Global Warning

15 November 2008

Theodore Dalrymple delivers a Global Warning

Anyone who doubts that, at least from the cultural point of view, the Soviet Union won the Cold War in Britain hands down should attend a conference organised for doctors about impending organisational changes in the National Health Service (and organisational changes are always impending in the NHS). There he will be convinced that every doctor will soon have a political commissar working alongside him to remind him of his wider responsibilities to government and party.

Doctors in Britain are now roughly in the position of Tsarist generals, scientists and ‘specialists’ in the first phase of the Russian Revolution: necessary but distrusted, hated and feared, and to be eliminated altogether as soon as possible. The British revolution, however, has been carried out neither by the proletariat nor in the name of the proletariat: it is, rather, the revolution of the ambitious but ungifted, of whom there is a gross oversupply. For everyone is persuaded these days that there is only one thing worth having, and that thing is power.

Last week I attended, for the sheer fun of it, a conference about some forthcoming changes to the NHS. One of the lectures was given by a lady apparatchik from the Department of Health whose grimacing attempts at smiles, and whose bodily writhing as she tortured the English language with neologisms, acronyms and platitudes in the service of evident untruth, made Gordon Brown’s bonhomie seem like a model of spontaneity. She knew what the assembled doctors thought of her, so in a sense she was being brave; at one point in what I suppose I must call her ‘presentation’ there was a single guffaw of contemptuous laughter.

It was an illuminating moment, a flash of lightning in a moonless night-time landscape. For a moment I felt almost sorry for the speaker: you could see the panic on her face, a fear lest 150 doctors turn on her and demand explanations in comprehensible language. Alas, doctors are far too well brought up and chivalrous (or is it pusillanimous?) to humiliate an ambitious dimwit in public; and so the ambitious dimwits live to plot their revenge and increase their power.

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Herbert Thornton

November 13th, 2008 10:35pm Report this comment

This reminded me of similar situations around 40 years ago when I worked for a Canadian government department in Ottawa.

One time, at a low-level meeting of some committee or other, a mid-level bureaucratic of limited abilities declared, with a knowledgeable air that "parameters" must be established.

So I asked him to please explain what, in this situation, he meant by "parameters".

There was a complete silence. He had obviously given no thought to it and had thrown the word in because he thought it sounded impressive.

TDK

November 14th, 2008 9:43am Report this comment

"I spent the conference counting the acronyms"

Of course. We call this game "buzz word bingo" and it isn't restricted to bureaucrats in government service. There are hundreds of management gurus around around whose very existence depends on them being able to translate the mundane into techno babble, which they then present to enraptured executives.

Ollie

November 14th, 2008 3:23pm Report this comment

Most of the examples you give aren't acronyms, as an acronym needs to spell a pronounceable word. In other words, NATO is an acronym, NSPCC merely an abbreviation.

Elberry

November 15th, 2008 7:47pm Report this comment

Most amusing, i too work in the NHS (at the bottom of the ladder) and recently had to do a 'KSF' explaining my existence to my manager, as if she had no idea what my job is or who i am.

Later, i realised i have no idea what KSF stands for.