Nurse! Call a jumbulance for crippled Britain ...
Tory mP Sarah Wollaston has defected from the Vote Leave camp, accusing the Brexiteers of making false claims about the NHS. She says the health service would be worse off if we get out of the EU. Dr Wollaston, who chairs the Commons Health Select Committee, said it was untrue to claim that withdrawal would free up £350 million a week to spend on the NHS.
maybe she’s right. Who knows? the numbers being bandied about by both sides are baffling. I’m not going to get into the financial squabbles for and against, since most of the figures seem to be plucked out of thin air.
you can’t put a monetary value on liberty and national sovereignty. Anyone trying to pin a price tag on our right to make our own laws and control our own destiny is to confirm oscar Wilde’s enduring definition of a cynic — someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Perhaps if Dr Wollaston had paused to read yesterday’s damning report on the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, she may not have been quite so eager to join remain.
When inspectors from the Care Quality Commission made an unannounced visit to the hospital, they found the Accident and Emergency department so busy that 16 ambulances were queueing outside.
they also discovered some people with lifethreatening injuries being forced to wait in something called a ‘Jumbulance’ — a king-sized vehicle designed to accommodate up to four patients at a time. the inspectors noted ‘regular, significant and substantial overcrowding’ inside the building, with patients being warehoused in corridors.
Because of the log-jam at A&E, the ambulances were unable to respond to other emergency calls.
No doubt there are those who will blame the ‘savage cuts’ for the dire state of affairs at the hospital, even though the Government is spending record sums on the NHS and has ring-fenced the health care budget.
What is indisputable is that the pressures on the health service have been greatly exacerbated by mass immigration — something we are powerless to control while we remain in the European Union.
PortSmoUtH is a case in point. Already the most densely inhabited city outside London, its population has undergone a dramatic rise over the past five years. In 2011, at the time of the last census, the number of people in Portsmouth stood at 205,000.
this year it is forecast to reach just shy of 270,000. An increase of more than 30 per cent in half a decade has put severe strain on public services, not just health but education and transport, too.
most of the influx has been from Eastern Europe, as illustrated by the 10,000 people pictured queueing up in Portsmouth to vote in the romanian elections 18 months ago.
Nobody can say accurately how many more have arrived since. Against this backdrop, it is worth reminding ourselves that the Labour government told us just 13,000 would be arriving in Britain from the whole of Eastern Europe after restrictions were lifted in 2004.
So why should we believe any official prediction about anything, especially the ‘benefits’ of EU membership?
there was another aspect of the Care Quality Commissioners’ report into the Queen Alexandra hospital which struck me. Staff recognised that standards were unacceptable but were stranded in a culture of something called ‘learned helplessness’. Eh? Apparently that’s a psychiatric term for a condition which afflicts people who have experienced persistent failure and are now suffering from a sense of powerlessness.
they believe that no matter how bad their situation, there is nothing they can do to improve things.
that would pretty much seem to sum up the predicament of those working not just at the Queen Alexandra, but throughout the NHS and the rest of our ‘world class’ public services. Even when they try to do their best, they are impeded by a system crippled by bureaucracy, incompetence and indifference.
So they become institutionalised and accept that not only can they do nothing to change their situation but there’s no escape either.
A sort of Stockholm Syndrome sets in and, like hostages and kidnap victims, they find it easiest to take the path of least resistance.
UNABLE to address the root cause of the problem — in this case the overwhelming number of people arriving at the hospital — they resort to sticking plaster solutions. Hence, the Jumbulance. Come to think of it, sometimes it seems as if half the country is suffering from Learned Helplessness syndrome — especially when it comes to the EU referendum. Even most of the remain crowd admit the EU is a mess. But they seem to accept that we just have to live with it.
As for experiencing persistent failure and powerlessness, doesn’t that describe perfectly all attempts to reform the EU in Britain’s favour?
Call me Dave’s pathetic ‘renegotiation’ is a classic example of a man afflicted with Learned Helplessness. He knew our so-called ‘partners’ weren’t going to budge an inch, so he modified his ‘demands’ to three parts of Sweet Fanny Adams. Not so much helpless as hopeless.
Even when he was thoroughly humiliated and forced to return empty handed with his tail between his legs, he still tried to make the best of a bad job. He knows that the EU is corrupt, anti-democratic and sclerotic but lacks the courage to break free.
Faced with EU incompetence and intransigence, most of our professional political class is suffering from Learned Helplessness.
they have accepted that some things just don’t change, so we might as well go along with it.
In the NHS, staff hesitate to rock the boat because of the impact it could have on their careers, so they settle for the quiet life option. much the same could be said of the political class, who have a similar vested interest in the status quo.
Dr Sarah Wollaston, whatever flimsy reason she gives for jumping ship, is just the latest politician to calculate that it’s best to cling to nurse for fear of something worse.
She knows full well that the real pressure on the NHS is not money but the ever-increasing number of people wanting to use it, largely because of our inability to control immigration while we remain in the EU.
Fortunately, we’re not all suffering from Learned Helplessness syndrome. We’re not powerless. We can do something about it on June 23.
Vote Leave!