Bloody-minded unions? Yes, the BMA is deadly (The Times)

I have a piece in today's Times on Dr Hamish Meldrum and the BMA. Here's an extract:

...When we think of bloody-minded unions, it's the likes of Jack Jones and Bob Crow that usually spring to mind. But when it comes to feather-bedding, screwing the public and a rigidly focused protection of its members' interest at the expense of everyone else, no other union comes close to the the British Medical Association.

Yesterday Hamish Meldrum, the BMA's chairman, added another string to its bow: cruelty. Speaking about the current rules governing co-payment - patients forced to pay privately for drugs denied by the NHS are then deemed non-people and refused any further NHS treatment - Dr Meldrum said the NHS should not treat patients who have paid for drugs themselves: “My gut instinct is that this goes against the sort of NHS I believe in, which is free at the point of use, fair and equitable to all.” And which, he didn't add, would let patients die rather than use a drug their health authority will not supply. Equity it may be; but it can be the equity of death.

But no one should be surprised at the sheer callousness of Dr Meldrum's position. The notion that an organisation which represents doctors ought somehow to have the patient's interest in mind is attractive. But it is also naive. When it comes to the public, the BMA sees us as little more than a cash cow.

Take its most recent campaign against polyclinics. The union's claim that it seeks only to protect the supposedly wonderful relationship between GPs and their patients is pure sophistry. All it wants to protect is the income its members receive. The BMA stiffed the incompetent Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, in the negotiations over the GP contract. Doctors were given the chance to stop all evening and weekend work in return for a 6 per cent pay cut. Then they were offered vast sums to hit a series of basic targets, so that today GP pay averages more than £100,000, even though the basic agreed sum is £55,000.

When Alan Johnson, Hewitt's successor as Health Secretary, made the reasonable suggestion that GPs might consider changing their opening hours to accommodate their patients' working hours, Dr Meldrum responded by demanding yet more money for his members...

 

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Innocence or guilt

Like Clive, I obviously have no knowledge of Ray Lewis' innocence or guilt. But having watched him give three live interviews in a row yesterday, two under very tough questioning, if he is guilty he is also the most accomplished, brazen and convincing liar I have ever seen.

UPDATE: Looks like it's the latter. Astonishing.

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Winning when losing

I love Ben Mcintyre's columns. They're always so different. Today's, on Abba, is a real treat:

Waterloo, for example, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974, even though it refers to a military victory that only the British care about. “My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender.”

One Abbaologist has suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that this is “clearly an attempt to recontextualise 19th-century European geopolitics. Napoleon had so subverted the principles of the French Revolution that for most Frenchmen his defeat was the only way civilisation could be saved.” I feel like I win when I lose. How typically French.

BTW, his biography of Agent Zigzag is a classic. I'd put it in the same class as Bernard Wasserstein's simply wonderful Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln. Anyone who hasn't read that should drop everything now and make good that ommission.

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Annoying the Taliban

Nothing against the woman. I just don't understand what she's done to merit an OBE.

That said, Fraser's point is quite persuasive:

It was once put to me that Kylie embodies everything the Taliban hate and has done more to raise morale in this country far more most of those with OBE after their name. All hail.

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My encounter with Baroness Tonge

Re my post below, I don't think I've told this story before.

A few months after Baroness Tonge had been sacked as a front-bencher by Charles Kennedy for her remarks about Palestinian murderers, I was on a radio programme. The Baroness was one of the other particpants. I was looking forward to the programme, as I wanted to take her to task for her views.

Before the programme there was a dinner for the guests. I was unsure about breaking bread with her - I would no more wish to socialise with her than I would with anyone else who thinks I am part of a conspiracy to run the world and destroy non-Jews. But I figured it would be impolite to my hosts to refuse to come, so I went along.

Almost immediately the issue of her sacking arose. The host shared his sorrow at her removal, and said how badly 'everyone' thought she had been treated by her party leader, who was clearly too weak to stand up to the Israeli lobby. A very senior Labour politician (whom I had previously respected as a decent man) concurred. So did the producer.

I had a split second to think how to respond. Should I stick to my plan of being polite, and remain silent lest I cause a scene? Or should I make clear that not 'everyone' agreed with the consensus around the table?

I couldn't in all conscience do anything else. So I said, quietly but, I hope, firmly, that not everyone agreed, and that some of us - such as myself and many people I know, many of whom were not Jewish - thought that her remarks were contemptible, and that she had been let off lightly. Far from Charles Kennedy overreacting, a more appropriate response might have been to have the whip withdrawn. And she remained in the legislature, able to determine the laws under which I lived, which I found to be unsettling at best.

There was a very awkward silence, since it was not the done thing to behave like that over dinner. But the topic of comnversation was changed, I did the programme, and have done it since.

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Tonge rattling

Baroness Tonge of JewsRunTheWorld is at it again. She has already offered her Protocols of the Elders of Zion-like view that:

The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips. I think they have probably got a certain grip on our party.

Last night in the Lords she offered this further thought:

I am beginning to understand the power of the Israel lobby, active here as well as in the USA, with AIPAC, the Friends of Israel and the Board of Deputies. They take vindictive actions against people who oppose and criticise the lobby, getting them removed from positions that they hold and preventing them from speaking—even on unrelated subjects in my case. I understand their methods. I have many examples. They make constant accusations of anti-Semitism when no such sentiment exists to silence Israel’s critics.

It's the usual trick of saying that "constant accusations of anti-Semitism when no such sentiment exists" is used as a tool to shut people up. Let me say for the nth time: it is perfectly possible to be critical of Israeli policies without being anti-semitic. Many Israelis oppose the government.

But just because it is possible doesn't mean that it's a given. In some cases, the language and the arguments which the speaker or writer puts forward show that they do indeed cross the line into antisemitism.

And what is loud and clear from Baroness Tonge's tongue is that she believes almost every one of the classic antisemitic tropes: "the pro-Israeli lobby" (you can safely assume she means Jews and their useful idiots) "has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips"; and the Jews as a community have the power to punish and destroy their opponents. I'm surprised she hasn't referred to our drinking the blood of non-Jewish children.

It wasn't Jews who removed Baroness Tonge from her LibDem post; it was the then party leader, Charles Kennedy, because he rightly judged her words to be beyond the pale. Enoch Powell wasn't sacked by Heath after his Rivers of Blood Speech because the 'Black Lobby' forced him out but because Heath realised instantly that his views rendered him unfit for front bench duties. So too with Baroness Tonge.

Labour might have been beaten into fifth place by the BNP last week, but it's clear that the BNP has its own representative on the LibDem benches.

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For what, exactly?

Kylie Minogue got an OBE today.

Why? 

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Beyond the matron state (The Guardian)

I have a piece in today's Guardian on the NHS. Here's an extract:

One might have thought that a self-proclaimed plan for the NHS's next 60 years would deal with one of the most iniquitous of its many problems. But when health secretary Alan Johnson introduced Lord Darzi's report on Monday, mention was there none.

Two weeks ago the issue of co-payments was sent for review by the health secretary, who has asked "cancer tsar" Mike Richards to assess the state of play. It is time, he said, for an "up to date view". At present, patients who are denied drugs on the health service and are thus forced to pay for them are refused further treatment on the NHS.

...For months, Johnson insisted that it was quite right to refuse to treat these patients - to consider them, in effect, as non-people who had behaved so outrageously in paying for life-saving drugs that subsequently they should be denied health service care. He has based this on the notion that to accept them back would lead to a two-tiered NHS.

If the NHS did its supposed job properly - treating everyone with the most effective drugs - then there might be some medical justification for denying the right to opt back in to those who sought, in effect, worse care elsewhere. But the NHS's record on cancer treatment is lamentable. Only 8% of NHS lung cancer patients are alive after five years; the figures for Belgium and Germany, for instance, are 16% and 15% respectively. Just 17% of British stomach cancer patients survive for five years, as opposed to 33% of Belgians and 31% of Germans. So it is no wonder that many of those patients who can afford to do so pay for drugs that are prescribed by their doctors - Cetuximab and Sutent, for instance - and then denied them by the NHS.

It is little surprise that in a YouGov poll last month 89% of respondents agreed that the ban on co-payment is wrong and only 5% agreed with the health secretary's previous position that the NHS should, in effect, prefer patients to die rather than reach into their own pockets to pay for drugs the health service refuses to finance.

But the irony is that allowing co-payment will, indeed, as Johnson has always said it would, mark a revolutionary break with the health service's history. In recent years governments have started to reform the supply of NHS services through contracting out some provision and reorganising the internal market. Allowing co-payments will address the rest of the picture by opening up reform of demand, since it will introduce, for the first time, non-state funding into the purchase of NHS services.

This, of course, is the real reason why the health secretary and others have resisted co-payment for so long: it changes everything. In any area when consumers - or patients - start to be offered a choice, they soon start to demand an ever greater choice and range of services. The same process will begin once the door has been opened to part-private, part-public funding of healthcare treatment. It might start as co-payment for a small number of drugs, but it will spread, because the hitherto sacred principle of exclusive state funding - other than the basic prescription charge - will have been breached.

Patients are, after all, used to spending their money on healthcare. More than 6.5 million people have private medical insurance; a further six million are covered by private health cash plans. Eight million more pay for alternative therapies not available on the NHS, and many others pay for one-off private treatments. And this is not just the better-off: more than 3.5 million trade unionists have private health cash plans and medical insurance schemes.

The difference is that this money is spent outside the NHS. The introduction of co-payment will lead, inevitably, to a blurring of that divide, as there will be no reason in principle why patients will not be able to "top up" the care they receive from the health service. By the time of its 70th birthday, the NHS will not look remotely as it does as it celebrates its 60th.

 

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Truthiness

This wonderful story reminds me of one about Kelvin MacKenzie.

A reader called in to complain about something in the Sun. MacKenzie asked her for the name of her newsagent. 'Why do you want to know?' she asked. 'Because from now on you're barred from buying it.' A few minutes later she rang back. 'Does that apply to my husband, too?'.

I've no idea if it actually happened, but it has definite truthiness:

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Bill Gates' tips for success

According to Allison Pearson, Bill Gates has 11 'tips for success' which he recently gave to some high school pupils - tips which they would never learn in school. They look bang on to me:

RULE 1: Life is not fair  -  get used to it!

RULE 2: The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3: You will NOT make £30,000 a year right out of high school.

RULE 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

RULE 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: opportunity.

RULE 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes  -  learn from them.

RULE 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills and listening to you talk about how cool you are.

RULE 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT.

RULE 9: Life is not divided into terms. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you "find yourself". Do that in your own time.

RULE 10: TV is not real life. In real life, people have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one!

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