30 November 2017

Diary of a Corbynista

Spin at home, thuggery abroad

by Don Urquhart

22 November

Hammond’s budget will be a feeble affair.  He will make gestures in the popular directions – NHS, Housing, Education, Infrastructure.  He will claim success in terms of employment and deficit reduction, although the most recent deficit figures have been in the wrong direction.  So there will be a lot of words, possibly some gimmicks but nothing to address the real problems.

23 November

The Resolution Foundation tells us that we are due for the longest drop in living standards since records began.  The uncritical listener would have been buoyed by Hammond’s budget statement for he cherry picked statistics and simply told us how well things were going.  He threw in some jokes which left his own benches stony faced and did some standard Labour bashing (the deficit we inherited etc.) but it was unconvincing stuff.  The 1922 Committee will cluster round in his support but for how long?  The long hard NHS winter is upon us.

24 November

The Evening Standard is free.  George Osborne went to town on Hammond’s budget.  He misses few opportunities to besmirch Theresa May and all her works.  Come the General Election he changed tack and had red scare headlines to rival the Mail, Express and Telegraph.  Yesterday he expended nearly as much newsprint on condemning Labour as on the budget itself.  The Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell had been unable to answer some specific question on the deficit and had stubbornly refused to give numbers when asked how much the EU divorce bill should be.

25 November

“God bless the people of Egypt!” tweets the US President.  The words preceding this are “Need the WALL! Need the BAN!” which is clearly for domestic consumption.  The Sinai Province Group is affiliated to ISIS.  Having lost so much ground in Iraq and Syria, the jihadists have found someone else to bully, the relatively peaceable Sufis of North Sinai.  President Sisi has promised strong action and has done some bombing.  It seems that Egypt could well become a failed state.  Sisi has brutally suppressed free speech having deposed the elected Morsi government in 2013.  As in Syria you have to work out who is the least evil thug on the block.

26 November

Four years ago my sister-in-law died in a hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU).  On a Thursday evening the ICU requested attendance of a neurological consultant.  This continued through Friday with no luck.  A very senior neurological consultant turned up on Tuesday evening to tell the family that there was no chance of getting a neurological consultant at a weekend and certainly not on a Bank Holiday.  Jennifer passed away later that evening.  I queried the neurological service level and the Chief Medical Officer spent a lot of time asserting that negligence was not a contributory cause of death.  I spent even more time clarifying that I was not interested in negligence but in the service level.  A few weeks later they had me phone the neurological department where a staff member read from the next weekend’s rota, so I felt that I had achieved something.  The Neurological Alliance reports that the NHS is massively understaffed in this area with long waits for even the most critical conditions.  Like the medical hierarchy in Jennifer’s case, the Department of Health responds to the question it is ready for rather than the one that has been asked.

“We spend over £3 billion every year on neurological services and the number of neurologists in the NHS has increased by 37% since 2010.”

27 November

Children and Families Minister, Robert Goodwill said: “We recognise the importance of ensuring that schools have the necessary resources to meet a wide range of special educational needs.”  Well, that’s good to know.  He also tells us that he is spending £222 million over the next 4 years on reforms of special educational needs and disability support.  You wonder how much of this will go down the throats of management consultants.  The number of children being home-schooled because the system cannot handle special needs has risen by 57% over the last 5 years.  Ask any teacher about the difficulties of getting funding for special needs help.  The government has plenty of answers but only to questions they pose themselves.

28 November

Emmerson Mnangagwa is by all accounts as big a thug as Mugabe.  The latter will now be celebrated by an annual Bank Holiday on his birthday.  He and Grace seem to be escaping with ill-gotten gains intact, a precedent which I am sure Mnangagwa will be keen to follow when the time comes.

 

If you enjoyed this post please share it using the buttons above.

Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the ShawSheet