David Craig, on November 25th, 2022Friday/weekend blog
Letting children destroy our country?
First I wanted to mention a (I believe) rather important news item you may not have noticed.
New Zealand’s highest court ruled on Monday this week that the country’s current voting age of 18 was ‘discriminatory’. This judgement has forced the New Zealand parliament to discuss whether the country’s voting age should be lowered. Jacinda ‘Justin Trudeau’ Ardern, of course, supports the idea as it would ensure she stays in power and can continue wrecking her country with her idiotic, ultra-woke policies such as reducing the country’s vitally important farming industry to supposedly ‘save the planet. “I personally support a decrease in the voting age but it is not a matter simply for me or even the government, any change in electoral law of this nature requires 75% of parliamentarian support,” she said.
The case, which has been going through the courts since 2020, was bought by advocacy group Make It 16, which wants the age lowered to include 16 and 17 year olds.
This judgement is not directly relevant to the UK. The New Zealand Supreme Court found that the current voting age of 18 was inconsistent with the country’s Bill of Rights, which gives people a right to be free from age discrimination when they have reached 16. As far as I understand, the UK doesn’t have a Bill of Rights which gives 16- and 17-year olds similar rights. However, readers can hopefully see what is coming.
In the 2014 Scotland independence referendum 16- and 17-year-olds were given the vote. And I have warned several times on this blog that after Labour under Starmer win a landslide election victory in 2024, Labour will find some excuse to lower the voting age in the UK. The argument given will probably be along the lines that young people will have to live with the consequences of government policies for a longer time than older people. So young people deserve the vote.
This will enfranchise millions of new voters who have been indoctrinated into believing total nonsense such as white privilege, 56 genders, a borderless world and, of course, man-made climate change. So, the vast majority of these new voters will vote Labour or LibDem and will support policies such as unlimited immigration, paying reparations to the world’s most corrupt countries for slavery and colonialism and climate damage and anything else they can think of, closing most power production to reach ‘net zero’ to ‘fight climate change’ and the freedom of anyone to change their gender as often as they like in order to be true to themselves.
But if our children are determined to destroy their own futures, I guess we should let them.
Though what I find odd is that, from what I have seen and heard, nobody in the mainstream media seems to have spotted this disaster heading our way. So, I guess you read it here first.
Management madness in our broken NHS
In my Wednesday/Thursday blog, I pointed out that while our collapsing NHS was bleating about needing more money and more staff and more hospitals and more more more of everything, it was also wasting huge amounts of our money hiring totally pointless Diversity, Inclusion and Equality managers. In particular I mentioned the Cumbria and Northumberland NHS Foundation Trust which is recruiting an Involvement and Lived Experience Diversity Officer on a salary £33,706 to £40,588 a year.
In case you were wondering what this person’s role would be, here it is: As the Involvement and Lived Experience Diversity Officer you will support colleagues and others to improve the diversity of the Peer Support workforce and the membership of the Involvement Bank of service users and carers. You will work with colleagues to reach good practice in involving and engaging people from all cultures. You will build strong relationships with diverse community groups and work with them to improve interest in involvement and working in the Trust.
I have an acquaintance who is a cancer surgeon in a hospital in a Scandinavian country. There the cancer surgeons run their own department while the hospital’s administration department supports the clinical areas by handling such tasks as budgeting, payroll, paying invoices and so on. So decision-making power lies with the people dealing with patients rather than a professional, usual non-clinical management class. In such a situation, it would be inconceivable that the cancer surgeons would decide that patient care would be improved by spending a large chunk of their budget hiring an Involvement and Lived Experience Diversity Officer or even something as ‘useful’ as a Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
But in our collapsing NHS, a new managerial class with little understanding of how hospitals work seems to have taken over. From what I remember the number of managers in NHS England has shot up from around 25,000 to around 38,000 since 1997. Meanwhile the number of hospital beds managed by these managers has decreased from around 200,000 to just 141,000. So we’ve gone from about 8 beds per manager in 1997 to only around 3.7 beds per manager now.
When we have about seven million people on hospital waiting lists, when ambulances are queuing up for hours at A&E, when people are dying while waiting for an ambulance, it seems beyond incredible that management teams at hospitals around the country are deciding that one of their urgent recruiting needs is for ‘Directors of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ or ‘Involvement and Lived Experience Diversity Officers’. Our hospital managers seem to be blissfully unaware of the massive waiting lists, the queues of ambulances at their A&E departments and the rates of excess deaths resulting mainly from people being unable to receive medical treatment. Instead, they appear to be caught up in their own world where they sit in endless meetings spouting meaningless management gobbledigook while spaffing billions of our money on rubbish that has absolutely nothing to do with patient care.
With such idiots running our NHS, any money we give to the NHS will inevitably be wasted. It cannot be otherwise.
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I think it is too young. They have no experience of life. On the other hand, if they are voting for something they expect to get and then don’t get it, which is a certainty, it might backfire on the politicians. If I made the rules for voting I would limit it to those who paid income tax.
It isn’t just the NHS that is broken, it is the country because of the political system, in particular the size of the state and its control over us. You could rewrite the last paragraph as “With such idiots running the country, any taxes we pay will inevitably be wasted, it cannot be otherwise.”
Haven’t we reached a point where we don’t have to understand anything about economics or any other aspect of government to see the failure of politicians? They repeatedly tell us they can solve the problems, but it must be obvious to everybody that they created the problems, and that applies to the lot of them, regardless of the party. We need to keep the government out of our lives and anything important like the economy.
Thinking of money-wasting in the NHS, now much longer for goodness sake is this ridiculous insistence on mask wearing as soon as one steps over the threshold of a GP Practice building going to continue? I queued last week by appointment in the car park of my local surgery for the annual ‘flu jab (not an mRNA “vaccine” but the real thing). The system was in one door, bare your arm in readiness, be jabbed, walk out the door the other end, total time on the premises 5 minutes max, almost all of it standing in a corridor. The jab was done in a side room off the corridor, where a nurse stood waiting, needle at the ready, while a clerk at computer ascertained that according to their records you were actually still alive and breathing and ticked you off the list. Those being jabbed never entered an actual GP’s consulting room. Nevertheless there was insistence that masks be worn on the premises, and since no one had one, we were all given a new one at the door, hung them over our ears while waiting, ripped them off on the way out and tossed them either in the nearest rubbish bin or – regrettably – in some instances discarded them onto the car park tarmac. What a deplorable waste. But then, I guess that these businesses operating for profit, which is what GP Practices now are, can afford to provide masks free and probably set them against Practice expenses and make a very nice profit, given that they receive a bonus payment of a tad under a tenner for every ‘flu jab administered. However, this is relatively minor I suppose when compared with the millions being splashed out on salaries for “Diversity & Inclusion Officers” and similar busy-bodies, who insist that doctors and nurses who have been in post many years and performed satisfactorily attend ridiculous courses on how to conduct themselves in clinical situations. And don’t get me on to the amount now spent on translation services. I tend more every day to think that we in the West, with our in-built Judaeo-Christian-originating sense of guilt, have reached the epitome of idiocy, that things can’t get any worse, but then they do. We are heading lemming-like, with enthusiasm, to the destruction of our own culture. To give the vote on vital national issues to children who have been indoctrinated in schools from the age of five in Critical Race Theory and who believe that by just saying so human beings can change their sex, will be finally to throw ourselves over the cliff-edge.
In the Republic of Ireland, one of the EU’s outlying colonies, it now costs the punter about 70 Euros (just over sixty quid) for a visit to a GP. Surely all those lefties who so admire the EU couldn’t possibly object to the UK copying such a shining example of European health policy in order to finance the salaries of our (mostly Third_World) Angels?
As for kiddies getting the totally worthless UK vote, it seems to me entirely appropriate that our beloved leaders should be elected by people with the same mental age that they obviously have. It won’t make the slightest difference to the policies any UK government of any party pursues, since have already been clearly outlined by the WEF, the WHO, and the UN.