Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Outrage is What Isn’t Seen as Outrageous

Terrific Nick Cohen column today, decrying the feebleness of a new ITV political satire show that oh-so courageously portrays Gordon Brown as some sort of Scottish miser. The truth, of course, is quite different:

Brown couldn’t be further from a Dickensian miser if he tried. For 10 years, he has thrown other people’s money around with the abandon of a Roman emperor or Renaissance pope.. Try a thought experiment and suppose they had more confidence in themselves and their viewers and decided to deride Brown’s Britain intelligently. They might then have looked at the NHS, which Labour promised to save in 1997. In fairness, it has all but doubled the health budget in real terms to £97bn, brought down waiting lists and built new hospitals. But the waste has been out of all proportion to the gains. As Craig points out in his most depressing chapter, the number of managers has doubled to 40,000. They are paid lavish salaries, even though they are so incapable of doing their jobs they need to spend £600m a year on management consultants to hold their hands and tell them what to do. Further down the hierarchy, New Labour struck an incredible bargain with GPs: the taxpayer gave the doctors a 60 per cent pay rise in return for the doctors working fewer hours. What funds were left, the Department of Health then decided to pump into a grandiose computerisation programme that every independent expert on information technology says will never work. As the money flowed to the professional classes, hospitals became death traps. Rates of MRSA and C diff rose far in excess of any other European country. The highest estimate of avoidable deaths in its hospitals NHS admitted to in 2006 was 34,000. To put that in perspective, the United Nations estimated that in 2006, 35,000 died in the civil war in Iraq.

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