumbing down and regulating GPs: I mean, the real expertise in 2013 is in the hospitals, not the local practices…so that’s where the investment should be.
But of course it isn’t, because the fanatics have their agenda: hospitals will be starved into insolvency, and then “rescued” by Baroness Nettlebum’s mates.
I remain in awe of the French health system because it works better than ours. The GPs have more skills, a stronger sense of social calling, and infinitely more freedom: they solve far more problems at the community level than the NHS ever did…and that declogs the hospitals from patients who should never have become that ill in the first place – as a result of some braindead order-taker being unable to say much more than “OK, we’ll monitor the symptoms for a bit”. Decoded, this means “I don’t know – go away”.
The NHS has been buggered rigid over 40 years by a mad mélange of socialist bollocks and market drivel. For the nth time, I say mutualise the bloody thing: then you remove it from f**kwitted Sir Humphreys and gr**d driven insurers.
But enough of this: we had seafood to start here, and then a capon. Then we all went for a siesta. Then we decided there was almost sod-all on the telly, and so – after watching the remarkable Cirque do Soleil – variously burped, chatted and surfed before going to bed again. Wonderful.
I was going to write a seasonal parody called A Christmas Tory, but then Fukushima got in the way (probably a good thing) and so now I’m turning it over to you lot.
I wanted to make the plot about returning to Dickensian London in all the worst senses of that description, and thus give all the characters curiously constructed Dickensian names. I had a lead character called Sir Grabben Nickitall, for example. What names would you have put in there? Bear in mind, though, that points will be deducted for the names being out of period and character: what I’m looking for here is surnames like Gradgrind, Drood, Skimpole, Bumble, Magwitch and so forth. Further points will be added, however, if they are vauely recognisable as currently residing Westminster reprobates. A good example would be Timberley Yeovillain.
Go to it.
The Slog 