Things to think about

17 December 2022

At the end of last year, the Department of Health and Social Care appointed the King’s Fund, a well-respected charity (not connected with Charles), to investigate and report on the NHS.

Its 81-page report has now been published and concludes that “Though Covid certainly exacerbated the crisis in the NHS and social care, we are ultimately paying the price for a decade of neglect”.  It believes that ten years of underfunding have so weakened the NHS it won’t be able to clear the 7.2 million backlog of people still waiting for non-urgent care because it’s now got too few staff, too little equipment and too many decaying buildings.

The report is particularly critical of David Cameron’s austerity programme and it contrasts the damage wrought by the Conservative governments with the action taken by the Labour governments after inheriting similar problems when they came to power in 1997.  It also draws attention to Cameron’s decision to reduce annual NHS budget increases from Labour’s 3.6% to an average of just 1.5%, which it highlights as the key reason for the decline.

Is the Conservatives’ commitment to feeding businesses and starving benefit claimants good for the country as a whole? 

Now the government is risking further criticism by countering claims for better conditions and pay for nurses by refusing to discuss their pay, saying “there are non-pay options to discuss with the unions.  For example, there are issues affecting nurses’ morale.”  How fascinating that the government thinks reducing the real value of nurses’ pay for ten years doesn’t affect their morale.

So nurses and ambulance workers are going on strike in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland leads the way and has already negotiated a deal) and most normal people, whether or not they’re in a queue for treatment, are backing the nurses.

Is this likely to encourage people to join the ever-dwindling band of people who would normally vote Conservative? 

Another independent report, this time into how police forces treat accusations of rape, has also been released.  After analysing 80,000 rape reports across five forces in England and Wales, it concluded there remain persistent failures in the criminal justice system and blamed police systems for failing to keep track of repeated suspects, “explicit victim-blaming” and botched investigations.

The exposure of serious racism and sexism that seems to be endemic in the fire service also shames some very brave people who are not guilty but are unable, or scared, to defend the victims.

What can be done to tackle the stereotyping that underlies the prejudices in these services? 

Rail workers too are going on strike although, in the case of Avanti North West, it’s difficult to know whether services are affected by strikes or just their usual management incompetence (their bosses admitted – a week after their contract was renewed in October – that they were “still not good enough” but insisted things would be OK by Christmas).

The likes of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph talk about the strikes being over pay and fail to mention the threats to job security and working conditions or the proposal to reduce overtime pay.  Even the BBC, considered by the Mail and the Telegraph and other skewed nationalists to be left-biased, broadcast a long interview with a man who said he wouldn’t be able to see his son at Christmas because of the strikes.  After people had pointed out there’s a perfectly good bus service, they were forced to remove the story and explain that the man’s travel plans were, in fact, “unlikely to be affected by the strikes”.

(The left-wing film director Ken Loach has also attacked the BBC for “its absolutely shameless role [in] the destruction of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership” of the Labour party, further undermining the far-right conspiracy theorists.)

What many seem to have missed is that any reasonably clever nerd can create timetables to allow fast trains to overtake slow trains – it’s complicated but not terribly difficult – and they’re called management.  It’s the striking ‘workers’ who have to suffer the effects of delays and disruption, and of seeing someone lying on the line or jumping in front of them when they’re doing 90 mph.

Are the respective rewards of the rail bosses and the strikers being fairly represented in the media? 

And what about the Sussexes?  Did the royal family treat Meghan badly because she was a foreign actor with (slightly) differently coloured skin or is she over-sensitive?  Is it actually a genuinely moving love story between Harry and Meghan that led Harry to give up everything he’d been brought up to do? 

Would anybody care that much about them if the media weren’t making money out of keeping the story hot? 

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been arrested and charged with fraud.  I wonder if he’ll get a fair trial, bearing in mind that the people who lost money were those who were rich enough to buy into cryptocurrencies, and powerful enough to make someone else suffer for what they lost by taking risks with their money.

Of course he should be punished if he was guilty of fraud but should we feel sorry for those who lost money? 

Elon Musk is no longer the world’s richest person after he sold more Tesla shares to finance his purchase of Twitter and, what a surprise, the value of Tesla shares fell.  He’s been replaced as number one by Bernard Arnault, CEO of the group LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, a French corporation selling luxury goods).

Should they stop publishing lists of the richest people on the grounds that, apart from flattering their egos, it achieves nothing and nobody gives a flying fox anyway? 

A leaked civil service survey shows that 8% of civil servants in Whitehall felt they’d been bullied or harassed at work while 7% nationwide made the same claims. Almost a third (30%) of the 33 staff working directly for Dominic Raab say the same and 8 complaints against his behaviour are outstanding.

Should Raab step down until the investigations have been completed? 

After Jarosław Szymczyk, Poland’s police commander in chief, had been presented with a grenade launcher (isn’t that top of all our Christmas lists?) on his visit to Ukraine, he “accidentally” fired it in his office, causing some minor injuries and a hole in the ceiling.  Who is more culpable:  Ukraine for choosing such a dangerous present or Szymczyk for pulling the trigger without first checking whether anything was up the spout? 

Good news for the Democrats in America:  Donald Trump has offered for sale the “official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card” collection with pictures of him wearing a Superman costume, costing “only $99” each.  Since they’re Non Fungible Tokens they’re not even real but they sold out within a day.

Is this another of Trump’s self-inflicted injuries or a canny move by a snake oil salesman? 

Meanwhile, back at a ranch in Oregon, The Democrat governor Kate Brown has commuted the sentences of all prisoners on the state’s death row to life, with no possibility of parole.  It might have been a coincidence of timing but the Death Penalty Information Center revealed this week that 35% of the 20 attempts to execute people this year were botched and caused visible pain.  That’s seven people who weren’t just killed but were tortured first.

I don’t know how many were still claiming to be innocent when they died.

Remember the Pete Seeger song ‘What Did You Learn in School Today?’: “I learned that murderers pay for their crimes / Even if we make a mistake sometimes.”

Stupidity of Post Office, a prince, NFTs, Trumps, politicians, TV police, HMP and CIPD

20 February 2022

The most shameful news of the week is that it’s taken 20 years to set up the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry after more than 700 post office workers were wrongly convicted of fraud, theft and false accounting.  Some of them went to prison, some lost their homes, families and friends, some went bankrupt and some died or killed themselves before many of the convictions were overturned.

What beats me is that the Post Office management was faced with a sudden increase in cases of false accounting and lots of workers complaining about it after they introduced the new Horizon IT accounting system (installed and maintained by Fujitsu) but they chose to believe computer geeks who’d just written a new system rather than people who’d blamelessly worked with them for years. 

Didn’t it occur to anybody to test it on some volunteer post offices or two for a year or so?  (Nobody who actually was fiddling the books would have volunteered so reports of irregularities would have led to a check on the new system rather than prosecutions.)

The biggest unsurprise of the week is Prince Andrew’s agreement to settle with Virginia Giuffre for a very large amount of money.  How can anybody say what amounted to ‘Yes, that’s me in the photograph but I don’t know whose hand that is on the waist of that woman I have no recollection of ever meeting’, and then agree to pay the woman he doesn’t remember meeting such a large sum of money.  I’m thinking of writing to him saying I have no recollection of ever meeting him but could he please send a cheque.

In the agreement, Andrew neither disputes the allegation of sexual assault nor admits it, which will probably have moved the decimal point in the amount he’ll be paying one place to the right.  He does however now claim he “regrets his association with Epstein, and commends the bravery of Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others”, something he forgot to do while Emily Maitlis was letting him humiliate himself in their 2019 BBC interview.

But back to computers and gullibility.  Non Fungible Tokens seem to be the thing at the moment with Rupert Murdoch reported to be considering selling NFTs for front pages from his archives of the Times and the Sun.  Last month, Julian Lennon sold some Beatles stuff as NFTs.  What this means is that people pay money (often a lot of money) for a digital ‘token’ confirming that they ‘own’ the original work (and can sell it on), while Julian retains the original physical items.  Talk about having your cake and eating it.

By the way, if anybody’s interested in buying an NFT for some snake oil I happen to have, don’t hesitate to contact me at #IveBeenConned.

I don’t know how much energy is consumed creating an NFT but cryptocurrencies work in a similarly intangible way and their ‘mining’ use a lot to ‘produce’ something that doesn’t even exist except as a computer code which is so secure that one person reportedly threw away an old computer before realising it was the only place holding the code, and his bitcoin was lost.

In southern Montana, a coal-fired power plant had been failing for years, operating on just 46 days in 2020.  Then Marathon, a bitcoin ‘mining’ company, became the saviour of the plant / destroyer of the planet (your choice) and bought all its output.  In the first nine months of 2021, the plant worked for 236 days powering the new data centre Marathon built next door and emitting 187,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But, no doubt, a lot of people will be getting rich so that’s all right then.

Thinking of which reminds me that Donald Trump’s legal troubles increase by the day (no sniggering at the back please), the latest being the discovery that he illegally removed historical records from the White House. 

In one of the financial cases against him, he and two of his children, Ivanka and Donald Jnr, have been ordered to appear for a disposition in the next three weeks.  Trump Snr’s response included the claim that “We have a great company with fantastic assets that are unique, extremely valuable and, in many cases, far more valuable than what was listed in our Financial Statements.”  Jimmy Kimmel, the American broadcaster, writer and comedian, said “Only Donald Trump would defend himself against charges that he overvalued his assets by re-overvaluing his assets.”

With parliament on its half-term break, the UK’s biggest problems this week were caused by two storms.  The second, fiercer storm was called Eunice, which is such a delicate and sensitive name it was surprising how violent it was.  We escaped scot-free except that my wife refused to let me pop down to the beach to look at the waves, or even to the top of our nearest hill to lean on the wind.

The most unusual (at least to me) beneficiary of the storm was a YouTube outlet called Big Jet TV that livestreams aircraft movements and sets up cameras by airports during storms so viewers can watch the skills of the crew in landing safely.  A record 200,000 people were watching at one point yesterday but not, I’m sure, hoping to see a plane crash in real time.

At this point, I must make a confession:  we do sometimes watch ‘fly on the wall’ police documentaries but at least they’re edited and cut out all the blood and guts involved in crashes. 

My favourite piece was when a Lamborghini (or a Maserati or a Ferlinghetti or some such overpriced car) was stopped for not having a numberplate on the front.  It was bright red with teeth and could take a short-cut under an average lorry.  The driver climbed up out of it and stretched.  The police officer asked if he was OK and he said yes, this car goes very fast and reaches 62 mph before breakfast time yesterday but it’s unbelievably noisy and bloody uncomfortable (I’ve paraphrased what he said slightly but you can get the gist of it).

We now have dashcams in both my wife’s wheelchair accessible car and the proper car and I’ve been surprised what comfort it gives me to know that what’s happening on the road is being recorded (police will prosecute dangerous drivers on the evidence of dashcam recordings if you send them in).

This morning, Boris Johnson was interviewed at a time when all sensible people are still in bed and said the world is apparently poised on the edge of the biggest conflict since the second World War.  However, he appears not to have considered the alternatives such as the whole thing is a massive wind-up by Vladimir Putin who’s got all his perceived enemies needing frequent trouser changes while he chuckles to himself about the success of his manoeuvres.  

Michael Heseltine, a former Conservative deputy prime minister, has come out as yet another of Johnson’s heavyweight critics.  Heseltine pointed out the gap between what the Brexit campaign promised and how little has actually been achieved while the new Brexit minister started by asking Sun readers what they thought he should do.  (65 of the first 68 replies said they didn’t care as long as he didn’t outlaw pictures of semi-naked women;  the other three asked what a Brexit was.)

In Lincolnshire, Paul Robson, who is serving a life sentence for attempted rape and indecent assault and is judged by the police to be very dangerous, absconded from HMP North Sea Camp, an open prison.  He was recaptured quite quickly but we still have to hear which idiot approved his transfer to an open prison.

According to a CIPD survey, there’s good news and bad news.  British employers are expecting to increase pay by 3% this year – good news for the NHS and teachers but bad news for bankers and directors.  Or might the CIPD’s sample have omitted to include any of these groups? 

If you now need cheering up, remember that yesterday was World Pangolin Day.

And that a new slogan has been offered for use on T-shirts in America:  “If you don’t need a mask because God will protect you, why do you need a gun?”