Friday 4 February 2011

Make Room! Make Room!

During the debates over healthcare in the United States recently, it was interesting to see the misconceptions that young nation has about the NHS. Remember all that talk about ‘death panels’ deciding who lives and who dies? It got to the point where one was required to point out that Dr Shipman was the exception, not the norm. But we in dear old Blighty should restrain from mocking too much. We too have our own fiercely held beliefs that must seem peculiar to those not blessed to dwell among us. This was borne out recently by a survey that Radio 4’s been burbling on about concerning immigration. Apparently we don’t want any more immigrants on the grounds that the country is, in some way that I for one have not noticed, ‘full’ and furthermore we don’t want the immigrants we have got to receive any care or attention from the aforementioned NHS. So far, so Daily Mail. Then it gets weird because it turns out that we do want immigrants after all, but only if they are doctors or carers for the elderly.

Is this really a good idea? Maybe I’m a wuss in these things, but I am leery of being treated by someone who is denied the very care and treatment that s/he is giving me. I can see there being ‘potential issues’, as a manager I once had used to call foreseeable consequences, arising.

And then there’s this business of the country being ‘full’. This one’s been doing the rounds for as long as I can remember but it seems to be peaking at the moment. A lot of this, I suspect, is a result of the disgraceful scaremongering during the last government by the party previously known as Labour, but it seems to be also driven by all those southern shandypants who can’t tell the difference between the United Kingdom and South East England who get into a tizzy every time they can’t get a seat on the tube. Fret not my little metropolitan friends, once the housing benefit caps come in there’ll be loads of room. Curiously Holland does not think it's full despite having a higher percentage of immigrants and being smaller than us and, indeed flatter. Must be the waffles.

2 comments:

  1. Mabel A. Clifford4 February 2011 at 19:04

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete