NHS doesn’t really work – we can’t afford it anymore. It employs 1.7m people and is bigger than Indian army
FOR some time I’ve thought that the NHS doesn’t really work any more, but of course I could never say that out loud because the NHS is a deity.
It’d be like suggesting we’ve had enough of Sir Attenborough or the baby Jesus.
Things reached a peak in the pandemic.
I could see perfectly well that the healthcare systems in other countries were doing a far better job but still I didn’t dare say anything.
Not that you’d have heard me over the racket caused by people in the street clapping and banging saucepans together and cheerily hanging NHS rainbow flags in the window.
Now, though, it’s like everyone is coming to their senses. I’m starting to hear criticism of the NHS all the time.
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Free healthcare from the cradle to the grave sounds lovely. But everyone is saying we simply can’t afford it any more.
When the NHS was founded back in 1948, we could afford it because all that medical science could offer was aspirin and Band-Aids.
Now though, you can have your breasts enlarged on the NHS, and your penis chopped off, and we have the ability to do heart and kidney and liver transplants.
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There are more than 2,000 surgeries currently available on the NHS and most cost a fortune.
You want bilateral cochlear implants to help with your hearing? Well, that’ll cost the taxpayer £37,904.
To make matters worse, a large government organisation needs to be run by managers — and what managers like most of all is showing off. That means having a big team under them.
So you end up with “art co-ordinators” and “carbon managers” and “car park environmental officers”.
And then you’ll need a “diversity” officer who will also want a big team so they can look important when they host important biscuit-fuelled meetings about trans-lavatories.
As a result, the NHS now employs 1.7million people. Which makes it bigger than the Indian army.
And the cost is staggering. For every £1 you pay in taxes, 40p is spent on the NHS. That leaves only 60p for the military, social services, the police, street lighting and every other damn thing.
And I’m sorry, but everyone in the whole country is having to make savings in these inflationary times, so why should the NHS soldier on regardless?
A tough new boss could help by asking if it really needs people to choose what art should be hung on hospital walls, but really, the time has come to start again.
To look at the countries that did better than us in the pandemic and copy their systems.
And which countries are those? Pretty well all of them.
Cute pets hound me for treats
AFTER dogs stopped being wolves and became family pets, they’ve been developing facial muscles which are specifically designed to melt a human’s heart.
This is something even Darwin didn’t see coming, but it makes sense.
When a wolf is hungry, it just catches a deer and eats it, so it doesn’t need to move its face around.
But a dog can only be fed by its owner, so it has developed “fast twitch fibres” which enable it to lift its ears up and make puppy dog eyes when necessary.
It works too, because as I sit here at the kitchen table, both my labradors have got their cute faces on.
So whether I like it or not, I shall soon have to surrender and give them a bit of my pork pie.
I can’t help it. It’s nature.
ON TO A LOSER
I COULDN’T make it to Stamford Bridge on Wednesday night to see Chelsea take on Real Madrid, but figured I’d catch the second leg in Spain.
So on Tuesday morning, I will face a nine-hour queue to check in at Heathrow followed by nine hours sitting in the terminal being told that the plane that was due to fly me to Madrid is still in Istanbul and that it must take a party of Swedes to Los Angeles before it can load me up at three in the morning.
And all to see a match that even the Chelsea manager says we cannot win.
Heated debate at home
THIS week a number of large companies including the BBC and Tesco have pledged to make their offices more menopause-friendly.
This strikes a chord as I share a house with Lisa, who is in her, ahem, early fifties. And that means she alternates every three minutes from being far too hot to a bit cold.
Ordinarily, a house can cope with this. You just sit next to the radiator, endlessly turning it on and off.
But our house has underfloor heating which is controlled by a computer that even Nasa would call “a bit complicated”.
Which means that it takes two days to change the temperature in a room.
We are having to open and close windows instead, which means my heating bill for last month was about £17million.
DUCT IF I KNOW
WHEN the smell in my new kitchen first started, I blamed the dogs.
But it persisted, so I was forced to call out a plumber who found that, in a westerly wind, the smells that should be vented from a rooftop pipe were being blown back into the sinks.
He said he’d mended it with duct tape, but in the strong winds of Thursday I realised, while gagging, that his solution hasn’t worked.
I think this may be the first recorded incident in history where duct tape has failed to sort out a problem.
Russia on the run, says Vic
IT’S hard to know exactly what’s happening in Ukraine. One minute we are told the Russians are losing and the next that they’re deploying hypersonic missiles.
I get my updates from Victor, a Ukrainian chap who does the bees on my farm.
He has friends and family out there, and three weeks ago he asked for help raising money to buy armoured security vans which could be used to ferry civilians from behind Russian lines.
But he now says that because the Russians really are pulling back, armour plating is less important and that ordinary pick-up trucks will do.
This is encouraging news. Let’s hope they keep retreating all the way up the Kremlin lawn, and through Putin’s back door.
THERE was much wailing and gnashing of teeth this week when the Royal Navy discovered someone has nicked £250,000 of diesel fuel that was needed to power the mighty HMS Bulwark.
I’m afraid, however, this sort of thing has been going on for years.
Back in World War Two, the Fairmile Type B – which was used in the daring raid on St Nazaire – was even fitted with a small brass tap on its fuel lines so workers at the port could quietly help themselves to a bit of free fuel for their cars and motorcycles.
Electric shock
FORGET Ford and Vauxhall. The two best-selling cars in Britain are now both Teslas.
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Both use cobalt in their batteries, a metal which is mined by child slaves in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And both are recharged using power created in part by Russian gas.
Still, at least the owners can now look forward to a life of range anxiety and long waits at the charging points, which are usually all broken.