Crap: A Guide to Politics - The Blog

THE CATASTROPHE THAT IS THE NHS

Chapter 3 (Meaningless Crap) of my book records Dave (The Vague) Cameron’s answer to the permanent crisis in the National Health and Education industries which supposedly are, as Gordon Brown never tires of saying, “free at  the point of use”.

“Yes you should meet higher standards, yes you should give your patients and your pupils more.  But we’re not going to tell you how to do it.  You are professionals.  We trust in your vocation.  So in a Conservative Britain, professional responsibility will provide the answer to rising expectations in the NHS and schools.”

(David Cameron, Conservative Party Conference 2006)       

No doubt Dr Michael Ingram, a GP who writes occasionally for The Telegraph, agrees wholeheartedly, declaring on 5th February that:

"Waiting in the wings are the privatisation of general practice and its metamorphosis from a personal, long term relationship of care that is valued in  this country and admired abroad into a private production line system where the concept of “your” family doctor is just a distant memory”.

What planet is he on?  Surely this has to be Cheeky Crap.  “Your” family doctor, the embodiment of which pre-dates the NHS (remember Dr Finlay?) has been a distant memory for at least 30 years.  The state-run NHS, the world’s third largest employer, has been reduced to setting utterly meaningless, weasel-word targets and other bureaucratic nonsenses, for want of price signals.  Take, for example, the current mixed-wards scandal.  No doubt a stab at the likely costs of a full makeover has been made, but there is only one way to find if mixed-wards are worth it, and in what circumstances.  That is not to commission a study, it is to test it on paying customers.

The more fundamental point demonstrates why professionals alone, whatever their intentions, cannot run any large organization, let alone one which is in the “public” sector and “free at the point of use”. It is that, as Nikita Krushchev is reported to have said, “When all the world is communist, Switzerland will have to remain capitalist, so that it can tell us the price of everything”.1

Prices are the invisible hand which guides decisions about the use of all scarce factors of production (capital, labour, land and a myriad of sub divisions); that is why socialism is impossible, and why “national planning” must always be grossly inefficient. (It is not surprising that government censors free market prices wherever it can, that way we, as well as them, must grope about in the dark.)  It is also why the NHS cannot even grope without them.

What, then, has enabled the NHS to stumble along this far?

Firstly, I suggest, is that it started life by compulsory nationalisation of a system that already worked.  As that system became obsolete (via changes in technology etc.) the NHS began to crumble.  Secondly, á la Krushchev, it relies on “Switzerland” i.e. external markets.  Do not Messrs Cameron and Ingram realise how vital in hospital budgeting and funding are its tariffs, (e.g. for operations) copied from the private sector?  Thirdly, it is bolstered by the taxes of the increasing number of taxpayers who don’t use it, preferring to go elsewhere at home and (increasingly) abroad.  (Were this iniquity to be removed by tax rebates, the exodus would become a flood.)

The anti-choice nature of the NHS has been deliberately muffled since its birth by the socialist slogan “from each according to his means, to each according to his needs” – misleading crap and ultimately meaningless crap.  Why?  Because any group of citizens and families with the same means demonstrates a huge diversity of choice amongst different goods and services – health, education, holidays, hobbies, shopping, eating out, and so on.  Only a Stalin would remove such choices by nationalisation and taxation in the name of “free at point of use”.  Only a Stalin would gladly trade several thousand hospital deaths a year in the name of socialism2.

And a Bevan, of course. Aneurin Bevan, the founder of such injustices, is one of the Cameroons’ “Key Britons” whom we must be taught to remember for all time (yes, as a beacon not a blight).  Yet within a couple of generations or so, either the NHS or civilization in the UK will be doomed.

1. The underlying point was first proved by Ludwig von Mises in the 1920s and has never been refuted.

2.   By, for example, outlawing the sale of organs for transplants and by wilful neglect of MRSA,  virtually unheard of in private hospitals.

IDEOLOGICAL CRAP: Children of the State

On October 29th 2007 I referred to government-financed “science” and its propensity to create and perpetuate myths (such as “the world is flat”). Junk science, or more accurately  just junk.

Surely nowhere is this clearer than in State “Education”, a test-bed for increasingly potty ideas under the flag of “social engineering”, introduced and abandoned over several generations of the intensification of the Welfare/Warfare State.  As Per Bylund says (here) all central planning increases central power and when the expected results do not materialise, we get yet more central planning.

The latest junk comes from the Universities of London and Sheffield.  The former, in the shape of Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally, tells us that

“Some aspects of primary education are geared in favour of helping higher  income groups…..policies favour parents which…. know how to use published  information….but can also afford to choose exactly where to live”.

Let’s hope that too many millions weren’t spent on a statement of the obvious (relating to State education).

The latter’s chief adjudicator Philip Hunter says

“Parental choice in the market leads to segregation”.

What market is this?  Not education, that’s for sure.  Even if it were, he’s wrong; Chapter 8 of my book points out that in the USA a genuine cause for concern, racial segregation, is considerably less pronounced in private schools than state schools.  And both here and there, many state school teachers (to say nothing of the pols) prefer private schools for their own children.

The market, Mr Hunter, provides a permanent race to the top under the incentives of improve or die.  Prices for all goods are initially high and the market is small, but the search for efficiency provides a virtuous circle of reduced prices, mass production, and continuous improvement (consider motor cars). 

But the reverse applies in the “public” sector.  (Imagine what a lottery would do for supermarkets, sports teams, computers, and so on.)  As hooligans colonise every school, standards will plummet – to those of current government care homes.  Already hundreds if not thousands of West Indian parents in the UK are sending their children back to the Caribbean for a better education; under lottery placement (from which politicos will be exempt of course) the exodus will be enormous.

No prizes for guessing what happens next in the name of “social justice”.  Private education will be banned.  And after that, forced marriages (currently and rightly under attack by the politicos) will become the last desperate throw in the battle for “equality”.  Wealth must marry poverty, brains must marry brawn, and beauty must marry ugliness.  The return of eugenics with a vengeance.

You think I’m kidding?  Let’s hope so.

ILLOGICAL CRAP FROM THE POLITICOS EN MASSE

The politicos are joined at the hip on tax and spend.  On December 15th last, The Times reported that the Cameroons are “considering a plan to end the BBC’s sole claim on the £3.2 billion licence fee and parcel it out to other broadcasters”.

On 18th January The Times reported that James Purnell (as the Labour Government’s Anti-culture Secretary, but now promoted to fill the gap left by the priceless Peter Hain)  suggested that the £3.4 billion licence fee (wow, 6% inflation per month!) could be carved up in future between the BBC and commercial broadcasters committed to making “quality public-service programmes”.

Naturally, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, lost no time in protesting that this “could threaten its (the Beeb’s) ability to deliver public-service programmes and prompt a viewers’ revolt”.  In contrast the Chairman of the broadcasting Policy Group said that the proposal “may be a sensible first step to protecting the key objective of preserving plurality of supply”.

Meanwhile the Beeb’s Chief Executive Mark Thompson is pursuing an uncosted venture to provide political analysis for every schoolchild arguing that “the BBC was the right body to bring politics to children”.  Ugh!  (Note the singular “the” despite the BBC’s well known bias and corruption.)

As if this weren’t enough, a letter to The Times, correctly describing the current situation “it is as if anyone who wished to read The Times had to take out a year’s subscription to the Guardian…” quite illogically welcomes the Tory proposal!  (So anyone not wishing to take out a subscription to either The Times or the Guardian – or the BBC – must do so for all three!).

This is exactly how the politicos build up their empire, picking off an activity or organisation to nationalise or subsidise (in line with a lobby group’s plea on the basis of “public service” or other such tarradiddle) and later on when the injustice is plain to see, embracing all the competition too.  If the BBC had (sensibly) never existed, who would now be clamouring that all broadcasters – and other media, including The Times and the Guardian – should be funded partially by taxes?  And does anybody think that the overall subsidy would then remain at £3.4 billion? (In France President Zarkozy seems to do what he wants without clamour; he has just decreed that the five channels that make up France Télévisons, where he has some friends of course, will be financed entirely by taxpayers.)

None of this could be sustained without politicos in the media, where the Fourth Estate long since gave up its role as guardian of us the sheeple against the rapacity of government. The Times is a good example on this very issue; David Aaronovitch falls headlong into the same trap as the letter above (see my book Chapter 6) and Tim Hames became a fully paid-up member of the carve-up brigade on Jan 28th.  Government now assumes all wealth is its own, to “parcel out” to those who created it – and those who didn’t, whenever it pleases.

To use a popular word to which I shall return in due course, government is “colonising” all our private areas, possessions, and rights. The Internet, and organisations like The Taxpayers Alliance, are freedom’s only hope.

In the last paragraph of my previous entry (Mad as a Hattersley  (Jan 24th) I referred to a book by Lawrence White, published by “Blackwell”. In fact the publisher was The Institute of Economic Affairs; Blackwell published another, related, book by the same author. Apologies for any confusion.