I think we’re all mature enough on Twitter to talk about the real elephant in the room of British political life.
Okay it’s not really an elephant. It’s more like a sacred cow.
Or actually it’s more like an albatross.
Can we talk about the NHS for a second?
Okay it’s not really an elephant. It’s more like a sacred cow.
Or actually it’s more like an albatross.
Can we talk about the NHS for a second?
Broad strokes here obviously but none of this is untrue: the NHS is failing and everyone knows it. In fact it’s been failing since the mid 1990s. Remember that date, it’s important we’ll be coming back to it in a second.
But people who’re old enough - shockingly - remember when the NHS was actually good. I’m not lying, when I was a child in the early 90s and I was sick - which I frequently was - my parents would take me to the GP’s surgery and we’d be seen within an hour, no appointments needed.
Most hospital appointments were next day, or next week at the absolute longest. The whole organisation was famed for its efficiency.
If you’re a zoomer you probably think I’m joking. I’m not, it actually used to work.
If you’re a zoomer you probably think I’m joking. I’m not, it actually used to work.
But why did it work, and why doesn’t it now?
The answer is very simple: vuh Tories.
The answer is very simple: vuh Tories.
Just kidding, it’s immigration, which is precisely why we can’t talk about it and the issue will never be fixed.
When socialist leek goblin Nye Bevan set up the NHS in the period immediately following World War 2 it was a very finely balanced system, calibrated to the population and its needs and self funding through national insurance.
The medical training pipelines, hospitals themselves, and GP’s surgeries were established so that there would be a specific ratio of staff and facilities to patients, ensuring a good level of efficiency would be possible.
In fact during the 1960s, when net migration was negative and the birth rate started to decline, the NHS actually managed to improve its efficiency beyond what had been originally planned.
Things started to go wrong in the 1990s as net migration to the UK began to rise sharply, and earlier, smaller waves of migrants began having children at much higher rates than the native population.
The population in 1991 was 57.42 million. By 2011, it was over 63 million. A 10% increase in just 20 years, and almost double the increase in the preceding 30 years.
The NHS was never recalibrated to account for this change, which began to wear on it more and more noticeably throughout this period as the rate of population increase grew.
Because immigrants tend to cluster in big cities, the effects of the strain are felt much more acutely in places like London and Birmingham than they are in, say, rural Scotland. But at this point overspill pressures and knee jerk reforms affect every part of the system.
The frequently intoned political incantation that we “need immigrants to keep our NHS running” is a uniquely self defeating one. In the first place, this is only the case because we do not train nearly enough doctors or nurses to maintain a good staff/patient ratio.
Medical school places are entirely within the purview of the GMC, who refuse to raise the cap on the number of doctors they’ll train because it’s cheaper to source them from overseas.
In the second place, we wouldn’t have such an alarming shortage of doctors and nurses if we weren’t dementedly importing the population of the cities of Manchester and Bristol combined every single year.
When you add the burden created by the fact that many migrant populations are much more likely to contain “heavy users” of healthcare (mostly due to autosomal recessive and other chronic conditions) it becomes apparent that we’re bringing in immigrants to treat immigrants.
Indeed there are many areas of the country where the NHS is staffed mostly by immigrants, who are themselves mostly treating immigrants.
It’s like a pyramid scheme, except nobody makes any money and everyone who doesn’t participate in it has to pay for it too.
It’s like a pyramid scheme, except nobody makes any money and everyone who doesn’t participate in it has to pay for it too.
British society faces a stark choice over the coming decades. But such is the nature of our present political discourse that we can’t even discuss it openly, let alone soberly or rationally.
Which way, western man?
Which way, western man?
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