Monthly Archives: March 2012
Defusing the ticking NHS timebomb
Immigration is a matter of very great concern to us as it has placed huge pressures on all of our public services.
It has even, some would argue, started to erode some of our core British values.
When numbers equivalent to a city the size of Plymouth come into our country each year, it is natural that people tend to become alarmed. Yet I have had an experience this week which has opened my eyes to one important aspect of it.
Having hammered my knees over a lifetime, I needed to get them replaced. The first to receive the treatment was done twenty months ago (successfully, I might add). Ever the glutton for punishment, I pressed on.
It’s a big op, I have to admit, and the aftermath is painful; but what’s a bit of short-term suffering against a very great and long-term gain? Thus I tried to persuade myself, for I knew what I was letting myself in for the second time round.
Everyone will have to cope with clapped out and painful joints as they grow older. The lucky ones, in my view, are the ones where this happens early as they get them replaced. The less fortunate soldier on with their dodgy parts until it is too late… they are too old.
They have to watch the sprightly oldies – with their joints replaced – enjoying full and pain-free mobility while they struggle on with sticks and, if they can afford them, mobility scooters.
I opted to go to the Peninsula Treatment Centre. There, I was surrounded by a mini United Nations.
There were Filipinos, South Africans, Chinese, Jamaicans, Zambians, Polish, Romanians, Germans, French, Zimbabweans, Bulgarians – oh, and yes, one or two Brits. They all spoke excellent English and the service that I received was top-draw.
As a team they were magnificent. If only the UN, away in New York, could perform so harmoniously. Even the building and the standard of cleanliness were beyond compare.
Altogether it was a great experience. It makes you think, doesn’t it? It would not be over-egging it to say that if you’d kept these people out of our country then we would be shooting ourselves in the foot.
In the higher echelon skills at Peninsula, East Europe seemed to have excelled itself. The Communists got many things wrong, but education was not one of them.
I have reason to know this at first-hand. My Lithuanian, university-educated wife (fluent in three languages) is a constant reminder. She even helps me with my crosswords – would that I could do the same with hers – and she sometimes assists with a point of grammar. English was her subject at uni, you see.
It would be no exaggeration to say that if all these superb people were removed from Peninsula it would have to shut down. Who then would be the loser?
Of course, you will have noticed that they all spoke good English and for the most part were highly skilled. This is the road we must go down: cherry-picking the best who want to join us.
As it happens we are the destination of first choice to these people because of our language, law-driven society and tolerance; they are not the sort of people who want to be holed up in some kind of ghetto, insulated from the rest of us.
It was a very big mistake to allow the mantra of diversity to shut down discussion as to how we could best integrate newcomers to these shores, and in this respect there is much the Americans could teach us.
Last week I bumped into a fellow shopkeeper and he too had had both knees renewed. They had been done the better part of twenty years ago and he wasn’t even using a stick. He is 91.
Instead of feeling that he had been put out to pasture, he has been allowed to remain a vibrant member of, and contributor to, our local community.
This has to be the future… keeping as many of us as possible active into old age. But it has to start much earlier than our 91-year-old shopkeeper, that’s for sure.
The wonderful new £41.5m Life Centre, opened this week in Plymouth, is certainly a step in the right direction.
All of us must take charge of our own well being, wherever possible, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in so doing. But those of us who are not prepared to invest in a healthier, happier future must be brought to see how very foolish this is.
We know we can successfully influence people’s life choices. Look what we did in turning attitudes around with regard to smoking and drink driving.
The ticking NHS time bomb of an ageing population could, in large measure, be defused if we could all be persuaded to get off our derrieres and get moving. Preventative medicine has the potential to free up possibly a quarter of all our hospital beds and allow us, in the process, to lead happier, healthier and more productive lives.
If the recession causes us to cut our supermarket food bills, so much the better, say I.
Instead of so many old people feeling surplus to requirements, they would become a valued and much needed part of society.
We British usually appreciate being the first recipients of most things coming over ‘the pond’. But I did not appreciate learning that, after the Americans, we are the next most obese people in the developed world. As it happened, not long after learning that, I watched newsreel footage of our people in the 1940s and 50s. Do you know, I couldn’t see a fatty among them?
Food rationing had done its work and made us the healthiest we had ever been; they all looked leaner, fitter and, I have to say, altogether merrier.
Although the treatments available to them, at that time, were primitive by our standards, at least they weren’t imposing a burden on their fellow citizens, because of their super indulgent, lazy lifestyle. They were all pulling their weight – just not so much of it.
Time, may I suggest, to turn our guns on the fatties amongst us!
Words can hurt more than sticks and stones
I knew a man once, a very dear friend, who was in a horrendously abusive marriage.
The abuse came in the form of the language which was deployed against him by his wife. To be sure, it wasn’t only that; there was violence too, but it was the language that was the most alarming.
I know this because he felt that no one could possibly believe how depraved and evil it was unless they could actually hear a recording, and that he duly made; several of them. I was stunned.
The recordings were full of the vilest language our otherwise beautiful tongue has yet conjured up. Truly, soldiers and sailors in their billets or berths couldn’t have ‘bettered’ it.
I asked him why he didn’t get out of it and he replied that he didn’t want to lose his children. What could I say to that? He was of the opinion that there is a gap in the law which fails to recognise verbal violence as being as damaging, in many respects, as physical.
As a boy we got used to the corny old saying ‘sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words will never hurt me’. Yet, as we grew older we came to see this for the absolute nonsense it was.
It was perfectly possible not so many years ago to say just about anything you wanted to say: it was called Freedom of Speech, and that ‘holy cow’ allowed us to call people spastics, coons, yids, mental retards, Nancy boys, cripples and an endless repertoire of other demeaning terms.
Look, for example, at what passed for entertainment on the television. Alf Garnett at bay in Till Death Do Us Part or the ‘funny’ man Bernard Manning in full flow.
It took us a long time, but we came to realise that such bigoted, verbal diarrhoea could not be tolerated in a civilised society. Freedom of Speech had to have some limits. It could not be used to pillory and degrade minorities. We actually had long before come to recognise that when we created the law of blasphemy.
To say that words cannot hurt is to state the purest form of rubbish possible. Words can scar (for life); they can destroy self esteem; humiliate and degrade; crush the spirit; and can even drive a person mad.
Although referring to language’s written form, its message holds true even in the spoken form. ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword.’
Language is the most powerful weapon we can ever deploy against a person.
Not before time, society set about addressing this very real problem in its midst. And so a whole new industry was born: it is called ‘political correctness’, although in many of its aspects it might, more accurately, be described as ‘behavioural correctness’.
Few would deny that we were right to tackle this cruel form of abuse and are the better for having done so.
Only verbal abuse of the elderly is still permitted and I worry at what it says about us that we have allowed this most vulnerable sector of our society – the one to which we owe everything we have – to remain almost the last to receive such protection.
Like all new industries, the people whose jobs depend on it feel they have to keep up the momentum; justify, if you like, their existence. They spread the net wider and wider and probe into the most unlikely and deepest of recesses looking for that ever more elusive injustice.
If things go on as they are we may arrive at a situation where we are afraid to open our mouths lest we commit a felony.
The free flow of conversation itself may end up being imperilled as we put ourselves on mental override before we release our thoughts to a live audience.
I feel the time has come to put a brake on this whole burgeoning industry of political correctness.
Yes, we were right to look at all aspects of how we do things and what we say. Fairness and equality, along with tolerance, must always remain central to our way of thinking. But we are in danger, as always, of allowing the locomotive to run out of control.
It is interesting to note that we are not alone in wrestling with these thorny problems. The French are about to abolish the term ‘mademoiselle’ at the very time we are about to ban ‘Mrs’ on all government documents. Should the quaint term ‘Spinster’, still featured at every Registry Office, also be consigned to the dustbin of history?
While a very necessary transformation has taken place, it is important that we don’t end up making fools of ourselves and creating a lawyers’ paradise where all concerned argue, ad nauseam, as to whether offense was intended and the law breached.
Things are getting sillier by the minute.
Is it sensible to ban wolf whistles? Who will know which navvy among the many was the culprit? In any case, where’s the offence? My ex used to love it when she walked past a building site. She was guaranteed one every time.
Whilst not ordinarily in favour of any governmental expansion (in fact I am in favour of the reverse) I might be prepared to consider one exception: a new Ministry of Common Sense.
Degrade the Taliban to the max
More tears for our brave boys in Afghanistan last week. The sorrow was exacerbated by the knowledge that the ‘soft underbelly’ problem in armoured vehicles was identified more than four years ago and remains unfixed. We fought World War One in that time span.
Had our boys been in an American vehicle, there is every likelihood they would be alive today.
On a cost-benefit basis, both Afghanistan and Iraq have been a disaster. The Romans were more savvy when they built Hadrian’s Wall. They could have crushed the Scots had they wished. But what did Scotland have to offer them? A miserable climate – especially for an Italian – a constantly restive and warlike people (just like some others on the north bank of the Rhine – the Germans) and next to no natural resources.
As a pragmatic people they decided to leave them both to stew. So both missed out on a whole range of benefits which a more advanced civilisation had to offer. The whole of this can be said to apply to Afghanistan today.
Much of America’s financial woes can be traced back to the horrendous cost of the Vietnam war. After all, it was then that it was forced off the Gold Standard. Does anybody doubt that if the untold billions spent on the Iraq and Afghan wars had been sitting in the US treasury today that things would be looking very different? Yet exactly the same could be said about us.
Wars are expensive. From a position of incredible wealth as a country, it took just two of them to ruin us and rob us of our leading position in the world by 1945.
Afghanistan was always said to be the ‘graveyard of empires’, and no one knew this better than we did. We launched no fewer than three ill-fated forays into that country in the days of the Raj. In one of them, an entire column of 16,000 perished in the snows of the Hindu Kush on the retreat back from Kabul to the Indian frontier.
Prime Minister David Cameron would spend a long time reading out their names in the Commons. So, more than anyone else, we should have known better.
Of course it was right to go into that country to flush out Al Qaeda and punish the Taliban for harbouring them, but having done so we should have got out and stayed out. We, in our heyday, were never defeated in the field by the Afghans any more than NATO has been, or, for that matter, the Russians.
But the Afghans do not heed good advice to mend their medieval ways (especially when that advice comes from foreigners) so they must be left to marinate. Just be thankful that you are not a woman in that benighted country.
It is unlikely that if the Taliban return to power after NATO’s exit – which is probable – they will ever again allow Al Qaeda to set up training camps. They are canny enough not to go down that road a second time, helped by Bin Laden’s death. While he was their guest, there was never a snowball’s chance that they would have handed him over, even when we threatened to invade. Muslim law on hospitality absolutely forbade that.
It is always important to have an exit strategy. But it is equally important to keep the date of exit to yourself. Had we held to our original statements that ‘we are here until the job is done’ – even if you had a date in mind – then there is every likelihood that the same weariness which brought the IRA to the negotiating table would have done so in the case of the Taliban.
Why hold on, they would have said to themselves, and stay a fugitive forever and as likely not die in the struggle? Let’s do a deal.
The Afghans have always been known as the world’s greatest wheeler-dealers. Now they are going around saying ‘the West have the watches, but we have the time’. So now that we have revealed our hand, we must make every effort to equip and train the home-grown Afghan forces to look after themselves when we are gone.
Who knows, they might even pull it off, despite everything. And our boys, in the interim, must degrade the Taliban to the maximum extent possible. A weakened force might just be more amenable to a greatly strengthened home army. But the deeply corrupt Afghan government will make this an uphill struggle. We can only hope our fears are misplaced.
Accused without charge
I was astonished recently to learn that Ken Clarke, the Justice Minister whom I always thought of as something of a libertarian, should seek to clamp on the land of Magna Carta a Bill of wholesale restrictions on open justice.
He wants a special body of lawyers to sit behind closed doors conducting cases in which the accused cannot defend himself in time-honoured fashion. Incredibly, the accused will not even know with what he is charged nor have the right to face his accuser. He will be defended by a government-appointed lawyer he will never meet or speak with. And a Minister of the Crown, who may well be trying to protect himself or his department from well justified exposure, gets to decide whether the case in question merits this very special treatment.
Now, if this isn’t the very purest form of Kafka, then I’d like to know what is. Certainly every tinpot dictator of modern times would love it.
As you may have guessed from previous writings, the preservation of our ancient liberties is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. As I see it, we didn’t create, over centuries, the great edifice of The Common Law – admired around the world and used by over a quarter of it – only to see it dismantled in many of its essentials by a latter day band of political pygmies.
It is not as though I believe that it should be set in aspic, never to be changed. Some years ago I had deep misgivings when New Labour proposed to change the law of Double Jeopardy, whereby an acquitted person could never be tried on the same charge twice.
I came to believe that if science (DNA) could prove incontrovertibly at a later date that a guilty man had been acquitted then it would not be natural justice to let him continue to get away with it. There were, I considered, many good reasons for my earlier misgivings.
If, for instance, an oppressive government or police force were determined on a guilty verdict then it could keep on coming back for another bite of the cherry until it got the result it wanted.
Also, were the police to know that they could always have another try, they would not feel under the same compulsion to go that extra mile to ferret out all the available evidence the first time round. It would also be unfair on the acquitted person – who might believe that the powers-that-be were out to get him – to ask him to live under such a cloud of deferred retribution. But amendments were put in place that held to the double jeopardy principal except in the most serious of cases, so I was satisfied.
I have long felt that New Labour were cavalier in its attitude to the protections which The Common Law bestowed on us. When terrorism reared its ugly head in the aftermath of 9/11 they leaped to panic stations. They seemed to have forgotten that we, as a nation, had long experience of dealing with that particular sick and murderous element in society – thirty years, no less.
The IRA, of whom we are speaking, were, moreover, far more accomplished practitioners of the dark and terrible arts of mass murder than the Johnny-come-lately Jihadists who had grown up in our midst. Sadly, their bombs went off first time on nearly every occasion. The result was that, on a head count of victims, the IRA were light years ahead of their successors.
But New Labour saw it differently. They rushed through a whole range of measures which began the long assault on things we held dear: which had taken centuries of struggle to achieve. Now we have a new government of a different political hue, but it, too – inexplicably – continues the assault and even carries it into realms hitherto unthought-of. It has to be stopped.
Luckily, these new proposals have raised a great hue and cry from almost every quarter, including 57 of the 69 specially appointed lawyers who want nothing to do with it: bless their courage and probity.
Yet Cameron is supportive of the tragically misguided Clarke. No doubt the police and the security services would like – where they chose – to dispense secret ‘justice’ along with the hospital authorities, coroners’ courts, government Ministers and the Ministry of Defence – all of whom, it is proposed, at the minister’s discretion, can impose in camera hearings.
Were they to have had these powers, we would never had learned the truth with regard to the seven shots to the head, underground shooting of poor Charles de Mendez, mistaken for a terrorist; nor the lack of body armour and helicopters and the use of thin skinned vehicles which led to the death of so many of our brave soldiers; nor the lamentable toll of scandalous hospital deaths and shocking mistreatment of our old people; nor the truth about Princess Diana’s death; nor that of Victoria Climbié and Baby Peter; nor even, who knows, of the former Energy Secretary’s alleged wrongdoings. All of them bring acute embarrassment to the people and agencies involved and they would rather we knew nothing of their incompetence or couldn’t-care-less attitude.
Truth and openness, in my view, trumps every other consideration. Only in the most clear-cut threats to national security are we entitled to consider secrecy.
If David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ means a smaller, less intrusive state and more power to the people then I am all for it. Power, inevitably, seeks more power. But I am not concerned how much power accrues to the people; the more the better: they can be trusted. But individuals and agencies must always be constrained, and a free press is there to help us to achieve that.
Servants of the state must also be held to account and answer for serious shortcomings. In industry, commerce and even sport, heads roll regularly: not so in the public sector. This must change. How often is abject failure rewarded not with the sack, but with promotion. This truly incenses the public.
Everybody knows what a failure the head of the Borders Agency has made of her job. And not just that, but the one before. Yet she gets promoted to head up HM Revenue & Customs, an agency failing almost as badly as her own and which desperately needs real and proven talent not failure.
What a way to do business. But that’s big government for you! Spitting in the eye of its paymasters at every turn.
The Last Foundling 