Lynch says it’s press and network rail propaganda to ask questions about the draining support for strikes from RMT.. but he should listen to this from Labour MP..
Labour MP Carolyn Harris says union leaders need to "listen closer" to the people on strike, who are telling her "they can't afford" to keep up strike action.
Gravity always wins. The union can't fund these strikes indefinitely and the workers need to, you know, work to get paid. At a time of high inflation they probably need to work overtime if they are able. In the end Network Rail mat realise that the workers will accept a low ball offer because they will not be able to afford further strikes.
This is true for all of the strikers, but most especially the Royal Mail ones. Business is draining away from them and they are driving the company into bankruptcy at which point none of them have any jobs. Unions and management in this country are the worst among the world.
The bottom line is that if you treat people crappily for long enough they quit, strike or stop caring about doing their jobs to an adequate standard. Everyone loses as a result.
Let them quit. They won't because they're sitting it out until they get nice five figure voluntary redundancy pay offs, but I'd absolutely let them quit.
So fewer doctors, nurses and other care providers; fewer teachers; more train cancellations; even worse public services. I am not sure that’s a great idea. But it does encapsulate how we have got to where we are today. Unless the thinking changes, our decline will only continue.
Decline is the word. This country is broken. When you have hospitals having to provide food banks for their own nurses who can't afford to pay the bills on their salary, thats when you know the system has broken down.
People look back on the 1970s and remember a lost decade where everyone was on strike, industry went to shit and the price of everything went mental. The damage done saw Labour out of office for almost two decades. Yet the Tories - overseeing another lost decade - think there is no problem and people should vote for them again. Once out of office it will be a while before they return.
It does feel rather like the 1970s
But Labour didn’t lose power for two decades just because of that decline, the Tories came along with a leader who had a plan, who stuck to that plan, and who saved the nation. In the eyes of many
There is no evidence Labour has a clue what to do about our decline, other than maybe manage it slightly less badly than the Tories - if we’re lucky
The solutions to the problems that we have are not ones that Labour can really implement. We need to stop being so generous in many areas and find major efficiency savings. Labour only know how to tax more (although they'd have to go some to tax more than the Tories) and spend more. No way with the unions let them do this.
Tories are too tired to do what needs to be done either. So unfortunately we will be set for 5 years of paralysed Labour government. Probably the best we can hope for is for the Tories to lose narrowly and hope that some new Tory leader comes in with a real plan and for Labour to fall apart. Think the chances of that are less than 5% though.
What we all really need right now is for some resolution to be found to Ukraine.
Tories are too tired to fix the problems they've had 12 years to fix/create (delete to tase)? It's, to use the hoary old PB cliché, a view.
The Tories created a lot of these problems via austerity but I have to ask the same question I did yesterday.
Given the amount of tax we are paying - where it is being spent - because it's not on wages or infrastructure or anything that people can physically see?
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Productivity is our big challenge. So many people are stuck in gruelling jobs where they either have no way to advance or seek better pay / conditions, or they are so poorly paid that they are stuck in overpriced rotten housing without the ability to heat it or feed themselves, never mind consume by buying stuff or having little luxuries and holidays.
On paper we have a huge economy, one of the largest in the world. And yet millions are the working poor, and so many of these are the people the rest of society relies upon. The money is generated - a huge economy - yet is so sparsely available for most of things that most people need.
Why is that?
It does warrant a giggle when frequent flyer PBers complain about poor productivity. I'm guilty as charged too.
I'm a management consultant. When client workload is low I post. When it is high I don't post. I know I am lucky in that respect.
I wasn't having a pop at you.
I am in a similar line, and I could be doing vastly more productive tasks in quiet moments, like making phone calls to drum up future business or collect late payments rather than dick about on here. Which brings me back to the ultimate irony of many of us on here bellyaching about lazy train drivers, posties and nurses.
Poor productivity is nearly never laziness. Poor organisational structure or poor physical setup of the workplace 99% of the time.
Poor productivity is often laziness. Not necessarily in the conventional sense, but in lazy thinking, inability to embrace change and have a growth mindset. Then there is also good old fashioned laziness thrown in when the organisational structure does not make individuals accountable. All of these things can be seen in the public sector and large companies. It is a major challenge for policy makers.
Mishal Husain asked the average loss to members for striking
Mick Lynch told her "I find this a shocking stance that the BBC will take - you are just parroting the most right wing stuff you can get hold of on behalf of the establishment."
I'm left wondering whether he doesn't understand 'average' (with all the wittering on about it varying between different people) or simply didn't know the answer and so blustered.
Bizarre attack line when he talked about the sacrifices his members are making, when the question was indeed highlighting the sacrifices his members are making. Would be interesting to calculate the payback time on strikes versus pay settlements - i.e. if strikes are 5% of days in a year and the pay rise is 10% then clearly it pays back quickly, But for long running disputes it could be less clear cut/much longer return. For unsuccessful disputes, like the UCU ones, normally, it's just cost of course.
That's not quite how it works, because in the case of the rail strike they already have a +5% this year and +4% next year offer.
So the only benefit that the strike is obtaining is the marginal increase over those numbers. If they get 7% then they only have +2% from the strike. Even with optimising short strikes to maximise disruption (eg strike split across half of 2 shifts etc) it's a challenge to make the payback work.
For the NHS staff there is already an acceptance of +7.5% in Scotland, which looks as if it is going to stick.
In England the Govt has accepted the pay review body recommendation aiui, which is I think 4.5%. That is a lesson learned from last time when they tried it on offering a lower number than recommended.
RCN is demanding 17.5% or so, which has some interesting maths behind it. If they accept 7.5% as if starting to happen in Scotland the strike gain will be 2.5%.
I think the Govt also perhaps thinks that inflation has peaked, and any changes are in their favour.
On the other hand, a permanent increase in cheap supermarket prices of very nearly 20% is not trivial. It's a permanent dent in your income. So a reduction in inflation doesn't remove that unless we go into actual deflation. Or increased wages.
Do you have evidence to suggest it is permanent?
Do you have evidence otherwise? I can't see it improving much, given the current world situation and the problems of UK food producers.
Mishal Husain asked the average loss to members for striking
Mick Lynch told her "I find this a shocking stance that the BBC will take - you are just parroting the most right wing stuff you can get hold of on behalf of the establishment."
I'm left wondering whether he doesn't understand 'average' (with all the wittering on about it varying between different people) or simply didn't know the answer and so blustered.
Bizarre attack line when he talked about the sacrifices his members are making, when the question was indeed highlighting the sacrifices his members are making. Would be interesting to calculate the payback time on strikes versus pay settlements - i.e. if strikes are 5% of days in a year and the pay rise is 10% then clearly it pays back quickly, But for long running disputes it could be less clear cut/much longer return. For unsuccessful disputes, like the UCU ones, normally, it's just cost of course.
That's not quite how it works, because in the case of the rail strike they already have a +5% this year and +4% next year offer.
So the only benefit that the strike is obtaining is the marginal increase over those numbers. If they get 7% then they only have +2% from the strike. Even with optimising short strikes to maximise disruption (eg strike split across half of 2 shifts etc) it's a challenge to make the payback work.
For the NHS staff there is already an acceptance of +7.5% in Scotland, which looks as if it is going to stick.
In England the Govt has accepted the pay review body recommendation aiui, which is I think 4.5%. That is a lesson learned from last time when they tried it on offering a lower number than recommended.
RCN is demanding 17.5% or so, which has some interesting maths behind it. If they accept 7.5% as if starting to happen in Scotland the strike gain will be 2.5%.
I think the Govt also perhaps thinks that inflation has peaked, and any changes are in their favour.
On the other hand, a permanent increase in cheap supermarket prices of very nearly 20% is not trivial. It's a permanent dent in your income. So a reduction in inflation doesn't remove that unless we go into actual deflation. Or increased wages.
(Forgot to say morning all).
Yes - very fair point. There's been a lot of lurid commentary about essentials prices shooting up by far more than that, but 15-20% feels about right for what has happened over 12-18 months I'd say. I shop at Aldi for the bulk of things, which is in some measure "basics" by definition, and a lot of things there are up by 20% more or less (within a wider range of small rises to 35%) afaics, or package sizes have changed. And that is supported by the published numbers.
I think one thing the Govt need politically is mortgage rates back down before the bulk of fixes run out - not sure that they will get it. Kept BoJo for a year too long.
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
Depends on your definition of "manager". There is an administrative chain of command, and some of these people are no doubt of good quality, but many are not and wouldn't last 5 minutes in the private sector but still demand that their pay is based on private sector norms for the size of organisation, when that is a very poor comparator. Unless, of course, you are suggesting there are no bad managers or inefficiencies in our whiter than white NHS?
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Productivity is our big challenge. So many people are stuck in gruelling jobs where they either have no way to advance or seek better pay / conditions, or they are so poorly paid that they are stuck in overpriced rotten housing without the ability to heat it or feed themselves, never mind consume by buying stuff or having little luxuries and holidays.
On paper we have a huge economy, one of the largest in the world. And yet millions are the working poor, and so many of these are the people the rest of society relies upon. The money is generated - a huge economy - yet is so sparsely available for most of things that most people need.
Why is that?
It does warrant a giggle when frequent flyer PBers complain about poor productivity. I'm guilty as charged too.
I'm a management consultant. When client workload is low I post. When it is high I don't post. I know I am lucky in that respect.
I wasn't having a pop at you.
I am in a similar line, and I could be doing vastly more productive tasks in quiet moments, like making phone calls to drum up future business or collect late payments rather than dick about on here. Which brings me back to the ultimate irony of many of us on here bellyaching about lazy train drivers, posties and nurses.
Poor productivity is nearly never laziness. Poor organisational structure or poor physical setup of the workplace 99% of the time.
Poor productivity is often laziness. Not necessarily in the conventional sense, but in lazy thinking, inability to embrace change and have a growth mindset. Then there is also good old fashioned laziness thrown in when the organisational structure does not make individuals accountable. All of these things can be seen in the public sector and large companies. It is a major challenge for policy makers.
You need to read some history on productivity and Operations Research.
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Productivity is our big challenge. So many people are stuck in gruelling jobs where they either have no way to advance or seek better pay / conditions, or they are so poorly paid that they are stuck in overpriced rotten housing without the ability to heat it or feed themselves, never mind consume by buying stuff or having little luxuries and holidays.
On paper we have a huge economy, one of the largest in the world. And yet millions are the working poor, and so many of these are the people the rest of society relies upon. The money is generated - a huge economy - yet is so sparsely available for most of things that most people need.
Why is that?
It does warrant a giggle when frequent flyer PBers complain about poor productivity. I'm guilty as charged too.
My job intrinsically has poor productivity. There are only two of us who do what I do, but we can't go down to one because that one does have to take four weeks of holiday a year. And if the workload ever again gets too high for one person to be able to cope with it (as used to be the case) we'd have to add a third.
Are you in Bros?
Yes, he is Craig Logan
Just got me thinking of how you can split pop duo acts into 2 types - where both are approx equal as opposed to where it's really a 'one plus'. Wham is an obvious example of the 2nd. I happen to like Ridgeley's contribution but you have to say it's cameo. A good example of 'equals' is Sony & Cher imo. She was the bigger star by far as it turned out but in the duet he was in no way a passenger. Then you have the interesting case of Simon & Garfunkel. Paul thinks they're a plus one, Art thinks they're equals. I'm in the middle on this one. They're not equals, Art is wrong there, but to class them as a 'plus one' like Wham is a nonsense, so Paul is wrong too. Art Garfunkel is not like Andrew Ridgeley.
[heresy?] Given I prefer Simon's solo work, S&G is arguably a 'one minus'? [/heresy?]
(notwithstanding some S&G classics, none of their albums, for me, match up to Graceland)
Mishal Husain asked the average loss to members for striking
Mick Lynch told her "I find this a shocking stance that the BBC will take - you are just parroting the most right wing stuff you can get hold of on behalf of the establishment."
I'm left wondering whether he doesn't understand 'average' (with all the wittering on about it varying between different people) or simply didn't know the answer and so blustered.
Bizarre attack line when he talked about the sacrifices his members are making, when the question was indeed highlighting the sacrifices his members are making. Would be interesting to calculate the payback time on strikes versus pay settlements - i.e. if strikes are 5% of days in a year and the pay rise is 10% then clearly it pays back quickly, But for long running disputes it could be less clear cut/much longer return. For unsuccessful disputes, like the UCU ones, normally, it's just cost of course.
That's not quite how it works, because in the case of the rail strike they already have a +5% this year and +4% next year offer.
So the only benefit that the strike is obtaining is the marginal increase over those numbers. If they get 7% then they only have +2% from the strike. Even with optimising short strikes to maximise disruption (eg strike split across half of 2 shifts etc) it's a challenge to make the payback work.
For the NHS staff there is already an acceptance of +7.5% in Scotland, which looks as if it is going to stick.
In England the Govt has accepted the pay review body recommendation aiui, which is I think 4.5%. That is a lesson learned from last time when they tried it on offering a lower number than recommended.
RCN is demanding 17.5% or so, which has some interesting maths behind it. If they accept 7.5% as if starting to happen in Scotland the strike gain will be 2.5%.
I think the Govt also perhaps thinks that inflation has peaked, and any changes are in their favour.
On the other hand, a permanent increase in cheap supermarket prices of very nearly 20% is not trivial. It's a permanent dent in your income. So a reduction in inflation doesn't remove that unless we go into actual deflation. Or increased wages.
(Forgot to say morning all).
Yes - very fair point. There's been a lot of lurid commentary about essentials prices shooting up by far more than that, but 15-20% feels about right for what has happened over 12-18 months I'd say. I shop at Aldi for the bulk of things, which is in some measure "basics" by definition, and a lot of things there are up by 20% more or less (within a wider range of small rises to 35%) afaics, or package sizes have changed. And that is supported by the published numbers.
I think one thing the Govt need is mortgage rates back down before the bulk of fixes run out - not sure that they will get it.
I posted this recently, but you might have missed it - you are pretty much right with Aldi (allowing for notional shopping baskets vs yours, time periods etc.)
The question (as Max fairly asks) is how much they will go down again (ie deflation of prices). But given how much farmers etc are being screwed even at the high prices the long term viability remains open to question.
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
Yes, my partner is a highly-qualified NHS clinical scientist, but the amount of routine admin work she has to do is absurd. It's an obvious waste of her rather expensive time. She doesn't like doing it and she's not particularly good at it. It seems ridiculous that they aren't able to employ managers to do this work.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
I'm not sure how much extra headline money it is possible to put into the NHS politically or financially - are we not currently at something like 12% of GDP, which is very near the top of international comparisons (USA excepted)? And Labour engaging in a rhetoric of "high tax Tories".
They can go for stuff like unwinding or essentially nationalising remaining PFI contracts, which are significantly large in the 10s of billions, make it better at charging chargeable treatments rather than let them drift, hope for transfers as Covid continues to wind down and so on. But there's not, as far I know, much squeak room.
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
Yes, my partner is a highly-qualified NHS clinical scientist, but the amount of routine admin work she has to do is absurd. It's an obvious waste of her rather expensive time. She doesn't like doing it and she's not particularly good at it. It seems ridiculous that they aren't able to employ managers to do this work.
What the NHS needs is some modern analysis, followed by a systematic investment in removing the bottlenecks in “workflows” of providing treatment.
All standard stuff in intelligently run organisations. Means breaking some rice bowls, but hey….
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Productivity is our big challenge. So many people are stuck in gruelling jobs where they either have no way to advance or seek better pay / conditions, or they are so poorly paid that they are stuck in overpriced rotten housing without the ability to heat it or feed themselves, never mind consume by buying stuff or having little luxuries and holidays.
On paper we have a huge economy, one of the largest in the world. And yet millions are the working poor, and so many of these are the people the rest of society relies upon. The money is generated - a huge economy - yet is so sparsely available for most of things that most people need.
Why is that?
It does warrant a giggle when frequent flyer PBers complain about poor productivity. I'm guilty as charged too.
My job intrinsically has poor productivity. There are only two of us who do what I do, but we can't go down to one because that one does have to take four weeks of holiday a year. And if the workload ever again gets too high for one person to be able to cope with it (as used to be the case) we'd have to add a third.
Are you in Bros?
Yes, he is Craig Logan
Just got me thinking of how you can split pop duo acts into 2 types - where both are approx equal as opposed to where it's really a 'one plus'. Wham is an obvious example of the 2nd. I happen to like Ridgeley's contribution but you have to say it's cameo. A good example of 'equals' is Sony & Cher imo. She was the bigger star by far as it turned out but in the duet he was in no way a passenger. Then you have the interesting case of Simon & Garfunkel. Paul thinks they're a plus one, Art thinks they're equals. I'm in the middle on this one. They're not equals, Art is wrong there, but to class them as a 'plus one' like Wham is a nonsense, so Paul is wrong too. Art Garfunkel is not like Andrew Ridgeley.
Paul wrote all the S&G songs and played all the instruments. He also sang lead vocal on all the songs except one. Bit of trivia: which one was it?
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
Depends on your definition of "manager". There is an administrative chain of command, and some of these people are no doubt of good quality, but many are not and wouldn't last 5 minutes in the private sector but still demand that their pay is based on private sector norms for the size of organisation, when that is a very poor comparator. Unless, of course, you are suggesting there are no bad managers or inefficiencies in our whiter than white NHS?
I believe the suggestion is that a manager within the NHS would call you in for sensitivity training for using the phrase "whiter than white".
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Productivity is our big challenge. So many people are stuck in gruelling jobs where they either have no way to advance or seek better pay / conditions, or they are so poorly paid that they are stuck in overpriced rotten housing without the ability to heat it or feed themselves, never mind consume by buying stuff or having little luxuries and holidays.
On paper we have a huge economy, one of the largest in the world. And yet millions are the working poor, and so many of these are the people the rest of society relies upon. The money is generated - a huge economy - yet is so sparsely available for most of things that most people need.
Why is that?
It does warrant a giggle when frequent flyer PBers complain about poor productivity. I'm guilty as charged too.
My job intrinsically has poor productivity. There are only two of us who do what I do, but we can't go down to one because that one does have to take four weeks of holiday a year. And if the workload ever again gets too high for one person to be able to cope with it (as used to be the case) we'd have to add a third.
Are you in Bros?
Yes, he is Craig Logan
Just got me thinking of how you can split pop duo acts into 2 types - where both are approx equal as opposed to where it's really a 'one plus'. Wham is an obvious example of the 2nd. I happen to like Ridgeley's contribution but you have to say it's cameo. A good example of 'equals' is Sony & Cher imo. She was the bigger star by far as it turned out but in the duet he was in no way a passenger. Then you have the interesting case of Simon & Garfunkel. Paul thinks they're a plus one, Art thinks they're equals. I'm in the middle on this one. They're not equals, Art is wrong there, but to class them as a 'plus one' like Wham is a nonsense, so Paul is wrong too. Art Garfunkel is not like Andrew Ridgeley.
Paul wrote all the S&G songs and played all the instruments. He also sang lead vocal on all the songs except one. Bit of trivia: which one was it?
Surely Art Garfunkel was lead vocal on more than one
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
I'm not sure how much extra headline money it is possible to put into the NHS politically or financially - are we not currently at something like 12% of GDP, which is very near the top of international comparisons (USA excepted)? And Labour engaging in a rhetoric of "high tax Tories".
They can go for stuff like unwinding or essentially nationalising remaining PFI contracts, which are significantly large in the 10s of billions, make it better at charging chargeable treatments rather than let them drift, hope for transfers as Covid continues to wind down and so on. But there's not, as far I know, much squeak room.
Pass because the total cost of the NHS wasn't being discussed here - it's the usual I've found someone in the NHS being paid more to do a job than I think they should be earning.
Which boils down to at some level or other petty jealousy...
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
I'm not sure how much extra headline money it is possible to put into the NHS politically or financially - are we not currently at something like 12% of GDP, which is very near the top of international comparisons (USA excepted)? And Labour engaging in a rhetoric of "high tax Tories".
They can go for stuff like unwinding or essentially nationalising remaining PFI contracts, which are significantly large in the 10s of billions, make it better at charging chargeable treatments rather than let them drift, hope for transfers as Covid continues to wind down and so on. But there's not, as far I know, much squeak room.
Wouldn't the PFI nationalisation be blocked by the Tories, on human rights grounds?
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
Yes, my partner is a highly-qualified NHS clinical scientist, but the amount of routine admin work she has to do is absurd. It's an obvious waste of her rather expensive time. She doesn't like doing it and she's not particularly good at it. It seems ridiculous that they aren't able to employ managers to do this work.
What the NHS needs is some modern analysis, followed by a systematic investment in removing the bottlenecks in “workflows” of providing treatment.
All standard stuff in intelligently run organisations. Means breaking some rice bowls, but hey….
That has been tried. A bunch of expensive management consultants are brought in and make their more or less sensible recommendations, but these are subsequently blocked on political grounds ("the public wants to see more front-line staff, not managers") and things carry on pretty much as before.
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
I'm not sure how much extra headline money it is possible to put into the NHS politically or financially - are we not currently at something like 12% of GDP, which is very near the top of international comparisons (USA excepted)? And Labour engaging in a rhetoric of "high tax Tories".
They can go for stuff like unwinding or essentially nationalising remaining PFI contracts, which are significantly large in the 10s of billions, make it better at charging chargeable treatments rather than let them drift, hope for transfers as Covid continues to wind down and so on. But there's not, as far I know, much squeak room.
Wouldn't the PFI nationalisation be blocked by the Tories, on human rights grounds?
Nationalisation with compensation would be very expensive.
Nationalisation without compensation is a) open to a variety of legal challenges and b) if the government unilaterally reneges on a contract then they’ll find the future cost of contracts goes up somewhat. A lot, in fact. It’s essentially a voluntary default…..
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
Yes, my partner is a highly-qualified NHS clinical scientist, but the amount of routine admin work she has to do is absurd. It's an obvious waste of her rather expensive time. She doesn't like doing it and she's not particularly good at it. It seems ridiculous that they aren't able to employ managers to do this work.
What the NHS needs is some modern analysis, followed by a systematic investment in removing the bottlenecks in “workflows” of providing treatment.
All standard stuff in intelligently run organisations. Means breaking some rice bowls, but hey….
That has been tried. A bunch of expensive management consultants are brought in and make their more or less sensible recommendations, but these are subsequently blocked on political grounds ("the public wants to see more front-line staff, not managers") and things carry on pretty much as before.
Which is why, when I become UnDictator, thee will be shade on both sides of the roads…
If a bankruptcy restriction order is made against an MP they are automatically disqualified and there's a by-election.
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot 7m NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
Rishi should take the sting out of this attack line by pointing out that the only consequence of abolishing non-dom status would be that he and his family would just leave the country.
Update to my 8.09 Strictly tip on previous thread. 365 have cut Fleur from 10/1 to 6/1 for top female. That they've changed the price and left it out removes any valid argument for it being palped.
Unless the BBC change the rules from the last 4 way final in 2020 backing Fleur as top female is a proxy bet for Hamza winning.
Best price for Hamza is 8/15. Backing Fleur top female even at 6/1 would return £70 for a £30 bet (full odds to 3rd of stake for a 3 way tie). So better than evens.
DYOR though as a format change with a defined 2nd, 3rd, 4th would torpedo this.
On the subject of the header, and Wes Streeting, two points.
The plan is of course nonsense in the world of reality. If the problem is money then an addition of 2% of funding won't solve it. Labour will have no intention of disclosing how much the NHS would actually need to run properly because it is not a discussable subject.
There is an occasional but persistent thread running through comments on PB, by people who know much more than I do, that money is not in fact the real problem in the NHS, but that it is a matter of culture, organisation, motivation, attrition and competence.
Talking money (especially the money of rich Johnny Foreigner) is easy. Culture and competence is hard.
What is Labour's 30 second plan? I'd like to know because I intend to vote for them in the next GE, for the first time in 50 years.
Whenever I see talk of improving the NHS I think of this image (we used to have a copy pinned to the wall at work in fact)
Not necessarily that people in the NHS don't want the help or see the need to change. But when you're running on empty year after year it's hard to get your head out of the firefighting mode long enough to do anything about it.
If a bankruptcy restriction order is made against an MP they are automatically disqualified and there's a by-election.
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot 7m NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
If there is a by-election, and the Tories lose, there will not be enough stepmoms in all the world to service the favourite metaphor of @TSE to describe how much trouble they're in. That's a seat they've held continuously since 1874.
On the subject of the header, and Wes Streeting, two points.
The plan is of course nonsense in the world of reality. If the problem is money then an addition of 2% of funding won't solve it. Labour will have no intention of disclosing how much the NHS would actually need to run properly because it is not a discussable subject.
There is an occasional but persistent thread running through comments on PB, by people who know much more than I do, that money is not in fact the real problem in the NHS, but that it is a matter of culture, organisation, motivation, attrition and competence.
Talking money (especially the money of rich Johnny Foreigner) is easy. Culture and competence is hard.
What is Labour's 30 second plan? I'd like to know because I intend to vote for them in the next GE, for the first time in 50 years.
It's what they'll come up with after their thirty-first plan has failed, two years into government.
Mishal Husain asked the average loss to members for striking
Mick Lynch told her "I find this a shocking stance that the BBC will take - you are just parroting the most right wing stuff you can get hold of on behalf of the establishment."
I'm left wondering whether he doesn't understand 'average' (with all the wittering on about it varying between different people) or simply didn't know the answer and so blustered.
Bizarre attack line when he talked about the sacrifices his members are making, when the question was indeed highlighting the sacrifices his members are making. Would be interesting to calculate the payback time on strikes versus pay settlements - i.e. if strikes are 5% of days in a year and the pay rise is 10% then clearly it pays back quickly, But for long running disputes it could be less clear cut/much longer return. For unsuccessful disputes, like the UCU ones, normally, it's just cost of course.
That's not quite how it works, because in the case of the rail strike they already have a +5% this year and +4% next year offer.
So the only benefit that the strike is obtaining is the marginal increase over those numbers. If they get 7% then they only have +2% from the strike. Even with optimising short strikes to maximise disruption (eg strike split across half of 2 shifts etc) it's a challenge to make the payback work.
For the NHS staff there is already an acceptance of +7.5% in Scotland, which looks as if it is going to stick.
In England the Govt has accepted the pay review body recommendation aiui, which is I think 4.5%. That is a lesson learned from last time when they tried it on offering a lower number than recommended.
RCN is demanding 17.5% or so, which has some interesting maths behind it. If they accept 7.5% as if starting to happen in Scotland the strike gain will be 2.5%.
I think the Govt also perhaps thinks that inflation has peaked, and any changes are in their favour.
On the other hand, a permanent increase in cheap supermarket prices of very nearly 20% is not trivial. It's a permanent dent in your income. So a reduction in inflation doesn't remove that unless we go into actual deflation. Or increased wages.
Do you have evidence to suggest it is permanent?
Do you have evidence otherwise? I can't see it improving much, given the current world situation and the problems of UK food producers.
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Productivity is our big challenge. So many people are stuck in gruelling jobs where they either have no way to advance or seek better pay / conditions, or they are so poorly paid that they are stuck in overpriced rotten housing without the ability to heat it or feed themselves, never mind consume by buying stuff or having little luxuries and holidays.
On paper we have a huge economy, one of the largest in the world. And yet millions are the working poor, and so many of these are the people the rest of society relies upon. The money is generated - a huge economy - yet is so sparsely available for most of things that most people need.
Why is that?
It does warrant a giggle when frequent flyer PBers complain about poor productivity. I'm guilty as charged too.
I'm a management consultant. When client workload is low I post. When it is high I don't post. I know I am lucky in that respect.
I wasn't having a pop at you.
I am in a similar line, and I could be doing vastly more productive tasks in quiet moments, like making phone calls to drum up future business or collect late payments rather than dick about on here. Which brings me back to the ultimate irony of many of us on here bellyaching about lazy train drivers, posties and nurses.
Poor productivity is nearly never laziness. Poor organisational structure or poor physical setup of the workplace 99% of the time.
Poor productivity is often laziness. Not necessarily in the conventional sense, but in lazy thinking, inability to embrace change and have a growth mindset. Then there is also good old fashioned laziness thrown in when the organisational structure does not make individuals accountable. All of these things can be seen in the public sector and large companies. It is a major challenge for policy makers.
You need to read some history on productivity and Operations Research.
On the contrary. "Soldiering" is (if I understand correctly) the belief in top down management with an "us and them" culture. This is the complete antithesis of what I believe in. Paradoxically, unions tend to exacerbate this effect; they wish to make themselves relevant via the us-and-them that naturally occurs in behemoth organisations such as the NHS. When I used to work along side the NHS the "That is not my job" syndrome and other such fixed mindsets was rife. People need to be empowered through understanding that productivity is something they can own. The big challenge with very large organisations is that they attract people who wish to use excuses to hide their inefficiencies. I don't pretend to have the answer, but I do know that bigger, tax payer funded organisations are definitely not it.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
If a bankruptcy restriction order is made against an MP they are automatically disqualified and there's a by-election.
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot 7m NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
If there is a by-election, and the Tories lose, there will not be enough stepmoms in all the world to service the favourite metaphor of @TSE to describe how much trouble they're in. That's a seat they've held continuously since 1874.
Although the seat didn't exist from 1974 to 1992, but I doubt that would have made any difference.
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Productivity is our big challenge. So many people are stuck in gruelling jobs where they either have no way to advance or seek better pay / conditions, or they are so poorly paid that they are stuck in overpriced rotten housing without the ability to heat it or feed themselves, never mind consume by buying stuff or having little luxuries and holidays.
On paper we have a huge economy, one of the largest in the world. And yet millions are the working poor, and so many of these are the people the rest of society relies upon. The money is generated - a huge economy - yet is so sparsely available for most of things that most people need.
Why is that?
It does warrant a giggle when frequent flyer PBers complain about poor productivity. I'm guilty as charged too.
I'm a management consultant. When client workload is low I post. When it is high I don't post. I know I am lucky in that respect.
I wasn't having a pop at you.
I am in a similar line, and I could be doing vastly more productive tasks in quiet moments, like making phone calls to drum up future business or collect late payments rather than dick about on here. Which brings me back to the ultimate irony of many of us on here bellyaching about lazy train drivers, posties and nurses.
Poor productivity is nearly never laziness. Poor organisational structure or poor physical setup of the workplace 99% of the time.
Poor productivity is often laziness. Not necessarily in the conventional sense, but in lazy thinking, inability to embrace change and have a growth mindset. Then there is also good old fashioned laziness thrown in when the organisational structure does not make individuals accountable. All of these things can be seen in the public sector and large companies. It is a major challenge for policy makers.
You need to read some history on productivity and Operations Research.
On the contrary. "Soldiering" is (if I understand correctly) the belief in top down management with an "us and them" culture. This is the complete antithesis of what I believe in. Paradoxically, unions tend to exacerbate this effect; they wish to make themselves relevant via the us-and-them that naturally occurs in behemoth organisations such as the NHS. When I used to work along side the NHS the "That is not my job" syndrome and other such fixed mindsets was rife. People need to be empowered through understanding that productivity is something they can own. The big challenge with very large organisations is that they attract people who wish to use excuses to hide their inefficiencies. I don't pretend to have the answer, but I do know that bigger, tax payer funded organisations are definitely not it.
Now, I must do some work, or be less productive!
That’s exactly the syndrome that Taylor was describing - retreating into a time card world of doing the minimum between the set hours.
For the classic example of what can be done - car industry in the U.K. in the late eighties. As Leyland (and successors) staggered to its doom, other factories in the car industry were free from strikes, ever more productive, building better and better cars….
The workers and management were often hired from legacy car production - but given a non-stupid organisation they worked together.
If a bankruptcy restriction order is made against an MP they are automatically disqualified and there's a by-election.
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot 7m NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
If there is a by-election, and the Tories lose, there will not be enough stepmoms in all the world to service the favourite metaphor of @TSE to describe how much trouble they're in. That's a seat they've held continuously since 1874.
Although the seat didn't exist from 1974 to 1992, but I doubt that would have made any difference.
It was AIUI in effect the same seat with a different name, until it was divided in 1997.
Lynch says it’s press and network rail propaganda to ask questions about the draining support for strikes from RMT.. but he should listen to this from Labour MP..
Labour MP Carolyn Harris says union leaders need to "listen closer" to the people on strike, who are telling her "they can't afford" to keep up strike action.
Gravity always wins. The union can't fund these strikes indefinitely and the workers need to, you know, work to get paid. At a time of high inflation they probably need to work overtime if they are able. In the end Network Rail mat realise that the workers will accept a low ball offer because they will not be able to afford further strikes.
This is true for all of the strikers, but most especially the Royal Mail ones. Business is draining away from them and they are driving the company into bankruptcy at which point none of them have any jobs. Unions and management in this country are the worst among the world.
The bottom line is that if you treat people crappily for long enough they quit, strike or stop caring about doing their jobs to an adequate standard. Everyone loses as a result.
Let them quit. They won't because they're sitting it out until they get nice five figure voluntary redundancy pay offs, but I'd absolutely let them quit.
So fewer doctors, nurses and other care providers; fewer teachers; more train cancellations; even worse public services. I am not sure that’s a great idea. But it does encapsulate how we have got to where we are today. Unless the thinking changes, our decline will only continue.
Decline is the word. This country is broken. When you have hospitals having to provide food banks for their own nurses who can't afford to pay the bills on their salary, thats when you know the system has broken down.
People look back on the 1970s and remember a lost decade where everyone was on strike, industry went to shit and the price of everything went mental. The damage done saw Labour out of office for almost two decades. Yet the Tories - overseeing another lost decade - think there is no problem and people should vote for them again. Once out of office it will be a while before they return.
It does feel rather like the 1970s
But Labour didn’t lose power for two decades just because of that decline, the Tories came along with a leader who had a plan, who stuck to that plan, and who saved the nation. In the eyes of many
There is no evidence Labour has a clue what to do about our decline, other than maybe manage it slightly less badly than the Tories - if we’re lucky
The solutions to the problems that we have are not ones that Labour can really implement. We need to stop being so generous in many areas and find major efficiency savings. Labour only know how to tax more (although they'd have to go some to tax more than the Tories) and spend more. No way with the unions let them do this.
Tories are too tired to do what needs to be done either. So unfortunately we will be set for 5 years of paralysed Labour government. Probably the best we can hope for is for the Tories to lose narrowly and hope that some new Tory leader comes in with a real plan and for Labour to fall apart. Think the chances of that are less than 5% though.
What we all really need right now is for some resolution to be found to Ukraine.
Tories are too tired to fix the problems they've had 12 years to fix/create (delete to tase)? It's, to use the hoary old PB cliché, a view.
The Tories created a lot of these problems via austerity but I have to ask the same question I did yesterday.
Given the amount of tax we are paying - where it is being spent - because it's not on wages or infrastructure or anything that people can physically see?
It is correct that the Tories are clapped out (especially the current dregs), but if Wes Streeting's Tweet is anything to go by, Labour are the opposite of the solution.
The cost of the NHS lies in the fact that (in England and Wales) we have a huge Department of Health, running a huge NHS England, running huge NHS Trusts, running teams of administrators within hospitals, before you even touch a patient. What is the point? In Scotland it's a similar story. Arms-length quangos are proving a massively wasteful and inefficient way of providing a service. Let the DOH run the NHS.
Lynch says it’s press and network rail propaganda to ask questions about the draining support for strikes from RMT.. but he should listen to this from Labour MP..
Labour MP Carolyn Harris says union leaders need to "listen closer" to the people on strike, who are telling her "they can't afford" to keep up strike action.
Gravity always wins. The union can't fund these strikes indefinitely and the workers need to, you know, work to get paid. At a time of high inflation they probably need to work overtime if they are able. In the end Network Rail mat realise that the workers will accept a low ball offer because they will not be able to afford further strikes.
This is true for all of the strikers, but most especially the Royal Mail ones. Business is draining away from them and they are driving the company into bankruptcy at which point none of them have any jobs. Unions and management in this country are the worst among the world.
The bottom line is that if you treat people crappily for long enough they quit, strike or stop caring about doing their jobs to an adequate standard. Everyone loses as a result.
Let them quit. They won't because they're sitting it out until they get nice five figure voluntary redundancy pay offs, but I'd absolutely let them quit.
So fewer doctors, nurses and other care providers; fewer teachers; more train cancellations; even worse public services. I am not sure that’s a great idea. But it does encapsulate how we have got to where we are today. Unless the thinking changes, our decline will only continue.
Decline is the word. This country is broken. When you have hospitals having to provide food banks for their own nurses who can't afford to pay the bills on their salary, thats when you know the system has broken down.
People look back on the 1970s and remember a lost decade where everyone was on strike, industry went to shit and the price of everything went mental. The damage done saw Labour out of office for almost two decades. Yet the Tories - overseeing another lost decade - think there is no problem and people should vote for them again. Once out of office it will be a while before they return.
It does feel rather like the 1970s
But Labour didn’t lose power for two decades just because of that decline, the Tories came along with a leader who had a plan, who stuck to that plan, and who saved the nation. In the eyes of many
There is no evidence Labour has a clue what to do about our decline, other than maybe manage it slightly less badly than the Tories - if we’re lucky
The solutions to the problems that we have are not ones that Labour can really implement. We need to stop being so generous in many areas and find major efficiency savings. Labour only know how to tax more (although they'd have to go some to tax more than the Tories) and spend more. No way with the unions let them do this.
Tories are too tired to do what needs to be done either. So unfortunately we will be set for 5 years of paralysed Labour government. Probably the best we can hope for is for the Tories to lose narrowly and hope that some new Tory leader comes in with a real plan and for Labour to fall apart. Think the chances of that are less than 5% though.
What we all really need right now is for some resolution to be found to Ukraine.
Tories are too tired to fix the problems they've had 12 years to fix/create (delete to tase)? It's, to use the hoary old PB cliché, a view.
The Tories created a lot of these problems via austerity but I have to ask the same question I did yesterday.
Given the amount of tax we are paying - where it is being spent - because it's not on wages or infrastructure or anything that people can physically see?
Debt interest, pensions, PFI payments seem to be the main ways that money is leaving the Exchequer without leaving much trace of its passing.
Wes Streeting's message: blandishments for the supremely gullible. Hose money at the NHS and see it hoovered up by inefficiencies and fat cat highly paid doctors and hospital managers. Bigger and bigger pay settlements and pension provisions for all NHS staff regardless of need or salary level. Inefficiency all round and decreasing productivity.
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
What hospital managers - the NHS runs with the smallest admin costs of any health service anywhere. And we probably spend too little on Admin rather than too much.
Yes, my partner is a highly-qualified NHS clinical scientist, but the amount of routine admin work she has to do is absurd. It's an obvious waste of her rather expensive time. She doesn't like doing it and she's not particularly good at it. It seems ridiculous that they aren't able to employ managers to do this work.
What the NHS needs is some modern analysis, followed by a systematic investment in removing the bottlenecks in “workflows” of providing treatment.
All standard stuff in intelligently run organisations. Means breaking some rice bowls, but hey….
Serious Q on that.
How does it work when a failing trust is "sorted out"? Do they address things like consultants wasting time on admin?
My local district hospital was in special measures from about 2013, came out of them in approx 2016, and is now the only hospital in the East Midlands with an Outstanding CQC rating.
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
I imagine that working folk would be more inclined to accepted wages rises below inflation if non-working folk like pensioners had also received income rises below inflation.
Most pensioners aren't particularly well-off. I agree that the wealthier ones shouldn't be receiving things like a winter fuel payment they don't need.
Agree. The state pension is particularly low, hence I am in favour of the triple lock until it gets to an acceptable level for those who have no other income. For those for whom it is not really needed it maybe should be taxed more appropriately, although I'm not sure how.
I certainly don't need the winter fuel allowance, but to some it is critical. The £10 Christmas bonus (worth £100 in today's money when first given) is a joke. Get rid of it.
Very simple rule. If you are a pensioner and paying high rate tax then you don't need freebies (i.e. winter fuel allowance, free bus pass etc.).
Yes. The threshold for high rate tax paying pensioners should be reduced to cover the cost of the "freebies".
That's a smart idea, it would still allow the benefits to be universally applied (which makes them cheaper to administer and gets round the problem that many very poor pensioners wouldn't claim them if they were not universal), whilst recouping the cost from wealthier pensioners, with no extra admin cost. A really good suggestion.
If a bankruptcy restriction order is made against an MP they are automatically disqualified and there's a by-election.
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot 7m NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
If there is a by-election, and the Tories lose, there will not be enough stepmoms in all the world to service the favourite metaphor of @TSE to describe how much trouble they're in. That's a seat they've held continuously since 1874.
Although the seat didn't exist from 1974 to 1992, but I doubt that would have made any difference.
It was AIUI in effect the same seat with a different name, until it was divided in 1997.
Out of interest, do you know what's the longest continually held seat by any party?
If a bankruptcy restriction order is made against an MP they are automatically disqualified and there's a by-election.
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot 7m NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
If there is a by-election, and the Tories lose, there will not be enough stepmoms in all the world to service the favourite metaphor of @TSE to describe how much trouble they're in. That's a seat they've held continuously since 1874.
Although the seat didn't exist from 1974 to 1992, but I doubt that would have made any difference.
An 18.7% required swing to LD would suggest this is a likely regulation loss for this parliament and stepmoms need not apply here.
My threshold that would tell us more is an LD %age majority rivalling the one the Tories now have - say a ca. 30% swing or above.
Boris suffered close to those numbers in N. Shrops, but for a supposedly blue wall friendlier PM, that wouldn't be good.
A judge has thrown out a challenge to ScotGov's definition of woman in its gender balance on boards law - Lady Haldane says 'sex' is "not limited to biological or birth sex", but can include people with a gender recognition certificate. Full judgement:
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
This
The Northern Italian health service collapse wasn’t down to stupidity or bad management - it was the consequence of no lockdown and pre-vaccine COVID doing its thing.
The same could have happened anywhere - and it isn’t did, in a few places round the works.
How many examples do you need before you realise that repeating the experiment isn’t going to change the results?
Lynch says it’s press and network rail propaganda to ask questions about the draining support for strikes from RMT.. but he should listen to this from Labour MP..
Labour MP Carolyn Harris says union leaders need to "listen closer" to the people on strike, who are telling her "they can't afford" to keep up strike action.
Gravity always wins. The union can't fund these strikes indefinitely and the workers need to, you know, work to get paid. At a time of high inflation they probably need to work overtime if they are able. In the end Network Rail mat realise that the workers will accept a low ball offer because they will not be able to afford further strikes.
This is true for all of the strikers, but most especially the Royal Mail ones. Business is draining away from them and they are driving the company into bankruptcy at which point none of them have any jobs. Unions and management in this country are the worst among the world.
The bottom line is that if you treat people crappily for long enough they quit, strike or stop caring about doing their jobs to an adequate standard. Everyone loses as a result.
Let them quit. They won't because they're sitting it out until they get nice five figure voluntary redundancy pay offs, but I'd absolutely let them quit.
So fewer doctors, nurses and other care providers; fewer teachers; more train cancellations; even worse public services. I am not sure that’s a great idea. But it does encapsulate how we have got to where we are today. Unless the thinking changes, our decline will only continue.
Decline is the word. This country is broken. When you have hospitals having to provide food banks for their own nurses who can't afford to pay the bills on their salary, thats when you know the system has broken down.
People look back on the 1970s and remember a lost decade where everyone was on strike, industry went to shit and the price of everything went mental. The damage done saw Labour out of office for almost two decades. Yet the Tories - overseeing another lost decade - think there is no problem and people should vote for them again. Once out of office it will be a while before they return.
It does feel rather like the 1970s
But Labour didn’t lose power for two decades just because of that decline, the Tories came along with a leader who had a plan, who stuck to that plan, and who saved the nation. In the eyes of many
There is no evidence Labour has a clue what to do about our decline, other than maybe manage it slightly less badly than the Tories - if we’re lucky
The solutions to the problems that we have are not ones that Labour can really implement. We need to stop being so generous in many areas and find major efficiency savings. Labour only know how to tax more (although they'd have to go some to tax more than the Tories) and spend more. No way with the unions let them do this.
Tories are too tired to do what needs to be done either. So unfortunately we will be set for 5 years of paralysed Labour government. Probably the best we can hope for is for the Tories to lose narrowly and hope that some new Tory leader comes in with a real plan and for Labour to fall apart. Think the chances of that are less than 5% though.
What we all really need right now is for some resolution to be found to Ukraine.
Tories are too tired to fix the problems they've had 12 years to fix/create (delete to tase)? It's, to use the hoary old PB cliché, a view.
The Tories created a lot of these problems via austerity but I have to ask the same question I did yesterday.
Given the amount of tax we are paying - where it is being spent - because it's not on wages or infrastructure or anything that people can physically see?
Debt interest, pensions, PFI payments seem to be the main ways that money is leaving the Exchequer without leaving much trace of its passing.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
This
The Northern Italian health service collapse wasn’t down to stupidity or bad management - it was the consequence of no lockdown and pre-vaccine COVID doing its thing.
The same could have happened anywhere - and it isn’t did, in a few places round the works.
How many examples do you need before you realise that repeating the experiment isn’t going to change the results?
The big flaw in Labour's plan is that ending non-dom status would be a substantial hit to the economy, and the effect on tax revenues would be negative. Are they seriously suggesting that a US or French banker who comes to work in the City for a couple of years should be taxed on capital gains and income in the US and France? What the hell do they think the effect of that would be? And that's without even thinking about the super-mobile super-rich.
It's a completely bonkers policy, which is why successive Labour and Conservative governments since time immemorial haven't implemented it.
Of course, it will be a popular policy, like many policies which make things worse.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
If a bankruptcy restriction order is made against an MP they are automatically disqualified and there's a by-election.
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot 7m NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
If there is a by-election, and the Tories lose, there will not be enough stepmoms in all the world to service the favourite metaphor of @TSE to describe how much trouble they're in. That's a seat they've held continuously since 1874.
Although the seat didn't exist from 1974 to 1992, but I doubt that would have made any difference.
It was AIUI in effect the same seat with a different name, until it was divided in 1997.
Out of interest, do you know what's the longest continually held seat by any party?
I believe there's a seat in Sussex the Tories have held continuously in its various guises since 1832, but I couldn't tell you which one it is.
Edit - not Sussex, and since 1835 not 1832 but it appears to be South and then East Devon.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
This
The Northern Italian health service collapse wasn’t down to stupidity or bad management - it was the consequence of no lockdown and pre-vaccine COVID doing its thing.
The same could have happened anywhere - and it isn’t did, in a few places round the works.
How many examples do you need before you realise that repeating the experiment isn’t going to change the results?
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Lynch says it’s press and network rail propaganda to ask questions about the draining support for strikes from RMT.. but he should listen to this from Labour MP..
Labour MP Carolyn Harris says union leaders need to "listen closer" to the people on strike, who are telling her "they can't afford" to keep up strike action.
Gravity always wins. The union can't fund these strikes indefinitely and the workers need to, you know, work to get paid. At a time of high inflation they probably need to work overtime if they are able. In the end Network Rail mat realise that the workers will accept a low ball offer because they will not be able to afford further strikes.
This is true for all of the strikers, but most especially the Royal Mail ones. Business is draining away from them and they are driving the company into bankruptcy at which point none of them have any jobs. Unions and management in this country are the worst among the world.
The bottom line is that if you treat people crappily for long enough they quit, strike or stop caring about doing their jobs to an adequate standard. Everyone loses as a result.
Let them quit. They won't because they're sitting it out until they get nice five figure voluntary redundancy pay offs, but I'd absolutely let them quit.
So fewer doctors, nurses and other care providers; fewer teachers; more train cancellations; even worse public services. I am not sure that’s a great idea. But it does encapsulate how we have got to where we are today. Unless the thinking changes, our decline will only continue.
Decline is the word. This country is broken. When you have hospitals having to provide food banks for their own nurses who can't afford to pay the bills on their salary, thats when you know the system has broken down.
People look back on the 1970s and remember a lost decade where everyone was on strike, industry went to shit and the price of everything went mental. The damage done saw Labour out of office for almost two decades. Yet the Tories - overseeing another lost decade - think there is no problem and people should vote for them again. Once out of office it will be a while before they return.
It does feel rather like the 1970s
But Labour didn’t lose power for two decades just because of that decline, the Tories came along with a leader who had a plan, who stuck to that plan, and who saved the nation. In the eyes of many
There is no evidence Labour has a clue what to do about our decline, other than maybe manage it slightly less badly than the Tories - if we’re lucky
The solutions to the problems that we have are not ones that Labour can really implement. We need to stop being so generous in many areas and find major efficiency savings. Labour only know how to tax more (although they'd have to go some to tax more than the Tories) and spend more. No way with the unions let them do this.
Tories are too tired to do what needs to be done either. So unfortunately we will be set for 5 years of paralysed Labour government. Probably the best we can hope for is for the Tories to lose narrowly and hope that some new Tory leader comes in with a real plan and for Labour to fall apart. Think the chances of that are less than 5% though.
What we all really need right now is for some resolution to be found to Ukraine.
Tories are too tired to fix the problems they've had 12 years to fix/create (delete to tase)? It's, to use the hoary old PB cliché, a view.
The Tories created a lot of these problems via austerity but I have to ask the same question I did yesterday.
Given the amount of tax we are paying - where it is being spent - because it's not on wages or infrastructure or anything that people can physically see?
Debt interest, pensions, PFI payments seem to be the main ways that money is leaving the Exchequer without leaving much trace of its passing.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
The breakdown in Northern Italy's healthcare system was of relatively short duration precisely because they locked down and thereby limited further enormous damage until the vaccines came to the rescue..
This really isn't complicated. The lockdowns were essential as a temporary measure against a terrible and very contagious disease, until we became able to 'live with it' (as you like to say) thanks to the vaccines.
As for the NHS, yes, it's a complete mess. That isn't because of lockdowns, quite the opposite, the lockdowns helped. It's because of underfunding, disastrous management, severe structural issues, its semi-religious status, etc etc. Covid has of course exacerbated the problem, exactly as one would expect.
The big flaw in Labour's plan is that ending non-dom status would be a substantial hit to the economy, and the effect on tax revenues would be negative. Are they seriously suggesting that a US or French banker who comes to work in the City for a couple of years should be taxed on capital gains and income in the US and France? What the hell do they think the effect of that would be? And that's without even thinking about the super-mobile super-rich.
It's a completely bonkers policy, which is why successive Labour and Conservative governments since time immemorial haven't implemented it.
Of course, it will be a popular policy, like many policies which make things worse.
That's an interesting argument Richard but you haven't provided any figures. It's all based on an assumption. Do other countries have something similar and if not why not? Even on the basis that it is for people here temporarily it's obviously open to abuse.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
This is delusional. Firstly you seem to assume that their was no-one waiting for treatment in Feb 2020 - this is wildly incorrect. Secondly you seem to imagine the NHS collapsing would be just one of those things, just some busy days and a few oldies not getting treated. That's utter rubbish. The point of NHS collapse would have been no treatment for people in the their 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's either. It could have been you.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
Highly dubious and outdated given the latest poll, from Deltapoll, gives 216 Tory seats and just 354 for Labour on the new boundaries, closer to the 2005 result than 1997 or what Truss was heading for
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
This is delusional. Firstly you seem to assume that their was no-one waiting for treatment in Feb 2020 - this is wildly incorrect. Secondly you seem to imagine the NHS collapsing would be just one of those things, just some busy days and a few oldies not getting treated. That's utter rubbish. The point of NHS collapse would have been no treatment for people in the their 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's either. It could have been you.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
I was paying attention and I supported lockdown at the time. I was wrong to do so. Sweden didn't lockdown, they called this right. We should put our hands up and acknowledge when we make mistakes and I made a terrible mistake supporting lockdown as did the country.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
The breakdown in Northern Italy's healthcare system was of relatively short duration precisely because they locked down and thereby limited further enormous damage until the vaccines came to the rescue..
This really isn't complicated. The lockdowns were essential as a temporary measure against a terrible and very contagious disease, until we became able to 'live with it' (as you like to say) thanks to the vaccines.
As for the NHS, yes, it's a complete mess. That isn't because of lockdowns, quite the opposite, the lockdowns helped. It's because of underfunding, disastrous management, severe structural issues, its semi-religious status, etc etc. Covid has of course exacerbated the problem, exactly as one would expect.
It's not difficult.
Lockdown was dismal and expensive and will have bad effects that will take the rest of my working life to wash out.
It was still the right thing to do (and a week earlier each time would have probably been better) because the alternatives would have been worse.
Sometimes, there's no good option, only bad and worse.
I think it just shows the sheer bankruptcy of ideas that the "PB Right" have is that yesterday all they wanted to talk about was Brexit, and today it is lockdowns. What's their plan for the next 5 years?
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Well it's not quite as simple as that, since wages as a percentage of either the economy, or individual business expenses is not forever fixed. And also groups with greater bargaining power will tend to benefit at the expense of those who lack it.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
This is delusional. Firstly you seem to assume that their was no-one waiting for treatment in Feb 2020 - this is wildly incorrect. Secondly you seem to imagine the NHS collapsing would be just one of those things, just some busy days and a few oldies not getting treated. That's utter rubbish. The point of NHS collapse would have been no treatment for people in the their 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's either. It could have been you.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
I was paying attention and I supported lockdown at the time. I was wrong to do so. Sweden didn't lockdown, they called this right. We should put our hands up and acknowledge when we make mistakes and I made a terrible mistake supporting lockdown as did the country.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
To answer a question you didn't, in March 2020 there were 4.6 million people on the waiting list. So its totally wrong to suggest that the lockdown has led to an extra 7 million on the lists. At worst its 3.4 million - many of whom may be down to covid itself.
It is utter crap and completely outdated and based on a 20% Labour lead when the latest poll gives just a 13% Labour lead
Whilst that would be one hell of an enjoyable evening, and not far off what the Tories deserve, there is no way they will finish on anything like 60 odd seats, ludicrous
Almost comical to see Sunak twisting himself in knots trying to claim that "illegal" asylum seekers had legal routes to get here. For so many countries there is no legal way to claim asylum here at all.
Tories want to fix the asylum problems yet can't do so as living on denial about basic facts. What's more I think the client vote of "sink the scroungers" people is largely a figment of their deranged imaginations.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
The breakdown in Northern Italy's healthcare system was of relatively short duration precisely because they locked down and thereby limited further enormous damage until the vaccines came to the rescue..
This really isn't complicated. The lockdowns were essential as a temporary measure against a terrible and very contagious disease, until we became able to 'live with it' (as you like to say) thanks to the vaccines.
As for the NHS, yes, it's a complete mess. That isn't because of lockdowns, quite the opposite, the lockdowns helped. It's because of underfunding, disastrous management, severe structural issues, its semi-religious status, etc etc. Covid has of course exacerbated the problem, exactly as one would expect.
It's not difficult.
Lockdown was dismal and expensive and will have bad effects that will take the rest of my working life to wash out.
It was still the right thing to do (and a week earlier each time would have probably been better) because the alternatives would have been worse.
Sometimes, there's no good option, only bad and worse.
People love to say the alternatives would be worse, but without saying why exactly they would have been.
Would people have died? Yes, but that's not worse, people die.
Would people have been turned away? Yes, but that's not worse, it already happens. And it happens for Covid.
I have a relative who works in a care home and who at the height of the pandemic while Covid was in the home and people were dying had a paramedic come to the home. They were advised to make the residents comfortable, none of them would be taken to the hospital.
They almost all died, a few recovered but not many. That wasn't North Italy, that was England, and it happened.
Would it have happened more if we hadn't locked down? Yes. More people would have got sick, been unable to get treatment, and died. But it happens, it happened, its not unthinkable - the NHS has a capacity and if its exceeded people get turned away. Whether they be Covid patients being told they will die in their own bed as the hospital is full, or seven million people on the waiting list, or anything else.
We threw it all away because its always easier to make tomorrow's problems worse than live up to today being a bit more difficult. Shutting down the economy, healthy work, civil liberties and education causing harm to millions and harm for years to come in order to prevent people from dying today is neither an improvement nor necessary, it was the relatively easy but wrong choice.
I was paying attention and I supported lockdown at the time. I was wrong to do so. Sweden didn't lockdown, they called this right. We should put our hands up and acknowledge when we make mistakes and I made a terrible mistake supporting lockdown as did the country.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
To answer a question you didn't, in March 2020 there were 4.6 million people on the waiting list. So its totally wrong to suggest that the lockdown has led to an extra 7 million on the lists. At worst its 3.4 million - many of whom may be down to covid itself.
I didn't suggest they were all turned away due to lockdown, I said we live with people being turned away by the NHS. Its always happened and always will.
We should have been more willing to turn Covid positive patients away to die at home, rather than throw away all of society and add millions to the waiting lists to prevent some Covid deaths.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
The breakdown in Northern Italy's healthcare system was of relatively short duration precisely because they locked down and thereby limited further enormous damage until the vaccines came to the rescue..
This really isn't complicated. The lockdowns were essential as a temporary measure against a terrible and very contagious disease, until we became able to 'live with it' (as you like to say) thanks to the vaccines.
As for the NHS, yes, it's a complete mess. That isn't because of lockdowns, quite the opposite, the lockdowns helped. It's because of underfunding, disastrous management, severe structural issues, its semi-religious status, etc etc. Covid has of course exacerbated the problem, exactly as one would expect.
Indeed.
Paul Mainwood is using Cat 2 ambulance times as a proxy for health system stress (it's flawed, but pretty good, as the ambulance delays are primarily caused by bed saturation), and when the lockdowns are overlain on it, it doesn't look like lockdowns have caused the issues:
This is going to further impact China's tech sector, since most of the world's advanced chip manufacturing equipment is produced by those three countries..
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
This
The Northern Italian health service collapse wasn’t down to stupidity or bad management - it was the consequence of no lockdown and pre-vaccine COVID doing its thing.
The same could have happened anywhere - and it isn’t did, in a few places round the works.
How many examples do you need before you realise that repeating the experiment isn’t going to change the results?
The "And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending?" statement is utter hyperbollocks, as I think we all know.
According to the stats, people waiting more than 2 years were reduced essentially to zero by this summer - except for a few especially complex cases or those who chose to delay. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2022-11-09.83737.h
And the target for reducing those waiting for than 18 months to essentially nothing is April 2023.
I'd say they are making a lot of progress. One stat that did surprise me was the rapid increase in NHS staff, with Drs increasing the most.
The main remaining impact of Covid on services seems to be lower productivity perhaps due to extra precautions necessary.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
I mentioned the deaths that would indeed have been stratospheric: had we needed to try to hospitalise 3 million or so people simultaneously and then decided not to hospitalise them, then yes, deaths would have gone sky high.
And then the bulk of the post was on how that wouldn't have protected the healthcare system, anyway.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
Sweden's entire outcome is difficult to compare to us, anymore than we can be compared to, say, India. It's useful for people who don't actually care what would or would not have been better, because they can just pretend everything was normal in Sweden and no bad things happened, but it's not really useful in working out what was or was not better. And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Almost comical to see Sunak twisting himself in knots trying to claim that "illegal" asylum seekers had legal routes to get here. For so many countries there is no legal way to claim asylum here at all.
Tories want to fix the asylum problems yet can't do so as living on denial about basic facts. What's more I think the client vote of "sink the scroungers" people is largely a figment of their deranged imaginations.
This is where I struggle with the Tory establishments view on asylum and migration.
For some reason they are incapable of verbalising and legislating to match their views. If they believe asylum should only automatically be available into neighbouring countries with some additional capacity on an invitational basis, just say so. Don't gaslight with bullshit or blame the asylum seekers and migrants or indeed the French.
Legislatively it means leaving some international treaties where we have committed to the opposite. Again if that is what they want, just do it. Don't blame judges, lawyers, lefties or asylum seekers and migrants for reacting to laws that you have chosen to keep.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
The breakdown in Northern Italy's healthcare system was of relatively short duration precisely because they locked down and thereby limited further enormous damage until the vaccines came to the rescue..
This really isn't complicated. The lockdowns were essential as a temporary measure against a terrible and very contagious disease, until we became able to 'live with it' (as you like to say) thanks to the vaccines.
As for the NHS, yes, it's a complete mess. That isn't because of lockdowns, quite the opposite, the lockdowns helped. It's because of underfunding, disastrous management, severe structural issues, its semi-religious status, etc etc. Covid has of course exacerbated the problem, exactly as one would expect.
It's not difficult.
Lockdown was dismal and expensive and will have bad effects that will take the rest of my working life to wash out.
It was still the right thing to do (and a week earlier each time would have probably been better) because the alternatives would have been worse.
Sometimes, there's no good option, only bad and worse.
We don't know if the alternatives would have been worse because no cost/benefit analysis was ever done.
But I doubt they would have been worse than the reality of the population having been conditioned to expect lockdown and nannying as the first option, not something to be avoided at all costs.
1./ THEY LIED. Shona Robison, Patrick Harvie and Nicola Sturgeon -and the MSPs who pushed the Gender Recognition Reform Bill- said it would not undermine the Equality Act. Today’s judgment has made it clear it destroys protections for women in the Act. We’ve all been lied to.…
2./ The Judgment states: “For all of the foregoing reasons, I conclude that in this context, which is the meaning of sex for the purposes of the 2010 Act, “sex” is not limited to biological or birth sex…
3./ “….but includes those in possession of a GRC obtained in accordance with the 2004 Act stating their acquired gender, and thus their sex." The erasure of the meaning and significance of “sex” has long been the primary goal of the trans lobby. Our politicians do their bidding.
Would it have happened more if we hadn't locked down? Yes. More people would have got sick, been unable to get treatment, and died. But it happens, it happened, its not unthinkable - the NHS has a capacity and if its exceeded people get turned away. Whether they be Covid patients being told they will die in their own bed as the hospital is full, or seven million people on the waiting list, or anything else.
We threw it all away because its always easier to make tomorrow's problems worse than live up to today being a bit more difficult. Shutting down the economy, healthy work, civil liberties and education causing harm to millions and harm for years to come in order to prevent people from dying today is neither an improvement nor necessary, it was the relatively easy but wrong choice.
You are eliding (a) people dying prematurely (b) people being on a waiting list and (c) people suffering inconvenience in everyday lives. That's just silly. I'm on a waiting list to have a toe seen to, and it's taking 3 months. That's a nuisance, an if it turns out to be 4 or 6 months it'll be a bigger nuisance. It is, however, not remotely comparable to dropping dead 10-20 years before I might otherwise do so.
The underlying assumption in your many posts seems to be that having your personal freedom temporarily restricted is so awful that it is worth any number of people dying prematurely to avoid it - after all, you point out, people do die anyway. You're of course entitled to your opinion, but I doubt if it's widely-shared - and governments, on the whole, try to do what most people want.
Almost comical to see Sunak twisting himself in knots trying to claim that "illegal" asylum seekers had legal routes to get here. For so many countries there is no legal way to claim asylum here at all.
Tories want to fix the asylum problems yet can't do so as living on denial about basic facts. What's more I think the client vote of "sink the scroungers" people is largely a figment of their deranged imaginations.
This is where I struggle with the Tory establishments view on asylum and migration.
For some reason they are incapable of verbalising and legislating to match their views. If they believe asylum should only automatically be available into neighbouring countries with some additional capacity on an invitational basis, just say so. Don't gaslight with bullshit or blame the asylum seekers and migrants or indeed the French.
Legislatively it means leaving some international treaties where we have committed to the opposite. Again if that is what they want, just do it. Don't blame judges, lawyers, lefties or asylum seekers and migrants for reacting to laws that you have chosen to keep.
They assume that (a) their target voters are either too stupid to understand reality or don't care what reality is, and that (b) blame Johnny Foreigner is good for them electorally.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
This is delusional. Firstly you seem to assume that their was no-one waiting for treatment in Feb 2020 - this is wildly incorrect. Secondly you seem to imagine the NHS collapsing would be just one of those things, just some busy days and a few oldies not getting treated. That's utter rubbish. The point of NHS collapse would have been no treatment for people in the their 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's either. It could have been you.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
I was paying attention and I supported lockdown at the time. I was wrong to do so. Sweden didn't lockdown, they called this right. We should put our hands up and acknowledge when we make mistakes and I made a terrible mistake supporting lockdown as did the country.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
To answer a question you didn't, in March 2020 there were 4.6 million people on the waiting list. So its totally wrong to suggest that the lockdown has led to an extra 7 million on the lists. At worst its 3.4 million - many of whom may be down to covid itself.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
This
The Northern Italian health service collapse wasn’t down to stupidity or bad management - it was the consequence of no lockdown and pre-vaccine COVID doing its thing.
The same could have happened anywhere - and it isn’t did, in a few places round the works.
How many examples do you need before you realise that repeating the experiment isn’t going to change the results?
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
No it hasn't.
From the link I posted in my other comment, NHS hospital treatments per day currently run at ~96% of pre-Covid levels, compared to a fall at peak Covid of 85% in admitted cases, and 50% in non-admitted cases.
That sounds within a gnat's crochet of a complete recovery. Treatment activity
Prior to the pandemic there were typically an average of 45,000 hospital treatments from the waiting list each calendar day, including an average of 10,000 admitted treatments and 35,000 non-admitted treatments.
Activity fell substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic as NHS resources were diverted towards treating COVID-19. In April 2020, treatments involving admission to hospital (‘admitted’) were 85% lower than the previous year and treatments not involving admission (‘non-admitted’) were down 50%.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Almost comical to see Sunak twisting himself in knots trying to claim that "illegal" asylum seekers had legal routes to get here. For so many countries there is no legal way to claim asylum here at all.
Tories want to fix the asylum problems yet can't do so as living on denial about basic facts. What's more I think the client vote of "sink the scroungers" people is largely a figment of their deranged imaginations.
This is where I struggle with the Tory establishments view on asylum and migration.
For some reason they are incapable of verbalising and legislating to match their views. If they believe asylum should only automatically be available into neighbouring countries with some additional capacity on an invitational basis, just say so. Don't gaslight with bullshit or blame the asylum seekers and migrants or indeed the French.
Legislatively it means leaving some international treaties where we have committed to the opposite. Again if that is what they want, just do it. Don't blame judges, lawyers, lefties or asylum seekers and migrants for reacting to laws that you have chosen to keep.
They assume that (a) their target voters are either too stupid to understand reality or don't care what reality is, and that (b) blame Johnny Foreigner is good for them electorally.
What would a good policy - humane, lawful with regard to treaties and acceptable to voters in the long term - look like. Does any electable party offer one?
Would it have happened more if we hadn't locked down? Yes. More people would have got sick, been unable to get treatment, and died. But it happens, it happened, its not unthinkable - the NHS has a capacity and if its exceeded people get turned away. Whether they be Covid patients being told they will die in their own bed as the hospital is full, or seven million people on the waiting list, or anything else.
We threw it all away because its always easier to make tomorrow's problems worse than live up to today being a bit more difficult. Shutting down the economy, healthy work, civil liberties and education causing harm to millions and harm for years to come in order to prevent people from dying today is neither an improvement nor necessary, it was the relatively easy but wrong choice.
You are eliding (a) people dying prematurely (b) people being on a waiting list and (c) people suffering inconvenience in everyday lives. That's just silly. I'm on a waiting list to have a toe seen to, and it's taking 3 months. That's a nuisance, an if it turns out to be 4 or 6 months it'll be a bigger nuisance. It is, however, not remotely comparable to dropping dead 10-20 years before I might otherwise do so.
The underlying assumption in your many posts seems to be that having your personal freedom temporarily restricted is so awful that it is worth any number of people dying prematurely to avoid it - after all, you point out, people do die anyway. You're of course entitled to your opinion, but I doubt if it's widely-shared - and governments, on the whole, try to do what most people want.
For me one of the most disappointing elements of the pandemic was the public's constant urging for stricter, harsher lockdowns. Didn't we see that at one point was it 13% of those asked didn't want nightclubs to ever open again.
I don't believe the amount of deaths (what was the final breakdown by age?) justified the restriction on liberties that you so casually dismiss.
Almost comical to see Sunak twisting himself in knots trying to claim that "illegal" asylum seekers had legal routes to get here. For so many countries there is no legal way to claim asylum here at all.
Tories want to fix the asylum problems yet can't do so as living on denial about basic facts. What's more I think the client vote of "sink the scroungers" people is largely a figment of their deranged imaginations.
This is where I struggle with the Tory establishments view on asylum and migration.
For some reason they are incapable of verbalising and legislating to match their views. If they believe asylum should only automatically be available into neighbouring countries with some additional capacity on an invitational basis, just say so. Don't gaslight with bullshit or blame the asylum seekers and migrants or indeed the French.
Legislatively it means leaving some international treaties where we have committed to the opposite. Again if that is what they want, just do it. Don't blame judges, lawyers, lefties or asylum seekers and migrants for reacting to laws that you have chosen to keep.
They assume that (a) their target voters are either too stupid to understand reality or don't care what reality is, and that (b) blame Johnny Foreigner is good for them electorally.
It's because they are still beholden to the Blairite consensus (which is not incompatible with the above points).
On topic, not particularly impressed. Lab have had 12 years to come up with something and all they have is a bunch of platitudes and reheated Blairism. I don't see any evidence of a party that's willing to grapple with tough choices.
It now seems almost inconceivable that the UK government will not act to strike the bill down as being an unlawful interference with reserved legislation, as it was already threatening to do before Lady Haldane’s ruling set its contradictions in stone.
Perhaps that is exactly what the First Minister wanted all along – she gets to burnish her woke credentials AND generate a grievance against the UK government, while also getting neatly off the hook of having to deal with the trainwreck of appalling consequences the reforms would create. It would certainly be wholly consistent for someone whose rule has been all grandstanding and zero substance, as anyone still waiting for a new ferry or a publicly-owned energy company will be aware.
If not, it’s Scotland’s women – the actual ones – who will pay the price.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Or democracy as we call it.
The first lockdown trained people that it wasn't that serious unless there was lockdown, so of course they didn't bother with voluntary measures.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
The breakdown in Northern Italy's healthcare system was of relatively short duration precisely because they locked down and thereby limited further enormous damage until the vaccines came to the rescue..
This really isn't complicated. The lockdowns were essential as a temporary measure against a terrible and very contagious disease, until we became able to 'live with it' (as you like to say) thanks to the vaccines.
As for the NHS, yes, it's a complete mess. That isn't because of lockdowns, quite the opposite, the lockdowns helped. It's because of underfunding, disastrous management, severe structural issues, its semi-religious status, etc etc. Covid has of course exacerbated the problem, exactly as one would expect.
It's not difficult.
Lockdown was dismal and expensive and will have bad effects that will take the rest of my working life to wash out.
It was still the right thing to do (and a week earlier each time would have probably been better) because the alternatives would have been worse.
Sometimes, there's no good option, only bad and worse.
We don't know if the alternatives would have been worse because no cost/benefit analysis was ever done.
But I doubt they would have been worse than the reality of the population having been conditioned to expect lockdown and nannying as the first option, not something to be avoided at all costs.
A very simple search that will miss a great deal. FWIW, most of the first few agree with you, but - like many cost benefit analyses - they're so simplistic as to be likely nonsense (finger in the air, guess a figure - I won't list objections to the assumptions here, but they're very narrow).
This will be analysed, over time, by doing controlled comparisons between countries/regions etc. Still, different assumptions will be made and papers will disagree, but it is likely that some kind of consensus will emerge over the effects and the optimum approach.
However, there will never be a simple answer as it does depend on personal values. How much do you value a life? How much cost do you put on the loss of liberties during lockdowns? We have different answers to those questions, so we'll never all agree on what was the best thing to do. We will, however, probably get some consensus on the economic impacts of different levels of lockdown - and even health system peformance -over the next ten years or so.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Or democracy as we call it.
The first lockdown trained people that it wasn't that serious unless there was lockdown, so of course they didn't bother with voluntary measures.
It really was instructive. The state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
Almost comical to see Sunak twisting himself in knots trying to claim that "illegal" asylum seekers had legal routes to get here. For so many countries there is no legal way to claim asylum here at all.
Tories want to fix the asylum problems yet can't do so as living on denial about basic facts. What's more I think the client vote of "sink the scroungers" people is largely a figment of their deranged imaginations.
This is where I struggle with the Tory establishments view on asylum and migration.
For some reason they are incapable of verbalising and legislating to match their views. If they believe asylum should only automatically be available into neighbouring countries with some additional capacity on an invitational basis, just say so. Don't gaslight with bullshit or blame the asylum seekers and migrants or indeed the French.
Legislatively it means leaving some international treaties where we have committed to the opposite. Again if that is what they want, just do it. Don't blame judges, lawyers, lefties or asylum seekers and migrants for reacting to laws that you have chosen to keep.
Why not - because it's hypocritical, self-contradictory, irrational, wrong? This is the mass propaganda era. If gaslighting with bullshit works, they'll do it. You are telling the Tory party not to tell voters, including possible swing voters, what they want to hear. This is bit like saying Apple misadvertise their phones, because their phones aren't good at all - they're a bunch of crap. Your final paragraph does a great job debate-wise but neither Labour nor the LibDems can say that kind of thing.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
This is delusional. Firstly you seem to assume that their was no-one waiting for treatment in Feb 2020 - this is wildly incorrect. Secondly you seem to imagine the NHS collapsing would be just one of those things, just some busy days and a few oldies not getting treated. That's utter rubbish. The point of NHS collapse would have been no treatment for people in the their 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's either. It could have been you.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
I was paying attention and I supported lockdown at the time. I was wrong to do so. Sweden didn't lockdown, they called this right. We should put our hands up and acknowledge when we make mistakes and I made a terrible mistake supporting lockdown as did the country.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
To answer a question you didn't, in March 2020 there were 4.6 million people on the waiting list. So its totally wrong to suggest that the lockdown has led to an extra 7 million on the lists. At worst its 3.4 million - many of whom may be down to covid itself.
"At worst it's 3.4million"
Listen to yourself.
1- I make that 2.4 million ! 1/3 of the problem solved.
2 - I think the issue is around backfilling lost work over time. Looking at the time profile of "treatments delivered" it looks like we lost something like 6-8 months of NHS work, and a lot of it is still crawling out of the woodwork (increased referrals etc).
However you slice it, that is not going to be recovered in a few months as productivity cannot double with a snap of the fingers.
There's a recovery plan, and a need to find ways to boost productivity - which is underway. There are things happening around questions like different management for admitted / non-admitted, around Covid risks.
One of the things I think may also be of benefit is increased outsourcing of diagnostics, as more than a million on the waiting list are in that category.
I think this is a good old ideological context missing hammer-and-tongs around the NHS (just like old times). But we need context eg whether the Italian service has recovered.
Tories definitely up off the floor now. They've gone from extinction to merely crap and it wil hopefully give us a good base to build from in opposition. Ideally all of the old selfish bastards leave the party and we can remake it for people who work hard and want to get on in life not just old graspers intent on bankrupting the nation so they can go on another cruise.
Comments
Given the amount of tax we are paying - where it is being spent - because it's not on wages or infrastructure or anything that people can physically see?
Sadly the gullible public will not want to hear this about the Holy Cow NHS
As for Wes Streeting . He is a lightweight and the vested interests will make short work of him if he ever ends up as Sec of State for Health
Yes - very fair point. There's been a lot of lurid commentary about essentials prices shooting up by far more than that, but 15-20% feels about right for what has happened over 12-18 months I'd say. I shop at Aldi for the bulk of things, which is in some measure "basics" by definition, and a lot of things there are up by 20% more or less (within a wider range of small rises to 35%) afaics, or package sizes have changed. And that is supported by the published numbers.
Food inflation numbers:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/food-inflation#:~:text=Food Inflation in the United,percent in February of 2015.
I think one thing the Govt need politically is mortgage rates back down before the bulk of fixes run out - not sure that they will get it. Kept BoJo for a year too long.
You seem to be at “Soldiering” - the we-pretend-to-work-because-management-pretend-to-manage idea - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
(notwithstanding some S&G classics, none of their albums, for me, match up to Graceland)
https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/supermarket-budget-and-own-brand-food-worst-impacted-by-inflation-a4a3j1y4lbi1
The question (as Max fairly asks) is how much they will go down again (ie deflation of prices). But given how much farmers etc are being screwed even at the high prices the long term viability remains open to question.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
They can go for stuff like unwinding or essentially nationalising remaining PFI contracts, which are significantly large in the 10s of billions, make it better at charging chargeable treatments rather than let them drift, hope for transfers as Covid continues to wind down and so on. But there's not, as far I know, much squeak room.
All standard stuff in intelligently run organisations. Means breaking some rice bowls, but hey….
- More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects)
- More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies)
- Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened
- Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Which boils down to at some level or other petty jealousy...
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Nationalisation without compensation is a) open to a variety of legal challenges and b) if the government unilaterally reneges on a contract then they’ll find the future cost of contracts goes up somewhat. A lot, in fact. It’s essentially a voluntary default…..
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot
7m
NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1602635070069678080?s=20&t=sxkMm0cggzoo4_Q1rEER1g
Unless the BBC change the rules from the last 4 way final in 2020 backing Fleur as top female is a proxy bet for Hamza winning.
Best price for Hamza is 8/15. Backing Fleur top female even at 6/1 would return £70 for a £30 bet (full odds to 3rd of stake for a 3 way tie). So better than evens.
DYOR though as a format change with a defined 2nd, 3rd, 4th would torpedo this.
The plan is of course nonsense in the world of reality. If the problem is money then an addition of 2% of funding won't solve it. Labour will have no intention of disclosing how much the NHS would actually need to run properly because it is not a discussable subject.
There is an occasional but persistent thread running through comments on PB, by people who know much more than I do, that money is not in fact the real problem in the NHS, but that it is a matter of culture, organisation, motivation, attrition and competence.
Talking money (especially the money of rich Johnny Foreigner) is easy. Culture and competence is hard.
What is Labour's 30 second plan? I'd like to know because I intend to vote for them in the next GE, for the first time in 50 years.
Not necessarily that people in the NHS don't want the help or see the need to change. But when you're running on empty year after year it's hard to get your head out of the firefighting mode long enough to do anything about it.
Now, I must do some work, or be less productive!
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
For the classic example of what can be done - car industry in the U.K. in the late eighties. As Leyland (and successors) staggered to its doom, other factories in the car industry were free from strikes, ever more productive, building better and better cars….
The workers and management were often hired from legacy car production - but given a non-stupid organisation they worked together.
The cost of the NHS lies in the fact that (in England and Wales) we have a huge Department of Health, running a huge NHS England, running huge NHS Trusts, running teams of administrators within hospitals, before you even touch a patient. What is the point? In Scotland it's a similar story. Arms-length quangos are proving a massively wasteful and inefficient way of providing a service. Let the DOH run the NHS.
How does it work when a failing trust is "sorted out"? Do they address things like consultants wasting time on admin?
My local district hospital was in special measures from about 2013, came out of them in approx 2016, and is now the only hospital in the East Midlands with an Outstanding CQC rating.
My threshold that would tell us more is an LD %age majority rivalling the one the Tories now have - say a ca. 30% swing or above.
Boris suffered close to those numbers in N. Shrops, but for a supposedly blue wall friendlier PM, that wouldn't be good.
A judge has thrown out a challenge to ScotGov's definition of woman in its gender balance on boards law - Lady Haldane says 'sex' is "not limited to biological or birth sex", but can include people with a gender recognition certificate. Full judgement:
https://twitter.com/BBCPhilipSim/status/1602643697975414784
The Northern Italian health service collapse wasn’t down to stupidity or bad management - it was the consequence of no lockdown and pre-vaccine COVID doing its thing.
The same could have happened anywhere - and it isn’t did, in a few places round the works.
How many examples do you need before you realise that repeating the experiment isn’t going to change the results?
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/government-spending
It's a completely bonkers policy, which is why successive Labour and Conservative governments since time immemorial haven't implemented it.
Of course, it will be a popular policy, like many policies which make things worse.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
Edit - not Sussex, and since 1835 not 1832 but it appears to be South and then East Devon.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Where is the North's Elizabeth Line? Get tunnelling!!
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
This really isn't complicated. The lockdowns were essential as a temporary measure against a terrible and very contagious disease, until we became able to 'live with it' (as you like to say) thanks to the vaccines.
As for the NHS, yes, it's a complete mess. That isn't because of lockdowns, quite the opposite, the lockdowns helped. It's because of underfunding, disastrous management, severe structural issues, its semi-religious status, etc etc. Covid has of course exacerbated the problem, exactly as one would expect.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=32&LAB=45&LIB=8&Reform=2&Green=3&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=14.3&SCOTLAB=30.7&SCOTLIB=6.7&SCOTReform=0.6&SCOTGreen=1.7&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=43.7&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019nbbase
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#Graphical_summary
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
Lockdown was dismal and expensive and will have bad effects that will take the rest of my working life to wash out.
It was still the right thing to do (and a week earlier each time would have probably been better) because the alternatives would have been worse.
Sometimes, there's no good option, only bad and worse.
A rogue poll is one you disagree with.
And also groups with greater bargaining power will tend to benefit at the expense of those who lack it.
But I agree entirely with the general point.
Tories want to fix the asylum problems yet can't do so as living on denial about basic facts. What's more I think the client vote of "sink the scroungers" people is largely a figment of their deranged imaginations.
Would people have died? Yes, but that's not worse, people die.
Would people have been turned away? Yes, but that's not worse, it already happens. And it happens for Covid.
I have a relative who works in a care home and who at the height of the pandemic while Covid was in the home and people were dying had a paramedic come to the home. They were advised to make the residents comfortable, none of them would be taken to the hospital.
They almost all died, a few recovered but not many. That wasn't North Italy, that was England, and it happened.
Would it have happened more if we hadn't locked down? Yes. More people would have got sick, been unable to get treatment, and died. But it happens, it happened, its not unthinkable - the NHS has a capacity and if its exceeded people get turned away. Whether they be Covid patients being told they will die in their own bed as the hospital is full, or seven million people on the waiting list, or anything else.
We threw it all away because its always easier to make tomorrow's problems worse than live up to today being a bit more difficult. Shutting down the economy, healthy work, civil liberties and education causing harm to millions and harm for years to come in order to prevent people from dying today is neither an improvement nor necessary, it was the relatively easy but wrong choice. I didn't suggest they were all turned away due to lockdown, I said we live with people being turned away by the NHS. Its always happened and always will.
We should have been more willing to turn Covid positive patients away to die at home, rather than throw away all of society and add millions to the waiting lists to prevent some Covid deaths.
Paul Mainwood is using Cat 2 ambulance times as a proxy for health system stress (it's flawed, but pretty good, as the ambulance delays are primarily caused by bed saturation), and when the lockdowns are overlain on it, it doesn't look like lockdowns have caused the issues:
Japan to Join US Effort to Tighten Chip Exports to China
Japan, the Netherlands sought to act in concert on new rules
Curbs will affect chipmaking gear firms ASML, Tokyo Electron
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-12/japan-is-said-to-join-us-effort-to-tighten-chip-exports-to-china
The last number I can find for people waiting more than 3 years was in the Daily Mail in April this year, and was around 50 individuals, rather than all of them.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10715163/60-patients-England-waiting-three-years-surgery.html
According to the stats, people waiting more than 2 years were reduced essentially to zero by this summer - except for a few especially complex cases or those who chose to delay.
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2022-11-09.83737.h
And the target for reducing those waiting for than 18 months to essentially nothing is April 2023.
I'd say they are making a lot of progress. One stat that did surprise me was the rapid increase in NHS staff, with Drs increasing the most.
The main remaining impact of Covid on services seems to be lower productivity perhaps due to extra precautions necessary.
Latest Stats for Nov 2022:
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7281/CBP-7281.pdf
And then the bulk of the post was on how that wouldn't have protected the healthcare system, anyway.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
Sweden's entire outcome is difficult to compare to us, anymore than we can be compared to, say, India. It's useful for people who don't actually care what would or would not have been better, because they can just pretend everything was normal in Sweden and no bad things happened, but it's not really useful in working out what was or was not better. And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
For some reason they are incapable of verbalising and legislating to match their views. If they believe asylum should only automatically be available into neighbouring countries with some additional capacity on an invitational basis, just say so. Don't gaslight with bullshit or blame the asylum seekers and migrants or indeed the French.
Legislatively it means leaving some international treaties where we have committed to the opposite. Again if that is what they want, just do it. Don't blame judges, lawyers, lefties or asylum seekers and migrants for reacting to laws that you have chosen to keep.
But I doubt they would have been worse than the reality of the population having been conditioned to expect lockdown and nannying as the first option, not something to be avoided at all costs.
2./ The Judgment states: “For all of the foregoing reasons, I conclude that in this context, which is the meaning of sex for the purposes of the 2010 Act, “sex” is not limited to biological or birth sex…
3./ “….but includes those in possession of a GRC obtained in accordance with the 2004 Act stating their acquired gender, and thus their sex." The erasure of the meaning and significance of “sex” has long been the primary goal of the trans lobby. Our politicians do their bidding.
https://twitter.com/TwisterFilm/status/1602657738466656256
The underlying assumption in your many posts seems to be that having your personal freedom temporarily restricted is so awful that it is worth any number of people dying prematurely to avoid it - after all, you point out, people do die anyway. You're of course entitled to your opinion, but I doubt if it's widely-shared - and governments, on the whole, try to do what most people want.
Listen to yourself.
From the link I posted in my other comment, NHS hospital treatments per day currently run at ~96% of pre-Covid levels, compared to a fall at peak Covid of 85% in admitted cases, and 50% in non-admitted cases.
That sounds within a gnat's crochet of a complete recovery.
Treatment activity
Prior to the pandemic there were typically an average of 45,000 hospital
treatments from the waiting list each calendar day, including an average of
10,000 admitted treatments and 35,000 non-admitted treatments.
Activity fell substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic as NHS resources
were diverted towards treating COVID-19. In April 2020, treatments involving
admission to hospital (‘admitted’) were 85% lower than the previous year and
treatments not involving admission (‘non-admitted’) were down 50%.
Activity has recovered since but remains below pre-COVID levels. In
September 2022 there were 6% fewer admitted treatments (-569 per day) and
3% fewer non-admitted treatments (-1,273 per day) compared with
September 2019.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7281/CBP-7281.pdf
LAB: 45% (-3)
CON: 32% (+4)
LDEM: 8% (-2)
Delta
Edit: nevermind, already done
I don't believe the amount of deaths (what was the final breakdown by age?) justified the restriction on liberties that you so casually dismiss.
I hope your toe gets seen to soon.
Note the John Major cameo.
London’s lost mega-motorway: the eight-lane ring road that would have destroyed much of the city
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/13/londons-lost-mega-motorway-the-eight-lane-ring-road-that-would-have-destroyed-much-of-the-city
It now seems almost inconceivable that the UK government will not act to strike the bill down as being an unlawful interference with reserved legislation, as it was already threatening to do before Lady Haldane’s ruling set its contradictions in stone.
Perhaps that is exactly what the First Minister wanted all along – she gets to burnish her woke credentials AND generate a grievance against the UK government, while also getting neatly off the hook of having to deal with the trainwreck of appalling consequences the reforms would create. It would certainly be wholly consistent for someone whose rule has been all grandstanding and zero substance, as anyone still waiting for a new ferry or a publicly-owned energy company will be aware.
If not, it’s Scotland’s women – the actual ones – who will pay the price.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-land-of-make-believe/
A very simple search that will miss a great deal. FWIW, most of the first few agree with you, but - like many cost benefit analyses - they're so simplistic as to be likely nonsense (finger in the air, guess a figure - I won't list objections to the assumptions here, but they're very narrow).
This will be analysed, over time, by doing controlled comparisons between countries/regions etc. Still, different assumptions will be made and papers will disagree, but it is likely that some kind of consensus will emerge over the effects and the optimum approach.
However, there will never be a simple answer as it does depend on personal values. How much do you value a life? How much cost do you put on the loss of liberties during lockdowns? We have different answers to those questions, so we'll never all agree on what was the best thing to do. We will, however, probably get some consensus on the economic impacts of different levels of lockdown - and even health system peformance -over the next ten years or so.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
2 - I think the issue is around backfilling lost work over time. Looking at the time profile of "treatments delivered" it looks like we lost something like 6-8 months of NHS work, and a lot of it is still crawling out of the woodwork (increased referrals etc).
However you slice it, that is not going to be recovered in a few months as productivity cannot double with a snap of the fingers.
There's a recovery plan, and a need to find ways to boost productivity - which is underway. There are things happening around questions like different management for admitted / non-admitted, around Covid risks.
One of the things I think may also be of benefit is increased outsourcing of diagnostics, as more than a million on the waiting list are in that category.
I think this is a good old ideological context missing hammer-and-tongs around the NHS (just like old times). But we need context eg whether the Italian service has recovered.