Privatisation

The thing about orthopaedic surgeons is they like to throw things about. When not throwing prostheses at pretty nurses, or scalpels at pesky students, they like to throw prime ministers off wards. Mr Cameron and his retinue were excised from Guy’s Hospital the other day, as swiftly and effectively as a bunion from Miss Marple’s foot. The only thing missing in the drama was a red flashing light at the centre of the surgeon’s bow tie.

Meanwhile, Alan Milburn, late of the Red Party, has taken the Daz Blue Rinse Test, and been found to be whiter than white. He hasn’t just nailed his colours to the mast, he has sprayed them all over the Torygraph. He has accused the coalition of being lily-livered Yellow Bastards, every sad-man-jack of them.

Amazingly, roboNick this morning wiped the Vaseline from his glasses, and saw the light. The BBC’s Innuendo-in-Chief, master of the C word, E word and R word, realised it was all about the D word.

‘Duty, that is, Huw. The duty [lugubrious sideways glance] of the Secretary of State, that is, to provide [meaningless pause] a comprehensive health service.’

‘Thanks Nick. That was Nick, ending his report for us from, err, Downing Street.’ That’s the nice thing about Huw: he always takes the trouble to make sure you know who’s who, what’s what, and where’s where, even when, err, he’s not quite sure himself.

Dr Clare Gerada, the well-known suicide cyclist, and Chair for the time being of the Royal College of General Practitioners, appeared on the SuperMarr show this morning. She was in fiery mood, with short cut red hair and a dress so red that it might itself have been on fire. Beside her, Mr Stephen Dorrell MP, one-time Health Secretary in the Major government, smouldered in a grey brown wood-ash jacket. When Clare appeared on the verge of bursting into flames, Stephen puffed political smoke. Had a mirror been at hand, he would no doubt have flashed political semaphore too. For all Dr No knows, he may even have done so, but Dr No’s Sunday sensibilities had at the start been rudely corrupted, and his eyes fixed, by a rogue cameraman who had spotted the stage was set not for the SuperMarr show but for Basic Instinct III. The camera lingered hopefully. At one point, Clare raised her hands from her lap. The cameraman’s basic instincts twitched palpably, his finger on zoom; but it wasn’t to be. The only flashes, were there to be any, would come from Stephen’s mirror, or the dying embers in his wood-ash jacket. We were back on easy, like Sunday morning.

The Today programme this morning fingered Jimbo as an Anglo-Sassenach. There wasn’t much he could do about it, except take a side-swipe at Humph by declaring that at least he wasn’t a Boyo, because the Sassenach evidence was in his DNA. It was the kind of case that Police Constables are wont to refer to as an open-and-shut case. The Bannock was laid bare, a faggot dressed as haggis. Auntie, on health and safety advice, thoughtfully provided a counsellor, in case it all proved to much for Jimbo. It was certainly too much for Humph, who could be heard in the distance cackling and laughing all the way to the allotment.

With friends like the British Medical Association, who needs enemies? On the day the Care Quality Commission revealed that three out of twelve hospitals it reported on were hanging elderly patients out to die, the BMA chose to blow its anti-Health and Social Care bill trumpet. But the Association’s call was inevitably drowned in the howls of anguish that arose in the face of hospitals turning biddies into Ryvitas on an industrial scale. Even Humph rose to the occasion, and adopted his best dishcloth wringing tone. No need to get bogged down in the statistics, said he, as he wrung the dishcloth of despair to its dying drop. As beads of disbelief coalesced on the brow of concern, he told the nation what it so desperately needed to hear: it was, he said in a whisper, about humanity. The BMA story, naturally, sunk like a stone in a pond.

Dr No’s NHS dentist is a likeable old cove. Asked how he proposed to fix Dr No’s new crown in place, he announced ‘Bostik Number Five’ – a Dr No response if ever there was one. So – just to be clear – this post is not about knocking dentists as a profession. What it is about is looking at what happens when you run a substantial private mostly insurance based system alongside a publicly funded NHS one; and what has happened in dentistry does not bode well for the rest of the NHS.

On Monday, Channel Four’s Dispatches programme invited dentists to open wide. A number obliged, and an unedifying collection of drill sharks, cement mixers and card snitchers sprung into view. The general wheeze was to get you, an NHS patient, in the chair, and then offer a Hobson’s choice of private treatment, at which point wallets, inevitably, opened wider than mouths.

Twenty five or so years ago, in the Hacksaw years, there was a move afoot (there had also been a Michael Foot, but that is another story) to relax the then decidedly restrictive and yet unworkable Sunday Trading Laws. Hacksaw and her buddies attempted to introduce a Shops Bill in 1986 to relax the rules, but the move was seen off by an unlikely coalition between the God Squad, acting in best Ian Paisley style, and by the Unions, marking the only time – a precedent we might want to note - that a Hacksaw Bill was ever defeated. Thus the restrictions, including the quaint absurdity of allowing the sale of a pornographic magazine but not a Bible or a birthday card on a Sunday, continued for another eight years, until the liberalising 1994 Sunday Trading Act came into force.

The early Hacksaw years were nonetheless a time of unbridled market adoration – yuppies had just been born, and the Stock Exchange Big Bang was around the corner – and so the spivs and suits, who had no intention of letting tiresome laws fetter their marketing zeal, set about devising ways of getting round the restrictions. Dr No’s favourite, for its audacity, was the carrot wheeze: carrots, but not beds, could be sold, so the spivs sold carrots, at a hundred quid a pop, and threw in a bed for free.

An extraordinary letter has appeared in The Telegraph this morning, online version here, a letter so bizarre that it elevates those chirpy Eurovision Song Contest result package links to communiqués of Kissingerian consequence. Signed by a clutch of GP chavs, it appears to be the brainchild of a scuba-diving Masonic medical wax chandler (motto: Non Angelus sed Anglus - No Angel but at least I'm English) who, tellingly, lists Conservative poiltics as one of his ‘interests’, which is putting it mildly: here he is blogging in 2009 about what the Tories are going to do to the Labour legacy once the Tories had achieved the ‘moral authority of victory’ in the 2010 election. Taken together with today’s Telegraph letter, it appears that Pimlico GP Dr Jonathon Munday’s zeal for nuking Labour legislation is matched only by an equal and opposite zeal for propping up Broken Arrow’s dud legislation.