Obnoxio:

The British deification of this shambolic, expensive clusterfuck is nothing more or less than a malevolent manifestation of “Not Invented Here” Syndrome – any alternative cannot be as good because it’s not British.

I’m not sure that knee-jerk Jingoism is sufficient to account for the phenomena observed.

The trouble with the NHS is that it is regarded by so many people as an institution, like the monarchy, to which the ordinary rules of business simply do not apply (in fact I maintain that they can and do apply to the monarchy, and that if the tourist revenue ever failed to exceed the Civil List we’d be a republic before you could say ‘guillotine’).

All the arguments about it are on vague and nebulous points of principle; nobody ever seems to bother to do what anyone in the Accounts Dept. would do and work out whether or not it was delivering as much bang for the buck as any of the possible alternatives.

The trouble with this, I suspect, is that we’ve all lost track of what ‘bang for the buck’ actually means in this context.

We (the people who pay the buck) mostly mean having some method of health provision which just fixes people when they go wrong or get broken; reliably, quickly and effectively. If, despite best efforts, they can’t be fixed, we’d like it to arrange for them to shuffle off this mortal coil in their own time and in as comfortable and dignified a manner as can be arranged.

These are not unreasonable requirements. Unfortunately, because the NHS is not a mechanism for healthcare provision but a national institution, a monument to the glory of postwar socialism, an icon, a political contrivance, it does not address them. Instead it spends vast sums of money and employs more people than live in some countries not on doing its job, but on being seen to be ‘doing its job’. The bang, for which the buck was paid, is now defined not as ‘having good healthcare’ but ‘having a good healthcare system, for a given value of ‘good’, as defined in the rubric to our customer satisfaction survey.’

The purpose of the exercise is no longer to keep everyone as healthy as they wish to be and to do one’s best for the unlucky.

It is to conserve, to nurture, to polish and generally to fettle up for the appreciation of the whole world this wonderful, 100% original symbol of the Caring Big State.

So there are loads and loads of managers, PR consultants and professional scolders, naggers and busybodies; a vast IT industry producing (perhaps fortunately for the tattered remains of British civil liberties) little except sales-puff and classical Newtonian chaos, and several regiments of hangers-on of a more or less artificial nature; and there is so little actual healthcare available after they’ve all been paid that it is now being withheld from those who need it on increasingly arbitrary, specious and political grounds.

The whole thing is a sham. It is not to preserve the nation’s health, but to preserve its socialism.

There is nothing even slightly wrong with the idea of healthcare provision paid for in advance, but, having spent my life in industry, I have to say that there really has got to be a better way of organising it than this.

Despite my respect for Ian Parker-Joseph I’m damned if I can work out why I need to join Facebook or equip myself to use Twitter (with neither of which I have bothered in the past) merely to express the view that the NHS, far from being what the oppressing class in all of its chromatic variants claims it to be, is in fact a substantial, and very expensive, component of the British national disgrace.

Mummylonglegs:

Laying the blame for this kind of stuff on ‘The Welfare State’ is to basically state that the person that carried out these crimes is not really to blame. If you truely believe that ‘The Welfare State’ is to blame for the death, torture, rape, abuse and maltreatment of thousands of children every year then you are, in fact, almost as bad as the perpertrators themselves, because you can bet a pound to a pinch of shit, that in their own minds, to their partners, to the children and to the courts they blamed everything and everyone else aswell.

I agree with this.

Tom Paine:

Haringey Social Services may not like being sued on this occasion, but they share Peter’s father’s underlying objective; to supplant the responsibility of the parent with that of the state.

I also agree with this.

The whole problem with the welfare state is that it is not static; it self-replicates in such a manner as to render it more likely to survive. It mutates.

I feel that we should discriminate between the narrow, old-fashioned interpretation of the welfare state, as it appears to apply to mummylonglegs and myself, apparently the only exponents of the art of welfare-dependent libertarianism in this part of the blogocliché, and the broad, modern interpretation as it applies to certain others.

I cannot help but notice that this is the second time that the Ambush Predator has referred to a story in the Daily Mail about professional beggars.

This is not a new phenomenon; I would call to the Predator’s attention The Man with the Twisted Lip, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

One cannot help but to contrast and compare accounts of the performance of the UK ‘border agency’ given by the Salted Slug and the Devil’s Kitchen.

The obvious conclusion emerging from this is not altogether an encouraging one.

The Blind Cyclists’ Union on London:

London is overcrowded, over priced, over hyped, full of stroppy wankers and it smells of wee.

I’d agree with all of that. And I was born there, damn it.

Which brings me to the genuinely contentious subject of optimum population metrics, which caused a bit if a stir when it was discussed over at Landed Underclass’ place, and which I will be rehashing here at some point, safe in the knowledge that no is reading it.

Only me.

The controversy, dear reader and seeker after wholesale play slime, is that some folk think that even trying to suggest that finite resource base can only sustain a maximum number of people, and that there is some optimum number for a given resource base is tantamount to opening death camps and shoving in gypsies and chavs. As I said at the time, this shows rather a lack of imagination on their part.

Does it actually require imagination? I had thought that basic arithmetic might suffice.

I suspect that the intemperate response to any mention of this question is itself due to imagination. People imagine that what is proposed is the kind of instant, vote-catching quick-fix beloved of the current set of political placeholders. The only instant solution in this case is an wholly repellent one. Dropping with consummate ease into ad-hominem mode, the critics then allege that since one is proposing such a repellent solution (which one is not) then one is some kind of monster out of history (which one is not).

This appears to be the customary debating technique of the enemy class.

Unfashionable though it might be nowadays, I, like so many people of my vintage (who remember the well-known picture taken from Apollo 8) am inclined to regard the Earth as a spaceship.

If there is any truth in this view at all, then the said spaceship, like all forms of transport, presumably has a maximum capacity.

Now a Land-Rover (I know about this because I used to own one) has a ‘maximum capacity’ of about seven or eight people (or perhaps a dozen if it’s a long-wheelbase type). At the Royal Tournament the Ghurkas always used to do a stunt about how many of them could ride on a Land-Rover; if I remember rightly they usually managed about sixty, the vast spherical mass of men totally concealing the Land-Rover, except for the lower parts of its tyres, which it needed to trundle painfully along.

So the Land-Rover can in fact accommodate some five or more times the number of people that it says it can. Those who resent the mention of the population question often use an argument similar to this to demonstrate that we need not think about this for so many years that in fact we need not think about it at all.

This argument ignores the fact that the Ghurkas, nails though they all are, would doubtless prefer not to have to remain in this configuration for more than the two or three minutes that the stunt takes; they can’t do anything else while they’re at it, it’s not very good for them, nor (as I’m sure the MT Section would confirm) is it very good for the Land-Rover.

Just because it’s possible to survive a population density far in excess of that which is comfortable should not mean that such a density ought to be regarded as some kind of desideratum.

Even as a very long-term issue I wonder whether it is ever going to be possible to discuss this sensibly; since merely mentioning it seems to set some people off into what might in earlier centuries have been diagnosed as a fit of religious enthusiasm (except on the far side of the Atlantic, where I believe they use the term conniptions) we shall have to see to what extent this posting itself is regarded as offensively provocative.

An uncompromising and without doubt drastically effective direct action plan, from leg-iron.

If everyone were to give up driving, and to walk or cycle instead, it is quite possible that the government’s targets on reducing obesity might actually be met.

What’s it going to be then, eh? They can’t have it both ways.

Outrage at what appears to be unanimity between Red and Blue corners in respect of the creation of some kind of Komsomol (or perhaps Hitlerjugend).

The Devil points out the similarity between the usual suspects’ promises, while Their Contempt For You Is Total and the Cynical Optimist are united in condemnation, though perhaps somewhat different in interpretation.

This idea is not only ethically indefensible, it is also very silly, and resembles what logisticians sometimes describe as ‘a load of wank’.

If such a scheme is to be introduced at all, then it has to be consistent. Though neither party’s schemes appear that they could be so, let us give them the benefit of the doubt (here we go again) and assume that they are both talking about some sort of compulsory ‘gap year’.

A government (of either colour) which bangs on about the value of education is hardly likely to stand up for long to outraged middle-class parents whose plans for their childrens’ futures do not include their being academically retarded for a year thanks to having to go off and do slave labour. Considering that some middle-class parents are government ministers, there will simply have to be a mechanism of exclusion for the children of the people who matter. There will, of course, be endless trouble over this, with parents of bright children, who cannot afford the bribes, being obliged to watch those of people who can getting to university, and into the qualified labour market, a year ahead. This will be somewhat difficult to news-manage.

Of course what this is really about is getting all those knife-wielding, crack-dealing, hoodie-clad feral youth off the street corner and out of the headlines.

The Army doesn’t want them. The days of cannon-fodder are over. Of course they could be given a year’s ‘military training’, but would you really want them to be, at the public expense and the Army’s considerable inconvenience, taught to handle firearms and explosives and, if necessary, to kill with their bare hands? Thought not. One might as well just put them in prison; it would be cheaper, and the training it would provide could hardly fail to be less lethal.

As for the Navy or the RAF, forget it. You want a gum-chewing oaf who can’t write his own name or add up two one-digit numbers in charge of something technical?

What other ideas? There was the one about doing the Three Peaks. I’ve done that. It didn’t take a year. It can, if one is up for it, be done in a day. Will they just go round and round: Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough, Whernside, Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough, Whernside, for a whole year? How many of them will be doing this at any one time? Where will they camp? Has anyone thought about path erosion?

And, of course, there’s ‘working with old folk’. The care of the elderly is in a somewhat parlous state already; would voters really want their great-aunt Agatha to be looked after by totally unqualified people who have, in all probability, huge chips on their shoulders and access to the dangerous drugs cabinet?

Then there’s ‘charities’. Of course a fake charity could be paid oodles of our money by the state to find something for large numbers of aggrieved slaves to do, but it probably wouldn’t involve any powered machinery. Or edge-tools.

No real charity would touch this with a barge-pole, and if forced to accept unwilling conscripts would probably go under with all the additional costs and workload. Maybe the government (whoever forms it) would see that as a bonus; can’t have these damned amateurs like the RNLI showing up the quangos-with-a-licence-to-beg, can we?

And finally, it boils down to:

…and even travel overseas helping Third World countries

Transportation.

It is certainly a coincidence that both Red and Blue socialists promise to implement a scheme of this kind, but it seems to me that they have not thought it through. It is therefore probably no more than one of those political promises which become so common at election time (well, it only just over a year away, isn’t it? Think how early Christmas starts).

Even if they did implement it, who exactly is going to go out there and round up the chav youth to be compulsorily made to do nice things? Will it be the police? Or perhaps social workers? Teachers, then? Perhaps not. Oh, of course; we’ll simply fine the parents, and fine them again, and add interest to the fines, and fine them for attracting interest, if they don’t make their children turn up and sign on the dotted line.

Just like getting them to go to school, then.

Pah.

At last, someone with a grasp of history.

mummylonglegs:

For all of history there has been a scummy underclass. So it will ever be. Taking away the benefits system will not change this. To blame benefits for the demise of society is idiotic at best and down right dangerous at worst. Money doesn’t make good parents, and lack of it doesn’t make bad parents. The most damaging thing to happen in recent years is social meddling. Children have more rights that their parents. No one can discipline or smack a child where as a child can kill some one and get away with it. Children don’t have to go to school if they don’t want to. The parents will be punished for failing to make them attend. Those parents are not allowed to physically drag those children to school or punish them for not attending. Benefits didn’t cause this problem, meddling twats in their ivory towers did. The sooner we rectify this the better.

I don’t have any children (for which, under the circumstances, I have to say that I am duly thankful), but I am obliged to claim benefit, and can confirm that doing so appears to have left me no more or less scummy than hitherto.

[The Blues Brothers]

Anna Raccoon:

When exactly did we stop thinking of children as being the natural outcome of sex, and turn them into commodities to be traded on the open market?

Part 1: ‘natural outcome’. I believe that this view changed with the invention, in the early twentieth century, of reliable methods of contraception (antecedent methods having been less than reliable), and was confirmed in the middle of that century following the general availability of highly reliable oral contraceptives.

Part 2: ‘commodities’. The use of children as commodities apparently greatly predates the use of artificial contraceptives of any kind. Mediaeval kings would exchange sons, to be brought up in one another’s courts, as hostages to treaties; the commercial aspects of the practice of apprenticeship, dating perhaps in its recognisable form from the Dark Ages, might be considered as relevant; and some sources suggest that in the Old Kingdom of classical Egypt it was an offence for a son to attempt to follow any trade other than that of his father.

If anything, I am inclined to believe that the ability to have only as many children as one wants is likely to increase the perceived value of each child, which in turn has probably led to the overprotective attitude of many modern parents.

On the other hand we have baby-farming benefit claimants, like our former neighbours, who called their children (of whom they had as many as they possibly could) by numbers rather than names, and clearly regarded them quite cynically as nominal liabilities to be traded against increased benefits.

There is, I think, quite possibly a causal relation between contraception and child-commercialism, but if there is then I would say that its sense is inverse with respect to that suggested by AR.