Tag Archives: NHS

What Is Truth?

Posted on by
1

I’m sceptical (or skeptical if you’re in the US). It’s a legacy of my years of believing the promises of Christianity. Preachers, pastors, Bible study leaders told me for 25 years that the promises of the bible, of Jesus himself, were all true. And like a fool I believed them. Jesus had made a new creature out of me; he loved me; he was guiding my life; he was returning soon; I’d be resurrected; I’d live in heaven forever… and on and on.

What a preposterous set of propositions! It took my Great Realisation, my own personal revelation that there was no God, to make me see how ridiculous they were.

It is this that left me with a legacy of scepticism. If I’d been misled all this time by people I respected and admired, what else was I accepting as true that very well might not be? I wasn’t going to be fooled again and so began to question practically everything I was told by authorities, experts and the media. If it seemed ‘off’, as we say these days, not quite right or too good (or bad) to be true I asked, ‘Who says so?’, ‘How do they know this?’, ‘What is the evidence?’, ‘Do they jump to conclusions or is their reasoning sound?’, ‘Why should I believe what they say?’ It’s exhausting, I assure you, having to search out the evidence – the primary sources of information – and to sift through it, recognising any bias that has been imposed on it. It’s either this or I must accept without question that everything I’m told is true. I can’t do that any more.

Here are a few examples of claims that I’ve been sceptical of on the recent past:

We are being guided by the science, said politicians during Covid to ensure compliance with whatever lockdown measures were being imposed. Did this really just mean was ‘we are being guided by our interpretation of some rather suspect data’? It became clear after we emerged from the hysteria surrounding the pandemic that this was the case.

Tens of thousands will die of Covid unless you comply: this based on computer predictions which turned out to be very far from accurate: the suspect data that ‘guided’ politicians.

A woman can have a penis. A man can have cervix. Yes, our politicians told us this during our recent fixation with transgenderism. Whatever you think of people changing sex, these two statements, designed to change hearts and minds, if not penises and cervixes, are patently false. Whatever was guiding those who said such things, it certainly wasn’t ‘the science’.

No more irresponsible, undeliverable promises. So said the Prime Minister exactly a year ago. I’m not going to be sceptical or cynical about this. I feel sure it’ll turn out to be true. Is he implying though that promises made earlier than this were indeed ‘irresponsible and undeliverable’. Surely not.

We will not raise taxes on working people (and energy prices will fall by £300 in the long term), Labour politicians, now the government, said only last year in an attempt to gain our votes. I was sceptical about this, as with much they said, and for the first time in many years Labour did not get my vote. Taxes have increased considerably for working people and everyone else in the last year and are set to rise again this week. The price of energy has risen too, by 18%, and will do so again in January. A £300 reduction by 2030, if it happens at all, is not really going to offset this by much. This was all very predictable; since when do politicians tell us the truth in order to get us to vote for them?

Anything Donald Trump says. Insert your selection here.

The NHS is the envy of the world. Pundits and politicians are very fond of this one. They like to add too that the NHS is underfunded. But the NHS is expensive, management heavy and wasteful. Is it really the envy of the world, and if it is, so what, when it’s constantly in crisis at home?

The BBC is the envy of the world. It is impartial and balanced. Is it? A number of independent reviews have determined that it has its own agendas and biases. During lockdowns it fuelled hysteria and now contributes to climate change panic. Rather than reporting facts, it tells us too often what we’re meant to think about issues. It has also been rocked over the past dozen years by sleaze and scandals.

Islam is a religion of peace. So many questions about this one. Many Western politicians have claimed something like it. President George W. Bush did, shortly after 9/11. Perhaps ordinary Muslims are committed to peace but there are many Islamists (the term now used for Muslim extremists) are evidently not: as well as 9/11 there have been acts of Islamist terrorism in London (7th July 2005), at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, in Manchester, the slaughter in the street of an off duty soldier, the massacre of Israeli young people in October 2023, the killing of Christians and others in Nigeria.. Is ‘Allahu Akbar’ really a cry of peace?

We can halt or reverse the climate changes we ourselves have caused. Can we? Who says? (Greta Thunberg, yes, but no actual scientists that I can find.) We can perhaps mitigate and slow down the change, and we should. But the climate will continue to change. Are these changes solely the fault of us humans – we’re contributing to the pace of change, certainly – when the climate has been in constant change from time immemorial?

I was accused of trying to be a maverick in a recent comment on an old post. Honestly, I’m not. It’s more a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’; I’m not going to be told ever again what to think, especially not by those who don’t present good reasons why I should (I’ve Jesus to thank for this). Everything needs to be questioned, otherwise our minds are not our own. Be sceptical.

Death and Taxes. But mainly taxes

Posted on by
2

Can I have a rant? I’m sick and tired of tax I have to pay in the UK to pay for others’ ill-conceived schemes and failures. I know a society depends on taxation for its services; taxation, in theory, ensures its successful operation. Here in the UK taxation pays for health care, policing, the justice system, defence, amenities, schools, welfare support, local services and the salaries of local and national government officials. However, British tax payers are currently paying the highest tax in 70 years – since World War 2 in fact.

Currently in the UK, average incomes are taxed at 20%. Purchases on everything except essential food items and children’s clothing are taxed at 20%, petrol at a staggering 54%, average house purchases at 5% while so-called green taxes are set at around 15%. Then there are local taxes, based on property size, road tax for those who drive and inheritance taxes that limit how much an individual can pass on to his or her offspring of money that has been already taxed. Plus the tax on alcohol (variable but around 25%), sugar tax (an average of 21p per litre of fizzy drink), house purchase tax (‘stamp duty’), inheritance tax and tobacco tax. It is estimated the average working person in the UK pays in the region of 40% of their income in tax.

What does the government do with all the money it collects? Too much of it pays for government bungling:

  • The mess made of the Covid pandemic when almost 10 billion pounds of public money was wasted – thrown away – on unusable PPE equipment. More tax payers money is now being spent on destroying that same equipment, while the Covid Enquiry, set up to discover just how badly the government bungled lockdown, is currently costing tax payers a further 156 million pounds.
  • Approximately 10.3 billion pounds was lost on the government’s Covid support scheme in 2012-22 due to ‘fraud and error’. In the same period, a further 40 billion pounds was wasted on other government schemes, none of which it was capable of operating with any degree of competence. 

  • The government’s inability to control immigration, both legal and illegal, despite numerous promises it would do so. I have a great deal of sympathy for those fleeing danger (though many who claim asylum in Britain are actually coming from France) but the UK’s services – those mentioned above – simply cannot cope with the increased numbers. Asylum seekers are initially accommodated at a cost of 8 million pounds a day, 1.3 billion pounds per year, in hotels and houses bought or rented by the government’s appointed agencies. It takes about 18 months for the Home Office to assess whether applicants can stay.

  • The 537 million pounds of tax payers’ money the government gave to China between 2009 and 2021. This apparently funds private enterprise in a country known for its disregard of human rights, one which the government itself has recently said poses a major threat to world security. It is currently donating a ‘reduced’ amount of 10 million a year. Why? Is this little more than protection money?

    Last year, the UK also gave £33.4 million to India, a country with its own space program. The amount is set to increase to £57 million next year. The UK government claims that much of this is for ‘business investment’. But again, why?

  • The 480 million pounds being handed over to French authorities in return for them preventing smugglers leaving French shores with illegal immigrants in unsafe rubber dinghies. The French authorities fail to do this but the British government continues to pay them.

  • The subsidies government hands over to private business, like the train companies that now receive more tax payers’ money than they did when the system was in public ownership.
  • The bailing out of failing banks in loans, only a small fraction of which is ever repaid despite the extortionate amounts the banks continue to pay their executives in bonuses.
  • Redundancy payments made to those in failing private businesses: the Body Shop is the latest to benefit from tax payers’ largesse.
  • Paying not just the salaries but the pensions of civil servants, bureaucrats, politicians and police. (Disclosure: as a former teacher, I paid, together with my employers’ contributions, for my own pension.)

  • The generous pay increases MPs award themselves. The latest only a few weeks ago was 5.5%. Local councillors meanwhile awarded themselves 20%, again payable by tax payers. The bars and restaurants in the Houses of Parliament are all subsidised in the same way, as is the heating of MPs’ second homes.

  • The endless expansion of the civil service, some of whom are currently considering striking because they have been told they must turn up at the office two days a week. This, they say, is an imposition too far, contravening the basic human right to work at home in their pyjamas (or something.)
  • Failing to get people back into work and paying those who will not work, often over entire lifetimes.
  • Unnecessary green policies. Britain has little need, despite the ranting of a few excitable extremists, to rush headlong into unsustainable green policies. Green taxes are, in theory at least, passed to multi-billion pound industries, that are more than capable of doing so for themselves, to develop more sustainable energy sources.
  • For the government’s failure to reform the NHS, which, it is estimated, employs as many administrators and bureaucrats as it does clinicians and medics, the people who actually deliver health care.

Tax payers’ money is not the panacea for all the problems politicians have failed to resolve. Liberally throwing tax payers’ hard-earned cash at whatever problem arises should not, on every occasion, be the first resort. It ought to be the last. It is easy to spend other people’s money, without accountability, and easy to waste it. When it runs out, it is equally as easy to increase taxes to extract still more from the masses. This is precisely what happened last year when taxes were, yet again, raised ‘temporarily’.

There is nothing I and ordinary hardworking people can do about this unjust, exploitative arrangement. We can vote against the current governing party and perhaps, as seems likely, have it replaced with another who will tax us just as much, or, as seems likely, more. They will then waste our money on other self-serving, hair-brained and ultimately fruitless causes.

End of rant.

 

 

 

Very Naughty Children

Posted on by
Reply

Remember when you were a child in primary school and the whole class was kept in at playtime because one or two individuals couldn’t behave themselves? Remember how unjust that felt? You’d done as you were told, as had most of your classmates, and yet there you were, stuck inside while other groups played out. All because of the actions of a few. When I became a teacher myself I vowed I would never do this to whole classes of children. Those who couldn’t behave would be the ones to face the consequences of their actions, not those who had. To the best of my memory, I kept this promise.

The sense of injustice I felt as a child when I was punished because of others’ misdemeanours returned this week, when UK health secretary Sajid Javid threatened the entire country with a Christmas lockdown if more eligible people didn’t take up their Covid booster jab. The ‘booster’ amounts to a third shot because, it turns out, the effects of the first two vaccinations last only six months. I have my booster booked for tomorrow. And yet, having done the right thing for myself and others, I could still be faced with the prospect of having Christmas curtailed because, according to Sajid Javid, too many people have been naughty children and haven’t done as they were told.

If this is the case, might it not be because the populace as a whole has grown tired, not to mention altogether sceptical, of politician’s promises about Covid?

       ‘Lockdown for three weeks to flatten the peak of the epidemic’ we were told by the Prime Minister in March 2020.

       Lockdown again, for a month, in November 2020, this time to protect the NHS.

        Stay locked down for over six months.

     Keep your distance, wear a mask, get tested – with which we all complied – and we’ll stop the infection from spreading.

       Get the injection and we’ll soon see off this pandemic;

       Get a second and save grandma;

     Vaccinate your children and erm… we’ll soon see off this pandemic (again).

      Get the booster jab and you can have Christmas. (What will it be after another six months? ‘Have your fourth shot or we won’t let you go on holiday’?)

While these measures may have been effective (the fact we’re still being threatened with lockdowns might suggest otherwise), the means by which we have been coerced into compliance has been through blackmail and bullying. Only a couple of days ago, NHS chief Amanda Pritchard claimed that hospitalisations are currently 14 times higher than they were this time last year. This was a lie. They are considerably lower, as the government’s own data shows. (Regrettably, Ms Pritchard neglected to mention that the NHS itself has been responsible for the deaths of about 11,600 people who caught Covid while in hospital for other ailments.)

I’ll be having my booster and I’ll be having Christmas too, regardless of what an authoritarian career politician and inept NHS chiefs tell me. If we have learnt anything as a result of the pandemic about those who govern us it is that they really do not have the first idea what they are doing. Nor do they know how to manage people. Bullying, blackmailing and punishing the whole class because of a few naughty children is not the way.

Facts & Figures

Posted on by
Reply

The average age of death in the UK is around 82.

The average age of vaccinated people dying from Covid-19 is 85.

Most Covid deaths are of people with five other underlying causes.

The majority of hospitalisations are of unvaccinated people.

The majority of people in Intensive Care Units are unvaccinated.

The statistics tell us Covid cases are on the increase in the UK. These scientists tell us they are about to decrease.

NHS executives Matthew Taylor and Amanda Pritchard argued last week that the government should impose restrictions on the populace to ‘protect the NHS’. These are the same executives who have done nothing since last winter to better prepare the service for this winter.

Taylor and Pritchard are paid in the region of £255,000. Regional NHS executive posts are advertised with salaries of between £220,000 to £270,000 a year.

The restrictive measures that executives want to bring in for England are already in place in Scotland and Wales. Covid rates in Scotland and Wales are increasing at a greater rate than in England.

Health Secretary, Sajid Javid said this week that the Booster programme in the UK had slowed due to a reluctance on the part of those eligible – the over-65s whose second shot was 6 months ago – to have the booster. They should, he said, book their booster on the NHS online booking system.

Many of those eligible report that the online booking system will not allow them to book a booster shot online. The online system refers them to an NHS telephone booking system. The telephone booking system refers them to the online booking system.

 

Is It Me?

Posted on by
2

Is it me?

Has the world gone completely mad during the pandemic?

It’s one of the two. In the UK, we have panic buying of fuel because of a shortage in some areas of delivery drivers and the consequent closure of a small number of petrol stations. According to a leading motoring organisation, we have over 5 times the usual number of people putting the wrong kind of fuel into their cars (diesel instead of petrol or vice versa.) There have even been some fights. The would-be German chancellor, Olaf Scholz (not yet, Olaf!) blames Brexit, which is a rather curious thing to do when Europe too, as well as the US, is likewise suffering from a shortage of delivery drivers. Perhaps it’s Covid, with some foreign drivers having returned home at the start of the pandemic, never to return. Perhaps it’s the poor working conditions for drivers in the UK or the fact that some companies have driven down their wages, making the job less attractive.

We have civil servants, who, despite their title, are neither civil nor cognisant of their duty to serve the public. Rather, it is, apparently, the public’s duty to comply with all of their demands. I’ve been dealing today, for example, with the DVLA, the agency that handles driving licences in the UK. They want my son, who lives in Australia, to renew his UK licence. He has explained to them by email why he won’t be doing so, only to be instructed to send his explanation in writing. You might think an email is in writing, but you’d be wrong. An email simply won’t do. It must be a letter in the post. Explanations are unacceptable in any other form.

Is it me?

Many civil servants are still working from home following the lockdowns and are reluctant to return to the office. A number of services are unavailable as a result, including queries about tax and pensions, as well as applying for various government permits. Perhaps I’m being unrealistic or unreasonable, but are these people, all of whom have been on full pay throughout the pandemic, working or are they not? Is ‘working from home’ now a euphemism for ‘avoiding dealing with the public we’re meant to serve’?

I don’t know. Maybe it is me.

I’ve been collecting together some of posts from this here blog into book form, as I’ve done several times in the past, using Amazon’s Kindle Direct. (What a splendid Christmas present it will make when it eventually goes on sale – I’ll be sure to let you all know when it does.) Amazon, however, emailed me a couple of hours after I submitted it yesterday, asking me to confirm whether the author of the book (me) is alive or dead. Apart from the pointlessness of this request, I do wonder how, if I were dead, I would confirm the fact.

Doctors (GPs) are now diagnosing people by phone, with many resisting the efforts to get them to resume face-to-face appointments. It took me three weeks to secure an in-person appointment with a doctor recently. I almost put ‘my’ doctor there, but as I’d never seen this particular doc before and am unlikely ever to see him again, I’m not sure ‘my’ really applies. Meanwhile, the Labour Party, the only serious opposition to the UK government, is currently embroiled in an argument about whether only a woman is in possession of a cervix. Many members of the party are reluctant to say and those who have, have been subject to verbal abuse. It is, obviously, the burning issue of the day.

It must be me. Perhaps I’m just getting old and grumpy. Maybe I’ve been locked up (let’s call it what it is) too many times during the last 18 months and, like my fellow Brits, am now facing the possibility of being locked up again this winter because successive UK governments have failed to get to grips with an ailing health service.

If it’s not me, then quite possibly the world really has gone mad.