Silent Majority Speaks
Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship
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Spin,
not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the Government's
chosen method of communication. Ordinary people are dangerous. Ordinary
people might ask a question which throws a politician 'off message';
the Cabinet member might reveal himself or herself to be a human being
like us, and not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might
tell the truth.
Ann Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004
Blair wants to leave his
mark on history - looks more like a stain to me.
Peter Thorndyke, Diss,
Norfolk - Daily Mail, May 23, 2005
I know I'm me - why do I
need an ID card?
"Sorry, officers, I
don't have an ID card. I never applied for one. It seemed a bit steep
at 300 quid. I do have my free passport, my driving licence and my
London freedom travel pass, each with my photograph. I have my NHS
medical card, with its lengthy number, given me at birth, my RAF
service book with my Armed Forces number, and a chit authorising me to
wear a few gongs -including a General Service Medal with Malaya bar,
for fighting communist terrorists on behalf of my country, or so they
told me.
"I've also got various credit
cards and store cards, all with my signature on the back, generally
good for buying the everyday requrements for life as well as the odd
luxury. If you decide to arrest me, I suppose I'll have to be
photographed and given another number, besides my PINs.
"I'm afraid I haven't got a
pension book; it was taken away."
"By thieves, sir?"
"No ... well, not exactly. By the
Government. By the way, may I see your warrant cards please, gentlemen?"
Oh dear, they've disappeared. E.
Harry Gumer, Romford, ESSEX - Daily Mail, June 1, 2005
NO means NO
When does NO mean MAYBE?
When it's not the answer the EU wants. With the courageous French
NON resounding in their ears, shabby, undemocratic self-interested
leaders of Europe propose ignoring the part of their precious
constitution that requires ratification by all members and
continuing without one of the biggest founder members to
prevent derailing the gravy train.
As in Ireland,
they refuse to accept any NO votes, ignoring the will of the people,
and re-stage votes until they can engineer the 'correct' answer. Sadly,
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw dances to their tune like a puppet on a
string. With tactics such as these, how can anyone really believe the
EU has our interests at heart. Letter from Steve Penny, Kingsnorth, Kent - Daily
Mail, June1, 2005
Surely
the French result makes the £1million the EU recently spent on a
treaty signing ceremony seem a trifle premature and extravagant. Letter from Keith Wiseman, Bury, Lancs. - Daily Mail,
June1, 2005
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Britain has
traditionally been one of the biggest net contributors to the EU
because we do not get as much money back from Brussels in farm and
regional subsidies as our rivals.
According to
Treasury figures, between 1995-2002, Britain's average contribution
taking the rebate into account, was £2.6billion, or £43.55
per head of population.
The French -
the biggest recipient of farm subsidies - contributed £1billion a
year or £16.08 per head of their population.
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May
9, 2006 (1095 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2428 US - 109 UK - >60,000? civilians - 25 media
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Tony
Blair should know that respect comes by example - from the
top. If a country's leader has no respect for the rule of
international law and no respect for the truth, how can
he expect anyone to have respect. Letter
from P.J.Atkinson, Ashford, Kent - Daily Mail, January 12,
2006
The
Chancellor's single greatest act of vandalism in almost
nine years in office has been his wanton destruction of
Britain's private retirement industry. By slapping a massive
tax on pension funds, now worth
£7.3billion a year, he has helped to turn
the best private retirement industry in Europe into a basket-case
in perpetual crisis. Together with the adoption of European
accounting rules - which make it much riskier to operate
a company pension scheme - hundreds of firms have shut their
final salary plans to new employees and slashed benefits
to existing staff.
From
Allister Heath: "I've seen the future and its grey"
in THE SPECTATOR - April 15, 2006
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No
wonder the NHS is cash-strapped-
...
Four years ago I had an eight-month stay in our hospital's
local cardio ward. There was no manager, just a sister
heading a very happy team, who did all they could to make
me content too.
This
year I returned to find the sister replaced by a ward
manager and all the happy feeling that wass there before
had gone. Staff had no time for anything but the necessities,
and I begged to be discharged after five days.
From
Barbara Rafferty, Redcar, North Yorkshire: " The
Mail on Sunday, May 14, 2006
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A
plague on NHS managers
They're
destroying the selfless care and dedication of the health service
I love
By
Margaret Cook - Doctor and former wife of Labour Cabinet Minister
Robin Cook
Daily
Mail, April 25, 2006
The
desperation of Patricia Hewitt, assuring a flabbergasted electorate
that the NHS has just had 'its best year ever', would be richly
comical were it not so insulting to our intelligence. The NHS
is such a massive organisation that most of the people in this
country will have had contact with it this last year, as staff
or patient, or relative of patients. We DO know what goes on,
Patricia.
And
if this is a good year, the God help us if we ever have a bad
one. On one level, is suppose we should not be surprised. Hewitt's
tactic of arguing, in her hectoring New Labour voice, that black
is white is an ancient political method of mesmerising the masses.
A closer analysis soon reveals a rather different picture.
£45,000
'care lesson' bill for the actors who pretend to be patients
By
Jaya Narain - Daily Mail, April 25, 2006
It
has debts of more than £11million and dozens of
its staff could face redundancy this year. But a hospital
trust is spending £45,000 so that managers can spend
a day with actors pretending to be patients.
A
theatre group will be paid £90 for each member of
staff from the East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust who
takes part. Initial sessions will involve 500 staff.
Caroline
Collins, of the Royal College of Nursing, said: "I
would suggest it would be better for the management team
to get into uniform and do a shift."
Tim
Ellis, of Unison, said; "This could potentially be
patronising to staff. The management need to deal with
practical problems like staffing and improving practice
rather than theory training."
The
programme, initially using more than £45,000 bequeathed
to the NHS by former patients, was launched on March 31.
The actors' task is supposedly to help the managers understand
how it feels to be a patient Gordon Birtwhistle, a member
of Burnley Council, said he was amazed as the initiative
came amid a controversial shake-up of services at the
trust.
"It
was just a joke. It amazes me that they are shutting services
down in Burnley and going on something like this. How
can we have managers who don't know what patients want?"
But
Trust chief executive Jo Cubbon said: "The Being
with Patients programme goes far beyond the traditional
training course in that it aims to reach the hearts as
well as the minds of staff who have daily contact with
patients to ensure that their behaviour is caring and
patient centred. I am 100% behind the programme, which
is why myself and the executive team will be taking part.
The programme will then be rolled out to the rest of the
trust and I feel this will have a major, positive impact
on patient care."
Dave
Hill, development manager at West Yorkshire based Cragrats
theatre group, which provides four actors for the days,
said: "I think this is what the NHS needs more than
anything else. It should be absolutely core to what each
trust does."
The
number of NHS hospital managers has doubled in 10 years
while staff numbers overall have risen by only 30%, Government
figures showed yesterday.
There
were 39.391 managers in 2005 - up from 20,842 in 1995.
Between 2004 and 2005, the number of managers rose by
1,665. The Information Centre for Health and Social Care
said the NHS had more than 1.3million employees in 2005,
compared with a million in 1995, making the workforce
figure the highest ever.
There
are now 37,900 more doctors and 87,300 more nurses than
in 1995, it said, adding that the managers represented
just under 3% of the total workforce.
Dave
Prentis, general secretary of Unison, said the figures
proved the Government's health reforms were 'distorting'
where funding was needed. "The latest forms have
increased administration and bureaucracy and the need
to employ more managers. It would be far better to use
the money to put into front-line services."
A
spokesman for the Department of Health said: "The
increase in the number of managers has to be seen in the
context of a record increase in NHS staff as a whole,
with more doctors and nurses than ever before. Managers
account for less than 3% of the total work-force, compared
with nurses who make up more than a quarter."
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What
does the Health Secretary quote to support her extravagant statement?
"We have just come through one of the coldest winters for
decades and we haven't had any of the winter bed crises."
That is crossed-finger code-speak for: "We haven't yet had
the predicted bird-flu epidemic.' Not even SHE could argue that
this was a triumph of government intervention.
Hewitt
also trumpets low waiting times. But these have largely been achieved
at the cost of massive overspends recently reported in the media
and the knock-on effects of the predicted sacrifice of 7,000 jobs
(a figure that may double by the time the axing has finished).
And while NHS workers' jobs are being savaged, what is happening
on the NHS managerial scene? Government figures show that 1,000
extra hospital managers were created last year. NHS managers number
nearly 40,000 - more than the total number of consultants. Hewitt
claims they are the basis of a well-run service.
Although
I retired from my job as a hospital doctor three years ago, I
can hear the echoing sounds of hysterical laughter from exhausted
colleagues. In my experience, managers seemed to create far more
problems than they solved, and were constantly distracting me
from patient-care duties. A pile of irrelevant papers hit my desk
every day, and when I complained, the response was that if they
did not disseminate this information, they would be criticised
by those further up the management chain.
They
seemed to subsist on a diet of lengthy meetings that the medical
and workforce were obliged to attend, which dealt with navel-gazing
matters of supreme irrelevance such as staff partnerships, participative
management, leadership drives and business plans. It was frustrating
and bewildering for doctors to spend increasing amounts of time
on such unproductive matters when we could have been caring for
our patients.
Yet
whenever we tried to seek support for minor measures that could
genuinely improve the level of care delivered in a department,
there was always red tape and a thousand reasons why they could
not be done. The truth is that having scores of managers simply
creates work, it does not streamline it - especially when most
of those managers have little, if any, insight into the true needs
and pressures of patient care.
Setting
abstract targets, introducing new initiatives each week, issuing
meaningless management DIKTATS about every tiny aspect
of healthcare serves only to demoralise staff.
Besides,
there is a wealth of difference between meeting official targets
and delivering quality care. Speed and the number of patients
treated do not make for quality care. Yet
it has been Labour's gift to the NHS that doctors are rewarded
for the quantity of patients they seem not the quality of care
they deliver - for ticking boxes, not using their skill and judgment.
The
news that some GPs are now able to pocket £250,000 a year
or more is particularly horrifying. There have always been doctors
prepared to dash through their cases to earn mega-bucks. But when
you think of the poor quality care that some vulnerable folk are
receiving in the community, while millions of pounds of NHS funds
are wasted on such astronomical salaries, you don't know whether
to laugh or cry.
Of
course, the vulnerable old often lack the confidence or ability
to complain. So they suffer in silence. Some get forced into private
treatment, which strips them of their life's savings. One octogenarian
of my acquaintance made her own diagnosis, but was unable to get
a doctor's appointment. Eventually, she saw a nurse, but wasn't
even examined, and - the final insult - was given the wrong treatment
- one that made the situation worse. In my book, such cases amount
to criminal neglect.
Yet
this is the same NHS that we are told is performing better than
ever. This is what we have to show for the extra £22billlion
poured into the NHS from public funds over the past four years.
Yes, Labour may have given record sums to the NHS, but it has
damaged its greatest resource of all: the staff who work for it.
In
its original form, the NHS was an extraordinary vision, which
really brought out the best in people, attracting those with a
vocation and a genuine interest in being of use. In my initiation
to medicine, I was imbued with an ethic of care that involved
a measure of self-sacrifice. It was this vision and selflessness
among staff that achieved amazing teamwork and feats of compassionate
care in the face of limited resources.
Of
course, in pockets, here and there, the old spirit survives. But
once that basic premise of altruism began to be progressively
undermined by a Government that offered profit-incentives for
meeting abstract targets, its lifespan was limited. With Hewitt
and her ilk in charge, it has now reached the point of widespread
disaffection, where once-motivated staff struggle to maintain
morale while the management walk all over them. So what can be
done?
First,
health professionals must accept some blame for going along with
initiatives that they knew full well owed more to political expediency
than medical need. Politicians are motivated primarily by their
instinct for survival to make self-serving statements and policies,
but doctors do not have to sing from the same hymn sheet. We do
not HAVE to accept targets for vaccinating children and handing
out cholesterol-lowering drugs to adults, thereby allowing politicians
to make medical decisions regardless of the individual requirements
of patients.
We
do not HAVE to kowtow to politicians and managers. One concerted
step that we doctors could take is to stand up and insist on an
independent body governing the NHS, as called for recently by
the editor of the British Medical Journal. Such a body would operate
like the BBC, with a board of governors and a fixed budget from
public funds.
Crucially,
it would help to insulate the NHS from the kind of interference
from Westminster that has led to so many confusing (and often
contradictory) policy initiatives in recent years. It would give
it the freedom to allocate care according to patient needs, rather
than according to the latest Government decree. And it would free
NHS staff from the kind of management that rewards the greedy
and punishes the compassionate.
That,
Ms Hewitt, would be a truly great initiative for the NHS> All
the rest of your verbiage is just window-dressing.
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