David Craig, on April 19th, 2023Wednesday/Thursday blog
Why does nobody care about facts anymore?
If you watch the news, you’ll have seen some (IMHO) dreadful woman – head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), I think – who sounds to a fool like me to be a bit like a female version of the Reverend Ian Paisley – ranting and howling about how 13 years of Tory government have wrecked our beloved NHS. And it was, I believe she was claiming, all the fault of the dreadful NHS-hating Tory government that doctors and nurses and ambulance staff and Uncle Joe Cobley and everyone else employed by the NHS has seen their salaries decimated by inflation.
I agree that 13 years of useless Tories in government have been a disaster for Britain. But being a really boring person, I decided to just check whether the ‘awful’ and ‘evil’ Tories really have cut the NHS’s budget resulting in below-inflation pay rises for NHS staff. This is, of course, something our so-called ‘journalists’ never seem to do.
In fact, the NHS has received above-inflation budget increases for every one of the 13 years the Tories have been in government:
What is more than disappointing is that, whenever a whining doctor or nurse or paramedic or other NHS striker is interviewed, the mainstream media interviewer never challenges them asking how is it possible that their wages have fallen below inflation when the NHS as a whole has received above-inflation budget increases every single year.
I won’t dare comment on Laura Kuenssberg’s attempt at an interview with the RCN’s head honcho last Sunday as, if I were to use words like ignorant, grovelling, lefty, Labour-loving, Tory-loathing, biased and so on, I might expose myself to legal action for daring to have an opinion about the BBC’s supposed ‘impartiality’.
Where have our many billions gone?
That then poses the question – if the NHS has received above-inflation budget increases every year and the NHS’s major cost – staff salaries – have been below inflation for the last 13 years, where have the many extra billions we’ve poured into the seemingly insatiable maws of the NHS gone?
Here’s how the NHS uses and abuses our £150 billion according to an article from the Daily Mail:
I would disagree with at least one of the figures here. For example, the article suggests that the cost of 800 Diversity, Inclusion and Equality (DIE) managers is £40m a year meaning each one costs us about £50,000 a year. But that’s just their salary cost. When you take into account their office costs, staff costs, pension costs and the huge number of hours of frontline staff’s time they waste educating them to avoid using blatantly discriminatory and offensive words like ‘male’ and ‘female’ and ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and suchlike, I’d put the real cost of the worthless DIE brigade at well over £100m. And this week our supposedly ‘in crisis’ NHS is advertising over 20 new DIE jobs. So that’s another few million the NHS will be squandering of these utterly pointless wastes of skin.
As for NHS salaries, they really don’t look that shabby to me:
In spite of the claims of hardship and poverty and suchlike made by union leaders and striking NHS staff, getting between £36,000 and £37,000 for a nurse or paramedic doesn’t look to me like the kind of destitution that would force a person to rely on food banks.
But if NHS unions really want more money for their members, they should stop claiming that ‘the government needs to put more cash on the table’ and start looking at how our mostly incompetent 37,000+ NHS managers have blown the above-inflation budget increases they have been given each year.
Oh, and by the way, here’s the (IMHO) ‘invisible woman’ – the NHS’s boss who (it seems to an uninformed idiot like myself) to have been cowering below the parapet or even gone AWOL during all these strikes when she should have been taking a leading role in solving the pay disputes:
As for the NHS and NHS unions – don’t fall for their howling and screaming and pleading about destitution. The NHS is drowning in our money. What remains a mystery is where have all our billions gone?
Category: 
Doesn’t this relate to your previous post about activists? Isn’t Kuenssberg just a more sophisticated activist with a platform to reach millions? The BBC has just started a new series of Our Changing Planet which is continual promotion of climate alarmism. In some cases like climate alarm the government must support this because it is a main policy issue. In the case of the NHS the government is on the defensive.
This makes the title of this piece relevant because the government is behind the trend to avoid providing facts, and this is nothing new.
I admire Farage and Rees-Mogg for keeping calm during their recent interviews of activists. It seems that these activists are well trained in their craft. They have a script that they repeat and they never allow any interruption or participate in discussion of facts. Perhaps this is deliberate by GB News to show us how activists operate. But in the case of climate alarm I think that Farage and Rees-Mogg both accept that we have to reduce CO2 emissions in the long term and it the speed of change that they object to. How many people today know how to establish the facts on any issue and present the proof in an understandable way?
I think you’re correct, A Thorpe, but as far a the climate change nonsense goes, we have to play them at their own game. If you point out that it’s a load of horse poo you just get labelled a climate change denier (they do like their derogatory labels) and the discussion is over. So IMO the trick is to challenge in them on the timescales and feasibility of achieving them.
As for the NHS – the 2 main parties are only interested in outdoing each other as to how much money they can throw at the NHS. They think it’s a vote winner and are oblivious or don’t care that it’s a black hole.
Vote reform!