If you build it, they will take the piss...

The eternal conundrum of the NHS is a riddle that may never be solved; where does all the money go? Variously described as a shining example to the world, a victim of its own success and a basket case, the National Health Service costs half of our entire annual budget. Okay, it’s not that much, but at £120 billion last year this is £4000 a year for each one of the nominal 30 million taxpayers. Of course, a huge number of those taxpayers are also in receipt of tax credits and other benefits so a conservative estimate probably makes it closer to £10k per head for those who receive no such rebate.

People in those income brackets and above of course are less likely to be sick, more likely to have access to private healthcare and even if they do succumb to illness are often too busy to seek treatment, certainly for minor issues. So it turns out that the NHS is really a wealth redistribution system, used disproportionately by those who play no part in funding it. I’m not arguing for dismantling it, nor for selling it off; bizarrely, for an evil, baby-eating Tory type, I think it is a wholly good thing that we have a health service accessible to all and free at the point of use. And yet...

It’s the same old thing, isn’t it? The left denigrate the rich and want to tear down capitalism and never seem to understand that if they get their wish and the costs of the welfare state had to fall more heavily on weaker shoulders the system would simply buckle under the strain. There is only so much money to go around and the NHS has been pleading poverty every single year of my sentient life.

Of course it can’t go on delivering an expanding menu of treatments to an ever greater population. Austerity isn’t mean; it’s living within our means. However you look at it, pouring more and more money into a system whose appetite is never satisfied is an appalling business model. Build it and they will come; give it away for free and they will gorge themselves. How, as a nation with our population, can we be so poorly that the NHS boasts of being one of the biggest employers on the planet?

Obviously, rationing healthcare is a dangerous road to go down; some need so much more than others. But shouldn’t we, as a society who pays for it all, start to take responsibility for this thing we can scarcely afford? If you knew you hadn’t the funds to replace it, would you deliberately crash your car? If you’re not going to eat it, why buy food with a short shelf life and then throw it away? So why eat, drink and drug yourself sick, relying on the health service to rescue you later?

The NHS is not free. I’ll say that again: the NHS is not free. Every penny it spends comes from the same source that funds defence, police, transport, education and your pension. Every bandage, pill, operation, therapy and consultation costs you, the taxpayer, and denies that funding to something else considered vital. You expect to draw on that pension for longer and longer these days, while also having your age-related illnesses eased? Which other fund do you sacrifice?

Take one every four hours... if you can afford it.

So, while nobody is suggesting you suffer in silence, if you really want to continue having access to non-judgemental care without up-front fees, how about taking some responsibility for your own health? And why not exercise a little personal triage before that automatic trip to the surgery? You keep demanding that the government saves our NHS. Why not save it yourself?

All of the people...

The Daily Star ran a story to outrage its readers by suggesting that the navy is paying hundreds of millions of pounds to install palm-sized weapons aboard its diminished fleet. How the social media machine laughed! But the idea of a five-inch gun is not so ridiculous as it would seem. A Palo Alto firm has created an iPhone adaptation whereby you can turn your handset into a powerful sonic weapon capable of disabling an attacker at close range by temporarily disorientating them.

Right here, in the UK, you can walk into any Staples superstore and for a quite small fee, secretly 3D print whatever you like. Citing personal privacy, the company have installed self-service booths where you can just insert your design via a USB device and print whatever you wish with no fear of detection. A company spokesman said “We are happy to provide the service, but it is not for us to police what is being printed.” Amazon UK are openly selling a range of downloadable designs for 3D-printed weapons, undetectable to airport scans for £19.99 each.

Another story in this week’s round up is that Google has been secretly installing spyware into its popular Chrome browser. The software is capable of capturing audio and video via the microphone and webcam hardware installed in smartphones, tablets, laptops, PCs and even some smart TVs. As the software can also capture keystrokes, this puts Google in a position where it could harvest every aspect of your online life and sell ‘you’ on to a queue of waiting customers eager to acquire such information.

One such customer is a company based in Brussels from whom you can buy EU identities for a few thousand Euros. So an African migrant need no longer worry about making the dangerous journey to a new life of crime and welfare dependency in the west via unscrupulous people traffickers. He can now simply go online, pay the fee and the documents will be created for him. If you wonder why this organisation hasn’t been shut down by the authorities it is because its start-up was funded by and its operation is overseen by those same authorities. The solution, it seems, to Europe’s illegal immigrant problem is to make them ‘legal’ immigrants.

In other news, a secretly filmed meeting doing the rounds shows Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton behaving not so much as sworn enemies but as co-conspirators in a grand prank being played on the world. The film was captured on a smart phone about a week ago and although the sound quality is poor, Trump can clearly be seen suggesting that she refer to him as a ’volatile little man’ in her nomination acceptance speech. They both laugh. Meanwhile here at home a senior Foreign Office official is under investigation for leaking to the press the intention to quietly bury the Brexit referendum vote under a mountain of procedural complications.

Oh, what a tangled web... 

If you do a search online you can find all of these stories and many more variations on such themes. Hell, you can create your very own and spread the rumours. But the one thing which may prove difficult for even the most diligent researcher is trying to disentangle the truth from the Gordian knot of lies, obfuscation, blind faith, ideology and simple misdirection that permeates The Information Age. As Abraham Lincoln might say today, you really can fool all of the people all of the time.

Industrial Action

The BBC simply will not take the Brexit vote lying down. Yesterday they reported Lloyds Bank’s announcement of local branch closures as being a result of the referendum result when in fact they are simply a symptom of the globalised world. Branches have been closing for years as people shop online, bank online and even socialise online. Nobody ever enjoyed the queues anyway as banks still ridiculously send all their staff to lunch at the same time as everybody else; machines do it so much better. Lloyds actually had to put out a tweet to explain these plans had been in place long before any hint of a leave vote was in the air.

The Greens also can’t stomach the thought of an independent nation and will seize on any ill wind as proof-positive that the wretched patriots and Eurosceptics have doomed the country to eternal malaise with a side helping of global warming to boot. So wedded are they to their pessimistic communistic concepts that they would like nothing quite so much as to see everybody starve, rather than see basic capitalism continue to feed the world. But then, their hatred of humanity is well-documented.

Labour, on the other hand, see themselves as the friend of humanity yet in Owen Smith would see a return to collective bargaining, wildcat strikes, flying pickets and all the paraphernalia of ersatz revolution... all of which would only result in ruin... which they could then gleefully blame on Brexit. There are some sick people in the world and collectively they would like nothing more than to see a free Britain fail miserably to regain its true place at the highest table. How they would cheer as the factories closed and commerce ground to a halt.

But businesses fail all the time, even in the best of times. And people lose their jobs regardless of whether we are in, out or partially engaged with Europe. Life goes on and events often have more complex provenances than we imagine. It is so easy to jump to erroneous conclusions. A friend of mine recently came home to tell his wife that they would have to draw on their life savings as he had just lost his job in his mid-fifties and had little chance of finding other work in what was a declining, traditional industry.

Bill had worked since leaving school at the local pickle factory, but piccalilli was very much an older taste and sales were down. The youngsters were looking for more exotic fare and he explained that the company had been looking for any excuse to lay off staff and that he was just another statistic in a gloomy pattern of industrial decline. She wasn’t happy, her dreams of retiring to a comfortable villa in Spain suddenly brought abruptly to a rude awakening.

“How dare they!” she yelled “You have given them almost forty years of devoted service. Why you? Why did they fire you?” He sighed, sat her down and said “To be fair, they had no choice. For years now I’ve had an urge to stick my dick in the pickle slicer...” She was aghast and clutched her hands together in front of her mouth. For a moment she couldn’t grasp what he was saying, although he had been acting strangely for some time and she supposed that working every day in such a repetitive line of work couldn’t come without some psychological effects. Before she could enquire further he continued.

She knows, y'know!

“Well, today I finally acted on that urge.” The wife ran over to him, told him to stand up and in one fluid movement she whipped down his trousers to see what damage had been done. There was none of the expected gore. She was puzzled and proceeded to pull down his underpants. “But you look perfectly okay,” she said, relieved. “So what happened to the pickle slicer?” Bill pulled up his trousers and refastened his flies. He looked devastated as he told his wife. “They fired her too.”

Added Value

I am delighted to hear that Labour leadership contender, Owen Smith (His name is an anagram, appropriately enough following his outburst against Theresa May, of *‘Hits Women’) is promising to replant and nurture the good old socialist fall back, the magic money tree. Yes, when Labour say ‘investing in the economy’ to cover up their standard policy of ‘borrow and piss up the wall’ it is the mythical missing ingredient they hope, this time, will finally materialise. Oh how we’ve missed the bonkers conjuring up of filthy lucre from fresh air.

Like vengeance-seeking Labour figures before him Smith (*'twin homes') first imagines that he will become Prime Minister and then he promises to soak the rich and double the NHS budget. Given that a wealth tax is likely to raise approximately the square root of zero-point-fuck-all it will be fascinating to see how those books balance. Maybe he believes that, post Brexit, rich Brits will have nowhere to run to, but he forgets that the rich are welcome everywhere their money is good... which is just about everywhere.

Owen Smith (*'theism now') has also promised that other quart-in-a-pint-pot policy of equality of outcomes (not opportunity, note) despite nobody in history ever achieving such a thing without aiming very low indeed. Positioning himself even further to the left than Jeremy Corbyn seems a curious move, given that the left have been unelectable since Maggie killed them off in ’79. Presumably he is hoping to capitalise (irony intended) on the recent surge in Labour membership from, we can surmise, mostly poorly educated, unemployable people. The Tories must dance their way into work each morning.

You see, the Labours have never quite grasped that if everybody can have it, it isn’t worth very much at all. You have to take what is there and add value. Those apples that grow for free in nature? Effort is required to harvest them, then that effort is later exchanged for currency, which can then pay more people to pick, while others go out and seek markets for the increased production. Effort adds value. In Labour-Land apples would be free to everybody and as a result they would have no real value which could be transferred.

Without incentive, where is the drive to acquire knowledge and push the boundaries of science and technology? Where is the reward for competing, for being better? Surely nobody actually believes that ‘all men are created equal’? Look around you... and then look up and down. Equality of outcome isn’t even a remote possibility without equality of origin, upbringing, education and aspiration. Face it; some people really are better people. And some are very much worse and society isn’t always to blame.

Labour's economic plan in detail

But wait, after fifty years of socialist thought in education isn’t it the case that the electorate come pre-dumbed to the franchise? With ridiculous notions of knowledge being redundant now we have the internet, child-centred (for which read ‘soft’) ‘facilitation of learning’, the ever decreasing levels of literacy and the near universal inability to work with numbers, it’s no wonder our school leavers are poorly equipped to compete with migrants. Owen Smith (*'moist hewn') may be onto something - now, there’s an equality of outcome for you. 

(*Play the Owen Smith anagrams Game!)

Don’t you just hate that?

Hate crime is the new... er what, exactly? The Association of Chief Police Officers and the CPS have agreed a common definition: "Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person's race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender." This helps not one bit; do they really have not one single advisor who has grown up in normal society?

Under this ruling most of the country’s children would have criminal records before they started school, were it not for the age of criminal responsibility... which is ten. So, make that before they start high school. No wonder there is a reported increase in hate crime ‘since the referendum’, as if the vote to leave the EU has suddenly caused all we bigoted little Englanders to release our hate on the world. If we’re going along with this nonsense how about the collective, focused and very real – forget your ‘perceived’ malarkey – sustained attack on leavers by the establishment.

Day after day we have to read in the press, online and in social media, about how our views are not wanted here, about how ‘people like you’ have condemned the whole nation to privation and diminished aspirations. We are told we are less intelligent, more thuggish and how we either live on welfare or work in menial jobs. Honestly, they say, it is clear that such dregs must not be allowed to subvert democracy by being allowed to vote. Try saying any of that about somebody identifiable as ethnically not from these isles and stand by for the dawn raid and the baton beatings.

Voltaire is popularly supposed to have said that if you want to know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise. Whether this originates from the aphorism-generating French polymath or not it has a tempting trueness to it. But by this measure the usual notion of European ruling elites is somewhat inaccurate because it would seem that the one group we actually can criticise is straight, white Christian men. Hate crime legislation has pretty ruled out criticising anybody else, so maybe the real boss is a cross-dressing, gender fluid, disabled gay vegetarian with a lisp.

For a working definition of hate crime see 1984’s thought crime. If you think that is somewhat far-fetched remember that ‘islamophobia’ has already seen people charged. Think about that for a moment; being afraid of that surly looking, bearded man with the scowl and a rucksack full of explosives can make you the bad guy. If the apologists for every aberration, every deviation from ‘the norm’ could actually police our very thoughts they certainly would; Minority Report is only nominally a fiction. Don’t you just hate that?