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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Elon Musk was thoroughly castigated for castigating woke Los Angeles for having a black female mayor and a lesbian as Chief Fire Officer. I'm not sure where I stand in the contretemps. I do like to hear of minorities being given every chance but I think, all the same, I won't be moving to Los Angeles after all. Global warming, you understand.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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More on the Gezira Scheme.This was a million hectares of Sudanese scrubby waste turned into cotton growing on the grand scale by the British. Not for the Sudanese but for Lancashire cotton mills. It was rather fabulous in that it was entirely gravity fed from Nile water and stupendously fertile. It was by the end, the mainstay of the entire Sudanese economy.
When it did become Sudanese, in 1956, the first thing that started falling into decay was all the machinery for turning cotton into bales of cotton fit for sending to spinning mills. Which in turn meant cotton growing itself was no longer economic. So the locals started growing other stuff.
Then Sudanese oil was discovered and the government refused to stump up the relatively small amounts necessary to keep the irrigation system in good nick. Why bother when you were being paid off in petrodollars? So the farmers started doing it themselves on a small scale. The million hectares started to shrink commensurately. After a bit of civil war, the canals starting silting up and all now is gone. Or soon will be.
What I find infuriating is how easy it all is in the right hands. But those hands will n'er be seen again. Oh for the wings of a colonial dove etc etc.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| "In Ireland, north and south, it is illegal to pay for sex." |
I heard these words spoken in a short story on Radio 4, so I cannot vouch for it being true but, from the context, I have no reason to think it isn't. So what? you are asking. Here's a few things, Watt. (A little Z-Cars joke there.)
1. Paying for sex, being paid for sex, is not illegal in Britain. You can be a punter or a prostitute to your heart's content in our fine island and many of you, I know, have.
2. But all the accoutrements of prostitution i.e. soliciting, living off the earnings etc etc are. As you found out when fined fifty pounds or seven days custodial after being caught kerb-crawling and you had to borrow the money from your brother.
3. How has Northern Ireland found itself out of lockstep with us on this central pillar of Common Law?
4. If the Irish Free State is in a similar love boat it must be of long standing so presumably it must have been us that departed from Common Law and done it since 1922.
5. Which I find hard to believe.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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In the nineteen-fifties Britain spent the same on defence as it did on health and welfare. As far as I can see (and experienced, I was there) this is about right. We didn't have a war on but we were always fighting small ones. The soldiery might have come free because of conscription but we had a lot of responsibilities all over the world. It was quite costly even withdrawing from these responsibilities.
The health service seemed OK. I was in hospital more than once so I can testify to that. I was too young to be unemployed but there didn't seem to be many that were. The old people got pensions. It all seemed deeply caring and compassionate.
Today we spend nine times more on health and welfare than we do on defence. What changed?
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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What changed?
1)
Yes, once upon a time we had a lot of responsibilities all over the world. Then it was "End of Empire" and we realised it wasn't our responsibility any more. Thank goodness for NATO and the Americans.
2)
Medical folks discovered loads more things that could be treated with interventional surgery and/or pharmaceutical products. Both costs a lot more than "Here's a bottle of aspirins, come back in three weeks if it doesn't get better".
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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By nine times? You're having a laugh.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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I wish.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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After Elon Musk's brutish downsizing of the American civil service, the Labour government have put forward our own version:
| Underperforming staff will be given incentives to leave. |
We shall be rewarding the idle with golden handshakes and encouraging the hard-working to stop working so hard if they want one. The decisions will be made in-house.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| I've been working with some brilliant people.... Wes Streeting, Health Secretary |
No, he hasn't. He's been working with civil servants and health administrators. Nobody brilliant would be found dead in either occupation. So why is he saying it? It is because he is going to announce a scheme that will axe thousands of civil servants and health administrators.
It turns out he is going to axe NHS England on the excellent grounds that they do exactly the same job as the Department of Health. Why is there an NHS England? Because for various reasons (some good, some bad, all inevitable) the NHS is devolved in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so it was felt necessary for various reasons (all bad) to therefore have an NHS England.
When it is pointed out this a blatant power grab on the part of Wes Streeting since it would have made more sense to abolish the Department of Health, Wes sez, "Oh no, I intend to devolve powers further to the regions, to the hospitals, to the various local boards..."
Oh, it's another top-down re-organisation. I wonder how that will work out. Maybe like the last ten top-down re-organisations, maybe not. Only time will tell.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | I've been working with some brilliant people.... Wes Streeting, Health Secretary | |
"Brilliant" is a relative term. A while ago, a senior civil servant explained how it works.
The truly brilliant would go straight into Pure Research jobs at the top Universities or Teaching Hospitals. They are paid to ask questions.
The good-to-very-good can still get good jobs, in Applied Research at the top pharma firms or universities. They are paid to think, and ocassionally ask questions.
The mediocre-to-useless get admin jobs applying policies and checklists in government departments. They are not paid to ask questions or think.
| Mick Harper wrote: | | Oh, it's another top-down re-organisation. I wonder how that will work out. Maybe like the last ten top-down re-organisations, maybe not. Only time will tell. |
As you suspect, it's about power or control. Centralised governments don't like autonomous regions able to make their own decisions. Sooner or later some local decisions are better than central decisions, and that makes the DHS look bad. What the autonomous regions can have is responsibility. So when it looks good, DHS gets the praise for "good management". When it goes tits-up, the local folk get the blame for being rogue traders and get to carry the overflowing bed pan.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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I think the problem with NHS England was that the orginal idea was that it serve as a independent commisioning/contracting body, getting value of money/competeing etc whilst folks at Department of Health monitored on a new slim client side.
This isnt supposed to be duplication per se, although to check up on someone you will inevitably be looking at similar stuff.
In practice want has happened is that NHS England simply was unable unwilling to pursue for value for money, so kept on going back to D of H for bail outs, which of course led to the D of H wanting to specify rather than monitor the commissioning wing.
NHS England was happy with this new partnership as it meant more money, and less work for them........the Dept of Health were happy as this gave them exactly the power that they had before NHS England was born. In fact both sides were happy as in total they had more people doing the job, with more funds, and nobody needed to secure value for money, or come in on budget.....
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I regard the entire NHS as misconceived. The clue being the N-word. The Department of Health should just be a budgeting and supervisory authority, as is the case with local government. There should be post code lotteries when it comes to health provision.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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It has basically every thing needed, ie political consensus its a good thing, plenty of funding, public support, its free, so doesnt have to recover money from patients, its just moving backwards from amongst the best to fairly average and starting to fail, so we will carry on much as before but surely we now must be more protective of it......Why?
Beacause it used to be the Best.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You are ignoring a basic tenet of AE. When something has been declining for so long and it has been subject to so many reforms, it is the thing itself that is irremediable. [One input/one output.] It has to go.
When you say 'the best' you probably mean 'the first'. By your own admission the NHS has been overtaken by others but that presumably just means their downward curves are behind our downward curve. If not, we would by now have simply adopted their methods. It would be another AE error to fall in love with something because it was the first when being first is not part of its function.
Like I keep saying, the really good thing about our system of health provision is 'being free at the point of delivery'. That does require a national health service but not the NHS.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Wile E. Coyote wrote: | | its just moving backwards from amongst the best to fairly average and starting to fail, so we will carry on much as before but surely we now must be more protective of it......Why? |
It's something in the national psyche, like the National Trust. Protecting crumbling and decrepit old buildings. Instead of building something better. Or Heritage Railways, nostalgically preserving obsolete ways of transporting people at slow speed.
My wee cousin, who has been living in France so long that some locals forget she's not local, joins in with the locals when they openly laugh in amazement at the crazy Rosbiffs who move into the area, and start renovating some crumbling old gites. In the process, spending far more on it than it would have cost to demolish and build anew.
It's an analogy or a metaphor or something.
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