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.

Solzhenitsyn and me

I’ve been censored! They cannot stop me so they try to silence me! Well it shall not happen! None shall pass! No Pasaran! Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer! Exclamation marks for all!

Actually, all that’s happened is that I’ve found out that you can’t access this blog through the NHS computer system. It’s more likely that they block Google mail through which my maunderings are brought to you rather than a conspiracy of terrified members of the A A Milne estate and manufacturers of airport security monitors combining to ensure that no worker in socialised medicine should hear my invective.

Still, for a few moments I relived the exhilaration of the left wing teenager where all is possible and the world will become free and fair just as soon as I’ve finished shouting at a few people. Being left wing in your mid-forties is a different matter. The cynicism that breeds obedience is seeping into your soul and you start worrying more about the noise than what the noise is about. Once I had the fire of protest and socialism that comes from being sent to a private school and then, as the cliché has it, I drifted towards gradualism and then to apathy.

But I drifted back again.

Many reasons. Mark Steel’s history of the French Revolution – Vive La Revolution – and the current Government loom large among them. Ten years working for a large philanthropic organisation helped as well, though perhaps not in the way the large philanthropic organisation wished or expected. And finally the creeping realisation that what with ID cards and blanket surveillance and political corruption and toadying to big business and lying about the reasons for going to war and all that, the old comfort of ‘such things don’t happen here’ has become ‘such things have not happened here yet’.

A la lanterne citoyens!