According to the Guardian today a man driving a black BMW ran down and killed two cyclists. He had to be cut out his car. One of the dead men was Kris Jarvis. According to the Guardian again, a friend of his said this:
“Kris always said he’d die on his bike, such was his love for cycling! None of his loving family or friends could ever imagine that this would be the way he would’ve expected it to happen. Such was his love for cycling.”
Really? Did he? Did he seriously really?
I can’t imagine anyone at all, ever, saying ‘such was his love for cycling.’ It’s the kind of phrase you only ever see written down and even then in one of those sports books with lots of pictures, remaindered from £25 to £1.99 in a shop piled high with travel games and maps of Basingstoke, next to a kebab shop in a rainy suburb somewhere off the north end of the A3.
Even Martin Amis must have blushed when he wrote much the same stuff as a parody about darts in London Fields. But the stupid doesn’t stop there.
He always said he’d die on his bike. No-one could have thought he’d expect it to happen. Well, yes actually. That’s exactly what he did. If the family friend meant ‘he can’t have expected to be killed by a selfish maniac in a car,’ then the family friend can’t have cycled much in the UK.
We have a culture here which is based on selfishness. It would be easy to just say ‘Thatcher’ in the manner of a 1980s alternative comedian and leave it at that, but I don’t know if the attitude pre-dated her. Films such as I’m Alright Jack suggest it did and that she simply tapped into a particularly British vein of homicidal conceit.
But evil dead politicians aside, anyone who cycles regularly in Britain knows perfectly well that there are car drivers who feel for their own reasons that Thatcher’s Great Car Economy would be better off with no bicycles around at all, and certainly none in front of their great car. It’s the reason it’s safer to cycle in the middle of the lane rather than at the side. They might still try to ride you down or crowd you deliberately into the side of the road for daring to be in their sacred way, but they aren’t going to be able to pretend they didn’t see you, or it was an accident, or they didn’t quite realise how close they were when they rode you into the verge.
Sometimes it’s still going to happen. Nobody who cycles thinks it can’t.
I can’t stand Ed Milliband. This email he sent me – no, seriously, he really did, it’s in the first person after all, so it must have been him, he wouldn’t lie or anything – tells you exactly why.
People sometimes say that they don’t know what we — what I — stand for, so I’ll put this in the simplest terms I can, Carl Bennett. This country is too unequal, and we need to change it.
So here are the promises I’m making to you about the kind of Britain I will lead:
First, I will undo the damage the Tories have done to our country:
I will scrap the Bedroom Tax, which unfairly punishes the disabled and the vulnerable.
I will scrap the Health and Social Care Act, which damages and undermines our NHS
I will scrap the gagging law, which limits our freedom of speech and right to campaign
I will reverse the Tories’ £3bn tax cut for millionaires, so we get the deficit down but do it fairly
Some good points there Ed, but I can’t help wondering why when the bedroom tax was implemented in April 2013 it took you until September 2013 to even mention that you thought it was a really bad idea. It could have been because it was just before the Labour Party conference of course, not that you’d actually discovered a principle you cared about.
Second, I will take on the powerful vested interests that hold millions back:
I will force energy companies to freeze gas and electricity bills until 2017
I will give power back to those who rent their homes, by scrapping letting fees and stabilising tenancy agreements
I will raise money from tobacco companies, tax avoiders, and a mansion tax to fund doctors, nurses, careworkers and midwives for our NHS
I will reform our banks so that they properly support small businesses
I will stop recruitment agencies hiring only from abroad
I’m not sure how you’d go about scrapping letting fees in any way that wouldn’t see them replaced in 30 seconds by “administrative charges” or some other estate agent scam. And the thing is Ed, tenancy agreements are perfectly stable. They’re too short if you’re looking for long-term security, at six months and a month’s notice, but that’s not unstable. So what is it, as usual, you’re actually going to do to help? If you wanted to help the NHS you wouldn’t have helped to privatise it. You wouldn’t piss about with a mansion tax that’s going to raise not very much, pretty much in London only, affecting just people with big houses but no smarts and no accountants who could, for example, put the house in a company wrapper or something.
Given that you helped refinance the same banks that bankrupted the economy in the first place and given you did nothing whatsoever to get banks to help small businesses last time Labour were in power, I don’t believe you. Your old boss ‘reformed’ the banks. We’re living with that now.
And instead of waffling on about stopping recruitment agencies hiring abroad, like a budget version of Nigel Farage, how about enforcing the minimum wage and scrapping the opt-out farmers are allowed, so they can hire from abroad and pay lower wages? Do you think that might be an idea? Obviously not.
Third, I will start to rebuild a fairer, better Britain:
I will raise the minimum wage, to ensure that everyone that does a hard day’s work is properly rewarded
I will promote the living wage by giving tax breaks to companies that pay it
I will ban the damaging zero-hours contracts that exploit British workers
I will bring in a lower 10p income tax rate, cutting taxes for 24 million workers
I will support working parents with 25 hours of free childcare for three- and four-year-olds
I will help more young people get on the housing ladder by getting 200,000 homes built every year
A hard day’s work. Ed, one of the reasons I hate you so much is because almost every time David Cameron comes out with some patronising crap about workers and shirkers I see your little face the other side of the House of Commons and you always look as if you’re thinking ‘I wish I’d said that, first.’ When I hear you come out with this hard workers stuff, I know I’m not mistaken.
How will you ‘get’ 200,000 homes built every year, Ed? Will you build them? You don’t say you will. That would smack of socialism, wouldn’t it, and we certainly can’t have you talking like that. So why are the building companies going to build them for you, exactly? Another scabby little deal like PFI that another of your old bosses dreamed up, that suit the companies and scam everyone else? Like the NHS, for example?
But the biggest reason I hate you Ed, is you don’t know what words mean. I don’t think you remember our conversation on Twitter. You stopped taking part in it after all, when I pointed out to you that contrary to what Tony Blair and Tweedles Dee and Dum maintained, words actually do not mean anything you want them to and it does not depend who is the master, them or you. You’d been saying how very sad you were that a market researcher had died after he’d done so much for the Labour Party. He did loads of qualitative analysis to find ideas and identify themes. You were almost heartbroken that this pollster, as you called him, had polled his last.
Which was pathetic and dishonest, because you clearly didn’t even know what he did if you confused counting how many – polling – with finding out why, or qualitative, subjective research. Or of course, you didn’t know him or what he did at all. There’s always that possibility.
And then we have your insulting little list.
I want to know — is this the kind of Britain you want to see?
Tell me now which of my three promises is most important to you:
Undoing Tory damage
Taking on vested interests
Building a better Britain
– EdThank you.
No Ed, thank YOU! You want to know which of these vacuous catch-alls bothers me most. Undoing Tory damage? Just like the way your old boss Tony Blair increased and accelerated it, with Thatcher back in Number 10 as an advisor the week after she was voted out of it, the woman who was so pleased with what your old boss did to the Labour Party she claimed it as her proudest achievement? I don’t know. Let’s have a look at the others.
Taking on vested interests might be a good idea, except you don’t say what they are, or whether they include the banks, the Royal family, which as landowners are one of the very biggest vested interests in the UK today, along with the Duke of Westminster, or the Big Five accountancy companies, who your old boss Gordon Brown practically gave the running of UK plc over to last time he was Prime Minister. Maybe that one. Are you really going to do that? I’m impressed.
I quite like the idea of building a better Britain, but I can’t say that’s really the big thing, because once again, you don’t say what you mean and without doing that, it’s anything I want it to mean, isn’t it? If I was six I’d probably say building it out of Lego would be better. If I was a UKIP voter I’d pretend to say I wanted a fairer labour market when I actually meant no darkies, thank-you very much. Or one where Simon Dee was back on Saturday afternoons and it was illegal to call anyone Doctor Who that wasn’t properly Tom Baker. If I was a ludicrous romantic I’d say a better Britain was one with a real Labour Party, one that had principles instead of buzzwords. One that had a leader who didn’t look like a total freak. One that had a leader who hadn’t sat there silent for two years while the Tory boys got to do whatever they wanted while Matron wasn’t looking. One that had a leader who didn’t think having a laugh and joke with Nigel sodding Farage on television, you grinning and graciously conceding his point like the new boy sucking up to the school bully, the same way you do with Cameron in the Commons, was appropriate behaviour. Except it is, for you, isn’t it, Ed?
You want to be everything to everyone, because you aren’t anything. You don’t believe in anything except expediency. Just like your old boss. Which is why I tore up my Labour Party membership card. Which is why I joined the Green Party. They actually believe things. I do, too.
“Then Sammy said if your Majesty hadn’t spoken I’d have thought it was the horse! Top hole, what, Mary? Oh I say, I didn’t mean, er..”
According to the BBC the number of High Street shops is falling. Again. Which is odd, because a few years ago the very earnest brand spanking new Prime Minister, David Cameron, thought he’d solved all of that by getting the rising media star Mary Portas to go and write a report on how to save if not the universe, then at least the heart of places like Trowbridge and Ipswich.
As someone who grew up in Trowbridge could have told you, what’s wrong with Trowbridge is easy to see. People don’t live in the centre, so at 5:30 its dead. The police force has been cut and what police there are drive around in cars, so after 5:30 you’re pretty much on your own. Not that the police there were ever much good in the first place. When I lived in the town there was a spate of garden gnome thefts. Miraculously almost all of the gnomes were found by the police but only because they were lined up on the police station wall one morning. And the pubs were crap. The Lamb wasn’t, because it had the Village Pump music gigs on Mondays (yes, as in the Village Pump folk festival, which wasn’t quite as big in those days, being mostly in the old stables out the back of the Lamb) and the Rose & Crown wasn’t, because it was walking distance from school and the landlord, back in those dear dead days, didn’t mind anyone drinking in there so long as they at least pretended to be a grown-up. Everybody knew about it. Nobody threw up or got stabbed or any other nonsense.
And there’s nowhere to park. Actually, there was a huge big carpark where the cattle and sheep market used to be, which was easier to use once the council got rid of the rusted brown metal pens that people sometimes drove into and wished they hadn’t. Something which can stand up to three or four tons of bullocks pushing against it for a hundred years didn’t have too many problems with a Ford Anglia. But the town got full, the carpark was replaced with a multi-storey and that got full as well and the shops that survived got bigger as the small shops shut their doors.
The supermarkets shut them. Something the Portas Report somehow didn’t feel it should mention. Bizzarely for a business report, it spent a lot of time saying what Mary Portas wanted, as if that was in some way relevant. Big squiggly signature. Big intro. Loads and loads of I think, I believe, I say. My challenge. My struggle.
My camp, Mary could almost have written if she’d been male, because when she wasn’t gurning on TV as a retail consultant looking straight to camera like Anne Robinson after an experimental trip to the hairdresser she was spending most of her time telling everyone who would listen how she’d just come out and still got on with her husband uber super-woman stylee, although presumably not on him.
“My review has shown me…” Wow, well thanks Mary. I somehow had the idea that all that public money you got for doing it was to show ME, but that shows how little I know what things are about.
“An increasing number of shops are falling by the wayside as they fail to meet the expectations of today’s increasingly experienced time-poor, experience-rich consumer.”
Well I never. I won’t say that the wayside metaphor is probably the most stupid cliche I’ve seen if you’re writing about a High Street, because it just is anyway. But what does the rest of it even mean? What kind of experience are we talking about? Silk ropes on the bedstead? And why two ‘experience’s in the same sentence? How were people fifty years ago poorer in their experiences? Because they didn’t have a TV show, a packet of ginger hair dye and a producer? Apart from the fact it’s vacuous inane borderline-illiterate regurgitated irrelevant crap in the first place?
“We’ve seen the closure of brands.”
Have we Mary? How do you close a brand, exactly? “There’s a wealth of knowledge which describes them.” Is there? Is that what knowledge does? “Much of what we do know is stored in professional silos.” At least I’ve seen one of those. It’s over near Wickham Market, in the grounds of the old school that the big farm took over to store their machinery. About sixty feet tall and bright silver. I think they store grain in it or something like that. As well as old copies of the Portas Report, presumably. They probably need something for the rats to nest in.
Mary Portas spent her entire non-TV career making the High Street the way it is. That could be why her report spent its first few pages saying it wasn’t about blame and we are where we are and it wasn’t really anyone’s fault if the High Street was all big crappy shops selling all the same stuff, except maybe the small shops who couldn’t afford to be there, the losers, given she’d made quite a lot of money turning it into that.
So what was Mary’s solution? £100,000, to be given to six “Portas towns.” Each, obviously. Wouldn’t want to give the impression that this was in any way a token amount that wouldn’t change anything. Why, for that sort of money you could probably get what, six, maybe even ten extra carpark spaces, provided you didn’t have to buy any land to put them on and you could just move some curbstones and paint some lines. And stick a meter in, obviously. Oh and a big sign about it all.
“What really worries me is that the big supermarkets don’t just sell food anymore, but all manner of things that people used to buy on the high street.” Portas Review p11 col 2.
Excuse me. Just what exactly is this crap? Why is it of even the most passing interest to me, or the government, what worries Mary Portas? Did she just get someone to type up her diary or something? “All manner of things? And there’s a capital H on High and a capital S on Street, while I’m here.
But basically, so what? Who cares? Lord Sainsbury doesn’t. There isn’t a Lord Tesco yet and if they don’t reach a bit deeper there won’t be, either. Most of the people who go to the shops don’t, so long as they think someone else should pay for their convenience, whether that’s Tesco building a big car park or Apple using child labour tucked up out of sight in China.
It’s a gimmick. The answers are obvious and nobody cares. Or rather, they say they do but if it comes to the choice of piling factory food in the back of the car or walking to the shop every day then they don’t, at all. And we can all go on pretending that car insurance and parking and congestion and pollution and children with asthma and road deaths and local council rates and every single road having yellow lines on it and places like Ipswich where if the council had any sense, given what they’re offering they’d pay you to park there, not the other way around, all of that’s convenience shopping.
There you go, Mary. Maybe you’ll be back on TV soon, to tell us all how your report’s doing. We really care what you think about things. Almost as much as you did in the Portas Review.
Let’s see anyone bothered by that. Until then, there’s probably something on TV about it. Oddly, after that stellar performance it’s not by Mary Portas this season.
In a further development, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Isil had been able to fly three Russian fighter jets captured from the regime. Though they have not been used in operations, the Observatory said the MiG jets were being flown with the help of defected Iraqi air force officers.
Just before dawn the three chums wandered out to the sheds where the fitters had been labouring through the night. Mohammed reached into the unfamiliar pocket of his flight suit, rummaging through the invisible folds of his traditional robes forgetting that he no longer wore them as they got really flappy in the cockpit at 700 knots.
“Smoke?” He held out the packet of Players to Mohammed and Mohammed.
“Actually old man, best not. Mohammed, you know.”
“Drat this,” Mohammed ejaculated tensely.
“Steady on, old man,’ Mohammed interjected judiciously. “If the CO hears you carry on like that he’ll think you’ve got a case of blue funk.”
Mohammed held his gaze steadily, his brown eyes hardening.
“Blue funk. We have three 40 year old MiG fighters, based on a design that’s 60 years old or I’m a Chinaman. Three.”
“Mohammed old man….” Mohammed exclaimed. “Not in front of the chaps!” He nodded his head towards the fitters still labouring in the sheds. One of them started to whistle a popular tune before his comrades told him to stop promoting decadent Western imperialism. Sheepishly the overalled figure assayed a few bars of “Like A Virgin,” but his attempt at reconciliation fell on stony ground.
“Do you know what each one cost? Well do you?” Fl.Lt Mohammed spat furiously. “$185,000. I went online and saw the advert.”
“Allah is merciful, Mohammed old man,” Squadron Leader Mohammed reassured Mohammed.
“Allah might be, but the Allied Re-Engagement Strike Enhancement Force (Air Recon) Command Exercise…”
“A.R.S.E.F.A.R.C.E., old man. Acronyms. Don’t want the chaps hearing things. Need to know,’ rumbled the squadron leader.
“A.R.S.E.F.A.R.C.E. then – isn’t. Our three MiGs go up against fifty brand new Mach 2 fighters guided straight to us by their AWACS and the entire Mediterranean U.S. littoral support capability the second we pull the stick back. If we ever flew against them seriously we’d be coming down Harry Prangers before we’d even got the wheels up. And that’s just the bally advance force in the area.”
“Flight Lieutenant Mohammed! That is enough!” The squadron leader’s tone was icy. “Chaps in the ISIS air force don’t come out with that kind of tommy rot.”
“Fl. Lt. Mohammed didn’t mean it sir,” Wing Commander Mohammed interceded. “It was just banter. He’s flown too many missions lately.”
“He’s flown no more than every other pilot in the ISIL airforce. Either of us,” growled the squadron leader. “It’s like the Battle of Britain. If a chap hasn’t the stomach for it we’ll soon see who has.”
The lieutenant steeled himself. “It’s not though sir, is it?” He rushed on, before his nerve finally failed him. “It’s not like the Battle of Britain. Or even the Battle of Baghdad.”
“No popsies, for a start. No piling ten chaps into a Lagonda and singing “We’ll walk together down a Syrian lane” on the way to the Red Lion. No Red Lion. It’s haram. And not with only three of us in the airforce. No cheeking the unarmed local bobby about closing time, because there’s never opening time. No fourteen pints and get rid of the hangover by snorting pure oxygen from your high altitude mask, because there’s no such thing as fourteen pints, or even one. Just the overwhelming odds. It’s nothing like a Biggles book. Nothing, I tell you. Except for the lemonade W.E. Johns had to put in the books instead of the whisky in the original stories he wrote just after the First War he served in, when Hamlyn started selling them to children in the 1930s. Sir,” he added lamely.
The lieutenant stood disconsolately, his resolution fading as his lip trembled before the Wing Co’s growing fury. Somehow he steeled himself for one last supreme effort.
“Even the only beheading we had around here was when Leading Aircraftman Mohammed pulled that ejector seat handle in the hanger without checking the safety pin was in place.”
A heavy silence hung over the entire ISIS airforce as the three men stood freshly bearded on the tarmac, not smoking, entirely un-hungover, limbs not loosened in a post-coital glow as they didn’t remember the two WAAFS and Flossie the barmaid from the Bunch of Grapes in Carshalton. Each man’s ears twitched for the sound of the Allied cruise missiles screaming across the field. It was going to be a short air war.
I don’t know why dragons are green, although the fact that they’re named green suggests that there must be other colours too, such as the red one and the black dragon that are supposed to have had a fight on the border of Essex and Suffolk, long ago. Assuming there are dragons.
Whether or not there are or were, a policeman used to ask my grandmother for a green dragon, back when she used to run a pub in rural Somerset. The Bird in Hand was in Nailsea, on the edge of the moors and when she was a girl, before the moors were drained, it was about as remote in winter when the sea came in as it had been in King Arthur’s time, or when Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury. Every few months a policeman on a motorcycle used to turn up, usually when the pub was closed and this was a time when pubs shut in the afternoon and at eleven o’clock at night, on the dot, if you didn’t want to lose your licence to sell alcohol.
A Mr Polly world, where the pub was central to the community, or at least the section of the community that had two pints a night every day on their way back from work, the men who worked with their hands in the village, the kind who got thirsty of a night. There were other reasons to drink in pubs in those days too, other than just liking beer. Beer at least made sure you wouldn’t be poisoned by the water you drank out of the pump, and a lot of houses big and small still had pumped water then. It also gave you an excuse to be out of the house, at a time when contraception was a joke or a dirty secret. My grandmother was one of eight children. She had nine. Maybe she should have gone out a bit more herself.
She never knew what it was the motorcycle policeman wanted. He visited for years. I have an idea but it seems unlikely. There never was a beer called Green Dragon. The wood floored beer smelling long bar of the Bird In Hand, where my grandmother’s favourite customer service toolkit included a bull’s penis stuffed with lead shot, applied behind the ear to gobby customers when they turned away, didn’t lend itself easily to anyone’s idea of a cocktail bar, either.
But absinthe …. maybe that’s what the policeman was after. It was illegal. I remember when it stopped being illegal, probably, and an advertising agency party where the bottle was considered almost as illicit as the coke someone lined up on the cheeseboard. Absinthe that Toulouse Luatrec liked, a little taste of la vie en rose wafted in to deepest Somerset. It hardly seems more likely, somehow, that anyone would go looking for it in Nailsea, never notably a hotbed of artistic bohemian endeavour.
The pub shut long ago. The forge was demolished and my grandmother dead more than twenty years back, so I’ll never know what she thought the policeman wanted. I have my own idea exactly what it was.
I did a thing people have told me to do for years. I went to the doctor and asked to be referred for and that’s the problem.
I don’t know what. You walk in. You don’t know where to start or what to say. I’ve got, I’ve been told, a warm, nice, calm voice. The kind of voice girls like. I speak clearly. I used to have the most awful Sloane bray and if I can’t hear and I’ve been drinking, I still do, but the doctor’s surgery was quiet and and I haven’t had a drink today. I’m going to when I’ve finished writing this.
I sat down. I watched the doctor getting impatient. I could see her face clouding. So I told her I’d been abused as a child. She thought I meant sexually, but I don’t think I was. Physically and mentally. As Meatloaf used to sing, out of three ain’t bad, doc. Two out of three ain’t bad.
My father was a bigamist. Probably. He was definitely a professional liar. He pretended he’d been born in Australia, but he wasn’t. I found out by going to get a copy of his birth certificate. He’d removed it and mine and my sister’s and my other sister’s and every other piece of official paper in the house when he finally left, but for most of my childhood he was hardly ever there, just two or three times a week as I remember it. We went on holiday a couple of times, and he had to do bizarre things on his own, like going to visit a church to see the special window dedicated to the RAF, which he claimed he was in as well. He never, ever went near a church in all the time I knew him, so I’m presuming this story, like every other story he came up with was pure horseshit. He was probably phoning his other family, the one he ran at the same time.
The nurses are on strike today. In the usual way that people speak to very small children the government has told them they can have a 1% pay rise or something else but not both because Mummy and Daddy can’t afford it.
So far as I’ve seen, nobody in government, the press or officially, the health unions has stood up and called this the utter horseshit that it is, that if a government can increase ‘the deficit’ and call it reducing it and at the same time commit to an endless war against abstract nouns when it doesn’t even know who’s on which side, assuming there even are any sides, then clearly it can afford anything it wants to.
But that’s unsayable. As Goering pointed out at his inevitably-decided trial at Nuremburg, the kind we should have had in 1997 except we didn’t know then we’d just voted in the same thing but with more hand-movements and a smile, it’s easy to get people on side with the idea of a war they don’t want. You just call them traitors if they say anything against it and tell them the enemy (anybody, it’s never really mattered, take your pick) wants to rape their dog and take away their iPad so they can’t watch X-Factor. Or the contemporary equivalent. And it always works, because it takes a bit of an effort to find out the truth and dogs and iPads don’t pay for themselves and there’s stuff to do.
Another truth that is a bit hard to find out because the media themselves are a bit too busy to mention it is that there will never be an NHS privatisation bill. There doesn’t need to be. It’s already been done.
For the last six months I’ve been working for the NHS, at a mental health Foundation Trust. It was supposed to provide services to two large rural counties to help people in fragile and damaging states of mind. Effectively now, it can’t, by design.
The first project I worked on was to provide a drug and alcohol service for around one and a half million people. We calculated what it was going to cost to provide it, working on the NHS overhead figures which usually come in between 20% and 25%. It pays for things like training, pensions, and all the expenses you can’t get rid of, such as the maintenance of buildings that have had to be shut almost as soon as they were opened, because there isn’t the money to run them. I can show you two, boarded up and unused as one of them has been since the last brick was laid. The maintenance building is closed now as well, so anything that needs doing won’t be done by the NHS and will have to go out to tender.
We thought somebody like SERCO would bid for the Drug & Alcohol work, along with other NHS Trusts from other areas. We thought SERCO would put in a bid at about 70% of our own NHS bid, because SERCO can afford to do that, operating on an overhead margin of 6%. Of course, SERCO don’t have to pay for training, or full-time staff and quite often deliberately underbid to get the work, as they did when they provided GP cover in Cornwall, where SERCO felt one GP was enough to cover the entire county some nights, and if that wasn’t really quite enough they’d falsify the records to make it unhappen anyway. Which is why SERCO is facing multiple different counts of criminal fraud. Which is not why SERCO is barred from pitching for any further NHS work, because it isn’t. This behaviour is entirely acceptable and in no way will or even can count against any further bids SERCO put in. Because that’s the system you voted for, especially if you didn’t vote.
None of it mattered anyway, because when we got the official budget from the county council which has the statutory duty to provide these services and can’t, so they contract them out to the NHS or anyone else who fancies a go, the money available was just over half the amount the NHS thought would be needed to do the job. So the NHS didn’t bid, because it couldn’t do the job for that money. Someone who thinks they can will be doing it instead. The NHS budget Cameron was talking about wasn’t even relevant. Any journalist could have found that out, if they’d wanted to. They just didn’t want to. This was County Council money. This is how it works.
Obviously, whoever gets the contract won’t be providing training or pensions or standard terms of employment or company cars or even minibusses to get staff from one end of a poorly served hump of land jutting out into the North Sea with hardly any trains and busses about as rare as a Labour voter around here. Because the NHS is safe in the Conservatives hands. They’ll take good care of it. So that when the last service the NHS currently does is put out to tender, when more staff have left, when the last bid can’t even be pitched for because it simply can’t be done for the money the local authority thinks is a perfectly reasonable amount, all that lovely prime development land on the edge of the town can be sold, mature trees, bus stop and all mains services connected.
Buyers are advised to carry out their own surveys and advertised services may not actually work, obviously. But that’s not really the point, is it? Nobody’s interested in how the NHS operates or what works and what doesn’t. You shouldn’t even be asking questions about it. Can’t you see the enemy are making you think that way? What are you, some kind of ISIS apologist?
Contract by contract, one reorganisation at a time, the NHS is being rearranged so that it can’t really do anything that would warrant the word ‘national’ in the title. Where I work, in a mental health foundation, services are split not just between two counties but into different parts within the same county. The level of service is not the same.
A lot of the time services have to be outsourced to external organisations, ‘third sector’ charities using sometimes untrained staff on lower wages as well as the SERCO/G4S end of the commercial spectrum who can also spectacularly undercut NHS bids for contracts by using minimum wage staff on zero hours contracts. SERCO has an operating profit target of 6% instead of the NHS’s 20% to 25%. The NHS profit goes on training. SERCO get the trained staff free, inherited from the NHS until they leave.
Everything has to be tendered. If you want ambulances the NHS ambulance service has to bid for the work. If you want community services, or a drug and alcohol treatment service, that has to go out to tender as well. The fact that the services my hospital can offer have been pared to the minimum and each NHS Trust has to compete against other N HS Trusts makes it easy to pick off the contracts one by one, leading to more closures and cuts as there are fewer and fewer NHS patients to cater for. There are more patients, or service users as they’re supposed to be called, overall, but not for the NHS. SERCO et al got those. You don’t see this on the news for the same reason there will be no massive NHS Privatisation Act; it’s already being done, without fanfare and so far as I can see, without any media paying much attention at all. Or maybe they know all about it and think as it’s the government doing it then it must be a good thing.
I think of it as a breach of trust. The NHS was not set up to work like this, which is why it doesn’t work like this and this is being done deliberately, to “prove” it doesn’t work and justify the cheery picking break-up of services so that the NHS is left with the difficult and expensive things to do and everything else can be jobbed off to the cheapest bid.
The easy things, for example. But private contractors breach trust even with these. My hospital jobbed off its wages administration to a private contractor for the usual reasons: it was supposed to be done better and cheaper and more competitively, because everyone knows that private contractors work that way and nationalised industries don’t. It’s gospel, since 1979 and you won’t find many MPs in any party who say otherwise.
Quite why that means everybody at my hospital has to chase their wages almost every month isn’t clear. People only go to work for somebody else in the expectation they get paid. Otherwise they might as well work for themselves. So when wages aren’t paid on time, when you have to phone up to ask when you’ll get the money for the job you’ve done, when you’ve learned there’s never, ever any point in asking why your wages haven’t been paid because there’s never any reason that you’re going to be told other than ‘we felt like getting some more interest on the money in our account instead of paying it out to people like you,’ or ‘you know all that stuff about how we’re more effciient?That was just crap we said to get the business,” and you certainly won’t be told either of those things, at least one of which is true by definition at any given time, the privatisation work is petty much done. Hardly anybody wants to work there. Simple because it takes more to build trust than simply putting it in your name. Obviously the new chairman is looking into this as a matter of urgency. I wonder if he’s paid on time?
Want to be rich and famous but you’re afraid of looking needy and greedy? Want to do that reassuring fireside chats thing, be cool and so smokiiiiin’ that your shorts burst into flame, all at the same time?
You too can be a famous Cuddly-Dissolute™ journalist/Have I Got News For You guest, go-to drugs authority/working journo me dear star. Just follow these ten golden rules and you too can get a little byline with a picture that looks as if it captures that nanosecond when you realise there was a wasp on that ice lolly you just bit into.
How To Write the Complete DIY Will Self Article:
1) Put a dateline in. It’s like journos used to do. Older means authoritative.
2) But you don’t want to seem too old, so put the mandatory drugs reference in the first paragraph. That makes you down widda kidz innit.
3) Do be careful with drugs. You don’t want people thinking you just wanted to get off your face like some loser in a council flat so make sure that drugs reference is an acronym of some kind. MDMA = good. Draw = I’m sorry, but you can’t put that in a respectable Will Self story.
4) Irony call – get this in early too, you don’t want people to think you actually LIKE the quite nice sounding place you’ve ended up reporting from, unless you can make it look as if you’re only liking it ironically. When you write, use words that sound as if your mouth is tight and turned down and that’ll be about right.
5) Synapses. They can fire, miss, implode, spurt, scream, anything you want them to do, but it is absolutely imperative to get them in there somehow, just to make sure people don’t think (3) or that you are or were some trash junky mess-up instead of a hip gunslinger way out there on the frontier, a sort of British Hunter Thompson, if Hunter Thompson had lived in Swindon, worked on the Wiltshire Times and hired a moped.
6) Key words and phrases to include: dickhead; capitalism’s blitzkrieg; millennium, moronic, at least one other highly specific drug reference, something about the 1980s, Comrade Stalin, hip, zeitgeist, unalloyed genius and at least one ‘high-culture’ icon, like Michaelangelo for example. Dante would do at a pinch.
7) Make sure if you do write ‘high-culture’ you put it in ironic inverted commas so that people know you know it is. Otherwise, no sorry, the thought alone is too hideous.
8) Get a pretendy swearword in towards the end, e.g. Hell. It keeps them reading. And you look hip as Hell. Also you’re obviously being ironic in using the word, so doubleplusgood.
9) Use doubleplusgood and/or Nadsat droogspeak if you can, but make sure they know you’re being ironic. Again.
10) The Faux-Humble Fake Letter From America. “And in the end” is a good way of rounding it off, especially as it’s got ‘in the end’ in, making it circular and oh look, ironic.
You’ll make a fortune. Just as soon as Will Self ironically shuffles off his mortal coil, comrade.
