Snouts in the Trough

A couple of days ago, I did a blog on a useless quango called Monitor that was set up to regulate NHS trusts. It was Monitor that noticed nothing wrong at all at Mid-Staffs NHS Trust as around 1,400 patients were slaughtered.

Monitor has since been rapidly expanding its empire, its staff and its spending and now describes its role as  “Monitor’s job is to make the health sector work better for patients”.

But hold on a minute – there seem to be lots of other supposed ‘regulators’ all claiming to do pretty much the same thing.

Here’s a small example of the problem:

New Labour set up at least one new healthcare regulator each year it was in power, though 2004 was a bumper year with no fewer than three new regulators being imposed on us.

– In 2001, we got the National Patient Safety Agency – about £30 million a year and over three hundred staff – “to improve patient safety in the NHS”.

– In 2002, there was the Nursing and Midwifery Council – about £24m a year and two hundred and forty plus staff “to protect the public by ensuring that nurses and midwives provide high standards of care”. In 2002 we also were given the NHS Confederation – £26.5m a year – “to help members improve health and patient care”.

– In 2003 the Health Protection Agency began work – £250m a year and over three thousand staff. It’s role “to provide an integrated approach to protecting UK public health”. In the same year there was the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency – £80m budget and eighty staff

– In 2004 our healthcare bureaucrats hit the jackpot. In January, Monitor (see blog Who Monitors the Monitors) appeared on the scene – initially over £13m a year but now over £60m a year. There was also the Healthcare Commission – £80m a year and over five hundred staff – “the Healthcare Commission is committed to making sure that patients are at the centre of everything we do”. And not to forget the Commission for Social Care Inspection – £164m and 2,335 staff.

I could go on. There are still a few more to come. But you probably get the picture by now.

Moreover, there are also over 3,000 more penpushers at the Department of Health – “raising standards in health and care, ensuring everyone is treated with compassion and respect” – costing us almost £300m a year.

All these mostly useless, over-paid, over-pensioned bureaucrats were apparently Blair’s and Brown’s way of fulfilling the pledge given in New Labour’s 1997 election manifesto, ‘the key is to root out unnecessary administrative cost and to spend money on the right things – frontline care’.

Looking at what had actually happened, one commentator recently remarked, ‘of all the billions poured into the NHS, it is just sickening to see how much of it has been soaked up by this ever-expanding bureaucracy, particularly these quangos’.

To repeat what I have written previously – the NHS doesn’t need any more of our money. The NHS is awash with our money. But sadly, like so many areas of the useless, over-bureaucratised public sector, the NHS wastes massive amounts of our money on itself and so can’t afford to do the job we pay it to do.

President Obama is pretty cock-a-hoop over his ‘historical breakthrough agreement’ with his new bestest friend in Iran:

But while Obama celebrates, his new bestest friend is busy with his great plan – the destruction of Israel.

Peace-loving Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has published a new book called “Palestine”.  The blurb on the back cover credits Khamenei as “The flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”

Obama’s bestest friend Khamenei makes his position clear from the start: Israel has no right to exist as a state.

Mad Mullah Khamenei claims that his strategy for the destruction of Israel is not based on anti-Semitism, which he describes as a European phenomenon. His position is instead based on “well-established *sl*mic principles”. One such principle is that a land that falls under M*sl*m rule, even briefly, can never again be ceded to non-M*sl*ms.

Here is a sample of the kinds of maps being circulated throughout the M*sl*m world to indicate that Israel is merely the first tiny step in reclaiming all formerly M*sl*m land:

So, if you’ve got a holiday home in Spain, I suggest you start reading up on the Qu’ran as these guys may be mad, but they’re also serious. And through a combination of bullets, bombs and babies they’re on course to achieving their aims.

Victory through “Israel fatigue”

Khamenei is not recommending “classical wars” to wipe Israel off the map. What he proposes is a long period of low-intensity warfare designed to make life unpleasant, if not impossible, for a majority of Israeli Jews so that they leave the country.

His calculation is based on the assumption that large numbers of Israelis have double-nationality and would prefer emigration to the United States and Europe to daily threats of rather unpleasant forms of death.

Khamenei makes no reference to Iran’s nuclear program. But the subtext is that a nuclear-armed Iran would make Israel think twice before trying to counter Khamenei’s strategy by taking military action against Iran.

In Khamenei’s analysis, the cost of staying in Israel will become too high for many Jews. Moreover, Western powers, notably the US, which have supported the Jewish state for decades, might decide that the cost of doing so is higher than possible benefits.

So, Khamenei believes that eventually “Israel fatigue” will force the international community to start looking for what he calls “a practical and logical mechanism” to end the conflict between Israel and M*sl*m countries.

Khamenei’s “practical and logical mechanism” excludes the two-state formula in any form.

“The solution is a one-state formula,” he writes. That state, to be called Palestine, would be under M*sl*m rule but would ostensibly allow non-M*sl*ms, including some Israeli Jews who could prove “genuine roots” in the region to stay as “protected minorities”.

Under Khamenei’s scheme, Israel, plus the West Bank and Gaza, would revert to a United Nations mandate for a brief period during which a referendum is held to create the new state of Palestine.

All Palestinians and their descendants, wherever they are, would be able to vote, while Jews “who have come from other places” would be excluded.

Though, of course, once he has his nukes, Khamenei might just change his mind and decide to turn Israel into dust and ashes. Who knows?

Obama’s bestest new friend is playing the long game and it looks like the Mad Mullah is winning.

Our wonderful NHS seems to stagger from crisis to disaster to chaos – mostly due to the incompetence, stupidity and dishonesty of politicians and senior NHS executives.

I’ve written before about how, under Blair and Brown’s New Labour, the NHS went from having about 200,000 hospital beds and 25,000 managers in 1997 (8 beds per manager) to just 140,000 hospital beds and 43,000 managers by 2010 (3.2 beds per manager)

This a truly staggering loss in managerial productivity.

At the same time, pay for NHS managers shot up, doubling for mid-management positions and tripling for hospital chief executives.

This was part of Brown’s bureaucratisation of Britain where throughout the public sector we got ever more managers being paid ever more for doing ever less.

To their credit, the Tory-led Coalition reduced the number of NHS managers from the 2010 high of 43,000 to nearer 38,000. Hooray! Progress! Or maybe not?

Here’s another figure readers might find relevant to assessing the Government’s claims to be improving our NHS.

The NHS spent £640 million on private-sector management consultants in 2014, up from £313 million in 2010. In 2010, when costs were less than half today’s at £313 million, Tory Health Secretary Andrew Lansley stated “I am staggered by the scale of the expenditure on management consultants in the NHS.” Lansley blamed Labour for the blooming costs and vowed then to “reduce management consultancy costs by 46% over the next four years” and promised “every penny saved will be reinvested in improving patient care”.

As with any promise by an incompetent, lying politician, we got the opposite – a massive increase in management consultancy costs and a reduction in the money available for idiot Lansley’s ‘improving patient care’.

So, in 2010 the NHS was spending £313 million on management consultants to help the NHS’s 43,000 overpaid, over-pensioned managers to do the jobs they were already being well paid to do. That’s about £7,300 per year per manager. By 2014, this had shot up to £640 million for 38,000 managers – a staggering £16,800 per NHS manager per year.

If we assume that a hospital consultant costs about £100,000 per year, then for just the £327 million increase in management consultancy costs from £313 million to £640 million would have been enough to pay for another £3,270 real medical consultants. Or perhaps 10,000 nurses.

Maybe our politicians fail to understand the difference between (generally useless) management consultants and (generally useful) hospital consultants? (click on image to see more clearly)

Commenting on NHS leaders’ ever-increasing reliance on management consultants to do their jobs for them, a senior medical figure remarked “If these well-paid individuals lack the skills to solve most local problems in-house, or by learning from other NHS colleagues, perhaps they shouldn’t be leading at all.”

I don’t think any of us would disagree with that.

Some people will have realised that the long-awaited EU in/out referendum will be a stitch-up and Britain will vote to stay in.

First, there’s the question “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?” Our rulers know that in any referendum it’s always psychologically easier for people to vote ‘yes’ to continue the situation they know than vote ‘no’ and face the uncertainty of change.

What if the question had been “Should Britain be an independent, self-governing country?” That would get a very different result.

Or what if the question had been “Should Britain be an independent, self-governing country with control over its own borders and laws?” I rather suspect this would receive a resounding “YES!”

Then there’s the flood or tsunami of our money handed over to the bureaucrats of Brussels, that they then use to support organisations and media groups across Europe that are pro-EU and which keep pumping out pro-EU propaganda.

I don’t have the latest figures. But here are the ones from my book THE GREAT EUROPEAN RIP-OFF:

– Each year the EU distributes over 24,000 grants worth more than €9bn to organisations and media groups that are pro-EU. The BBC gets millions in grants and low-interest loans as do the main media groups in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and many other countries. When asked about €141m in low-interest loans, the BBC claimed “there were no editorial obligations whatsoever attached to the three EIB loans”. But organisations tend not to bite the hand that feeds them. In just one year Radio France pocketed €5.8m. When I was in Brussels researching my book, many journalists I met complained that they were not allowed to write any articles criticising EU incompetence and corruption as their bosses knew these would lead to them losing their EU millions

– The DG (Directorate General) Education gives out a further €1bn to over 500 organisations, universities and schools that “foster the idea of belonging to the European Union”. Many British universities and schools receive some of this money

– The DG Information and Media hands out over €1.24bn to around 800 media organisations across Europe in return for them putting out positive stories of the benefits of belonging to the EU

So, when organisations hit the media in the run-up to the EU referendum, just follow the money – look at how much EU cash they’re taking to betray our country and hand over control of Britain to the German-dominated United States of Europe.

Here’s a short (2 mins) YouTube video I came across just scratching the surface of the ‘Judas Iscariot problem’ – the organisations that are eagerly taking the EU pieces of silver to betray our country:

Perhaps nothing best illustrates the ever-widening gulf between our self-appointed ‘opinion leaders’ and ordinary British people than the hastily manufactured hysteria of the mainstream media, Labour politicians and other bien pensants over Qu’meron referring to a ‘swarm of migrants‘ crossing the Med.

The self-righteous professional hand-wringers and ‘progressives’ filled our screens and our papers with their accusations that Qu’meron was ‘dehumanising’ the migrants. But while attacking Qu’meron, none of the bleaters and moaners seemed to offer any solution to the swarm, flood, tidal wave, tsunami of mainly M*sl*m migrants eagerly heading through a whole series of European countries to reach Benefits Britain. It’s easy for them to come here as the Italian and French police apparently hand them all papers guaranteeing them free rail travel to the French coast as the Italians and French don’t want them in their countries.

I suggest they are mainly M*sl*m as most Christians would have been killed by the M*sl*m migrants while crossing the Med. Moreover, we hear that mosques are now being built in the Calais ‘Jungle’ – there’s no mention of churches. That’s either because there aren’t many Christians or else because any Christians know that if they did try to build a makeshift church, it would immediately be attacked and burnt down by the M*sl*m mobs.

Strangely, our opinion leaders made no mention as to why these migrants were coming to Europe – the fact that they had destroyed their own countries through their idleness, stupidity, corruption, tribalism and religious intolerance and now wished to turn our country into the kind of flea-ridden, excrement-covered cesspits they had made of their own homelands:

Moreover, we were exposed to almost endless interviews with supposedly highly-educated migrants who all wanted to become brain surgeons or electrical engineers as the media tried to prove what a benefit to our country these people would be.

But this wasn’t the only example of pro-*sl*mic bias shown by the media this week. There were the usual howls of outrage when an eight month old Palestinian baby died in an arson attack probably by Jewish extremists. Even the great Ban Ki Moon himself intervened demanding the perpetrators be punished for their ‘terrorist act’. I agree they should be punished. But it’s odd that the screaming howling media didn’t demand similar punishment for the M*sl*m fanatics who have killed 124 and injured another 306 just during the last 7 days.

Here’s a list of M*sl*m atrocities over the last week. Hey Mr Moon! Hey BBC! Hey Channel 4! How about condemning them? How about demanding they get punished? Oh. Silence. I wonder why?