DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Our NHS cash is for patients, not wokery

2022-08-20

DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Our NHS cash is for patients, not wokery

What is a humanitarian crisis? A famine of biblical proportions in Africa? China’s persecution of the Uighur Muslims? The millions displaced by war in Ukraine?

To the increasingly hysterical NHS Confederation (led by Matthew Taylor, a one-time Blair lickspittle), it is the more mundane matter of rising energy prices.

In a nakedly political intervention, the organisation warns that unless ministers offer more help with soaring bills, households will be forced to choose between eating meals and heating their homes this winter. That would mean more people falling sick through cold and hunger – piling intolerable pressure on an already buckling NHS.

While undoubtedly troubling, this is hardly a ‘humanitarian crisis’. Such hyperbole is grotesque, and cheapens the discourse of true disaster.

Forget, also, that the Government is already spending £37billion to support families struggling with energy costs – and is almost certain to extend the package.

Matthew Taylor (pictured), head of the NHS Confederation, said Britain is facing a ‘humanitarian crisis’

No, this was nothing more than a shameless attempt to arm-twist ministers into handing over even more funding.

Simultaneously, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine warns of a ‘major crisis’ in ambulance services. Instead of being treated speedily, too many of those who dial 999 endure life-threatening delays. In one appalling case, a woman was stranded on a concrete path for more than ten hours after breaking her leg before paramedics arrived.

Even though the NHS budget is already a record £178.5billion, the health establishment’s proposed solution is tiresomely inevitable: More money. Like a blackmailer, the behemoth always comes back for more. No amount is ever enough.

But it would be easier to take its cries for cash seriously if it wasn’t wasting millions of taxpayers’ money on virtue-signalling.

Today the Mail reveals the NHS has spent more than £1million on ‘woke’ staff support groups, with picnics or talks on transgender issues, pronouns, sexuality and racism.

Of course, NHS employees, who do an outstanding job, deserve looking after. But the public will rightly ask if their hard-earned taxes shouldn’t instead be spent on more doctors and nurses or tackling waiting lists.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, £1million is a drop in the ocean. But it is endemic of an NHS mindset where our money is there to be spent at their leisure, much of it on needless tiers of management.

Until someone brave enough steps forward to grasp the nettle of what the country can afford for healthcare, and how to pay for it properly, things will only get worse.

Hands to the pump

Hosepipe bans, and the public told to ration the water they use. Pipes leaking billions of litres a day. And raw sewage routinely pumped into our rivers and seas.

With drought parching the country, the water companies have in general performed abysmally. But is it any wonder?

Surprise, surprise, those failing worst are letting their staff work from home during the crisis.

By contrast, the ones doing the best have kept busy offices.

When long-suffering customers are being so badly let down, the water firms should be putting all hands to the pump.

Hosepipe bans, and the public told to ration the water they use. Picture: file image

RMT off the rails

Using fiery but depressingly predictable rhetoric, union barons warn the crippling rail strikes could last ‘indefinitely’ if their pay demands aren’t met.

But is the industrial action working? With typical resilience, Britons are still going about their daily lives – either home-working or finding other ways to travel.

The RMT may relish a political punch-up with the Tory Government. But if their endless disruption kills off the railways, they will have only betrayed their own members – leaving them out of jobs and out of pocket.

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