Dirty Hospitals Are a Result of False Priorities

Following the Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust debacle last week, it seems there is a bad situation developing in Wales, according to THIS BBC report. People need to be careful not to tar all hospitals with the same brush, but one thing is becoming clear, and that's that NHS management is failing. If managers are not able to implement proper cleaning procedures it is only right to ask what else they are getting wrong. The NHS is one of the world's largest employers - second only to the Indian army, I read somewhere. Reforming it is like turning round an oil tanker. Successive governments have tried and failed, partly because few politicians have the courage to admit what we all know - that it's a 1940s national structure, trying and failing to meet the demands of twenty first century healthcare. It seems to me that there should be national centres for some treatments, but apart from that, the NHS needs to be broken down into much smaller units. You cannot run an organisation employing more than a million people centrally. At the moment you have the worst of all worlds, with national, regional and local administrations burdening people at the coalface with daily demands, targets and bureaucracy.

The other reason the NHS creaks is because no one will own up to the fact that it cannot meet every demand placed on it. When it was created it was meant to provide a comprehensive system of healthcare. No one envisioned to the medical advances that would be made. No one predicted that we would need a body like NICE to ration the provision of drugs. Certainly no one would ever have predicted that the NHS would take up around a sixth of government expenditure.

But it's this expenditure that has proved to be the essence of many of the NHS's problems. Since 1997 expenditure on the NHS has more than doubled, yet the outcomes are nowhere near what one might have predicted with such a rise in funding. Ok, much of it was spent in salary rises for nurses and doctors, but one might have expected at least a 25% increase in productivity. Instead, what we have seen is a target culture which has led to a huge increase in false prioritisation within the NHS. Everything is about patient throughput, rather than patient care. And, I am afraid this brings us back to where we started. Dirty hospitals are a direct result of these false priorities.

Lunch with Theresa

I'm having lunch with Theresa May today. I shall be wearing my best shoes. Someone said to be recently, "you are to ties, what Theresa May is to shoes". I think they meant it kindly...

The Case for More Than 28 Days Detentions Died Today

Jacqui Smith appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee today and completely destroyed her own government's case for increasing the number of days terrorist suspects can be held from 28 days. She revealed that there hasn't been a single occasion when there has been a need to do so so far. She then said that the need for an extension is 'precautionary', and that it is the police who feel it's necessary, due to the nature of the threat we face.

Jonathan Levy on the Boulton & Co blog says...

It seems to me that the job of government is not just to grant police powers,
but also to curtail them where they would be disproportionately draconian.

That's probably the most telling sentence I have read on a blog for a long time.

Part of the Union?

UPDATE Tue 11am: I cannot believe some of the ridiculous comments people have made about this video. Funny that no one has disputed any of the facts in it. It's not being anti Scottish, it's about being pro English and alerting people to the disgraceful amount of money being filtered out of England and given to Scotland. This is a legitimate political debate and the reaction in the comments demonstrate that there are many people afraid of having it. I wonder why that would be then?

Three More Election Battleground Programmes

I've recorded another three Election Battleground programmes today, all of which are alredy on the 18 Doughty Street archive. For the uninitiated they are 30 minute programmes with psephologist Robert Waller, who talks about the marginal seats in a different region of the country in each programme. Click on the links below for the latest three programmes and the the previous ones are listed too.

South London
North London
Scotland

And from the archives, South West, South East, West Midlands, Wales, North of England, East Anglia, North West. We'll be doing Yorkshire, East Midlands and the South next.

Advert: Jonny Wilkinson Limited Edition Signed Caricature

Now you know that I am not a rugby fan, but even I watched the game on Saturday night - ok, ok, it was on in the background over dinner. Anyway, Jonny and the England rugby team certainly did the country proud at the weekend. Although it may be early to think of Xmas pressies just now, England rugby fans could do worse than visit www.notjustagame.co.uk where personally signed Jonny Wilkinson limited edition prints are still available. The images are by the caricaturist John Ireland and all the official prints come with a photo of Jonny signing his prints. HERE'S a direct link to the Jonny print.

You May Think You're Anonymous...

Just a warning to those 'anonymous' commenters who think they can say anything they like on a blog and get away with it. Well you can't. I've always maintained that anyone on the internet is subject to exactly the same laws as anyone else, and just because you post anonymously, that doesn't mean that you can't be traced.

The Guardian carried a very revealing report today about a case involving a football website where fans of Sheffield Wednesday expressed their views on the owners of the club in a libellous fashion. The Chairman, Chief Executive and five directors of the club have won a High Court ruling forcing the owner of the Owlstalk website to reveal the identity of those accused of libelling them. It's worth reading the whole article HERE but here's an extract...

The club's lawyers asked the judge, Richard Parkes QC, to order disclosure about the identity of 11 fans. But the judge decided some fans, whose postings were merely "abusive" or likely to be understood as jokes, should keep their anonymity. The judge ordered that three fans whose postings might "reasonably be understood to allege greed, selfishness, untrustworthiness and dishonest behaviour", should be unmasked. Their right to maintain their anonymity and express themselves freely was outweighed by the directors' entitlement to take action to protect their reputation, he said. Court orders obliging websites to disclose the identity of users posting anonymous defamatory remarks began in 2001.

Dominic Bray, of K&L Gates, Sheffield Wednesday's solicitors, said: "There seem to be quite a lot of websites that are using their anonymity to make comments about people and think that there shouldn't be any liability for it. But the internet is no different to any other place of publication, and if somebody is making defamatory comments about people then they should be held responsible for it. What these cases do is just confirm that's the law - the law applies to the internet as much as it does to anything else."

This ruling has huge implications for blogs and websites and may well force us all to introduce full registration. If there are any libel lawyers reading this, do give us your take on this ruling and how it may affect blogs like mine!

The EU Reform Treaty: The View from Spain

A friend of mine just emailed this.

Here's the view on the Treaty from Spain. In an editorial in El Mundo of Saturday it was stated "....The new Treaty conserves the core of the Constitutional Treaty......In reality, the Treaty rejected in 2005 by the French and Dutch has hardly been changed..." Couldn't be any clearer! I'm a simple sort of guy. So, in order to clear this up, can someone please set out in simple language the differences (if there are any) between the Constitution and the Reform Treaty so the public can decide. We can't trust the politicos to do this but there must be an independent body who can.

Indeed. Anyone like to help?

David Cameron made a pretty good first of it in the House of Commons in response to the Prime Minister's statement this afternoon.

The Irish Prime Minister says it’s 90 per cent the same. The Spanish Foreign Minister says it’s 98 per cent the same. The German Chancellor says “The substance of the Constitution is preserved. That is a fact”. Why does he think all of them are wrong and he is right? What’s more, isn’t it the case that even his own colleagues don’t believe him. His new Trade Minister, Lord Jones of Birmingham, days before his appointment, said: “This is a con to call this a treaty – it’s not. It’s exactly the same – it’s a Constitution”. His colleagues on the Labour-dominated European Scrutiny Committee say the EU Treaty is “substantially equivalent” to the constitution - even for Britain. They say that pretending otherwise, as the Prime Minister keeps doing, is “likely to be misleading”. Next the Prime Minister says even if it’s a constitution for other countries it isn’t for Britain because of our opt outs and our red lines. Will he confirm the red lines don’t include the EU President, the single legal personality, the vetoes or the ratchet clause? That’s why his Hon Friend who helped to draft the Constitution described the red lines as “red herrings”.

Labour Peer to Apologise for Misleading the House?

Last week I accused Labour Finance Spokesman in the Lords, Lord Davies of misleading the House. See HERE. I suggested he might like to make a Personal Statement to apologise. It seems that he is making a personal statement this afternoon. It may be nothing at all to do with what I wrote about last week, but we shall see.

UPDATE: His statement was very short containing the required apology to the House and then maintaining that what he had meant to say was that UK corporation tax was one of the lowest amongst the G7 rather than the OECD!?! Yes ... well - not the sort of 'mistake' that one would expect a Minister on top of his brief to make.

Successful Schools Penalised by Labour

A few years ago I calculated that fewer than ten Labour MPs, out of a (then) total of 416 had ever run a business. THIS story in today's Telegraph exemplifies the effects of what happens when politicians have no idea how businesses work. Ok, a school is not a business, but in this case acts like one. It builds up a capital sum over a number of years to spend on an expensive project - maybe a refurbishment, or a new classroom. Now the government comes along and says that it must hand over 5% of any end of year surplus to the local authority in some sort of new tithe system. All this does is penalise good schools who manage their assets properly, and encourage all schools to spend every single penny of their budget for fear of being penalised for not doing so. Typical socialist economics of the mad house.

Guido on The Independent

Guido's thoughtful (yes, he can be) piece on the conduct of The Independent over its EU story deserves wider publicity. Read it HERE. (And a follow-up HERE) I don't think this over yet. Not by a long way.

Will Huhne Drugs Story Prove Toxic?

The revelation, if it can be called that, that LibDem leadership frontrunner once penned an article for a student magazine running through the risks of taking different kinds of drugs, doesn't seem to be catching hold. It is actually an old story which has been re-run to cause him damage. He managed to laugh it off in the Andrew Marr interview yesterday. Perhaps people expect this sort of thing from Liberal Democrats and they are taken less seriously than if it were a Conservative politician. That may or may not be right, but anyone who thinks Chris Huhne should be disaqualified from standing because of an article like this is basically saying that anyone who did anything slightly wrong in their youth should never enter politics or aspire to positions of responsibility. The House of Commons would be a very empty place.

Alex Deane: Report from the Aussie Election Day 8

CAMPAIGN DAY 8 – 33 TO GO

Last night’s tight debate between the Prime Minister and Kevin Rudd, and critiques thereof, dominate today’s media.

John Howard announced a new policy – a climate fund built with the funds gained from the auction of carbon permits, which will subsidise electricity bills for low income citizens. His essential message, that there is a cost to dealing with climate change and that people need to be helped to deal with those costs, is related to the fact that the best way to get people to engage with climate change is to help them to do so more easily, rather than lecturing them – an argument I’ve previously heard expressed well by Conservative blogger James Cleverly and is put really well by Crikey here.

That policy aside, the debate was a recital of a number of lines we’ve already heard – or at least, those of us who watched have heard. Debates such as these, IMHO, are watched almost solely by people who’ve made up their minds already. Certainly, most people will at least read a headline about who won or not (and, like most leaders’ debates in the modern era, this didn’t feature any knockout blows and is being spun both ways) but they don’t commit to sitting down and watching the 90 minutes of to-and-fro. I know that the heritage of such debates is very different in the USA of course, where great things supposedly turn on a candidate’s appearance, or whether he sighed or looked at his watch, but here it doesn’t receive the same focus.

There's a good poll for the Liberals in Western Australia HERE.

UPDATE

There is a meta-debate being conducted at the moment which threatens to drown out the debate proper. More precisely, the debate is about the “worm”, a fluctuating line appearing at the bottom of the screen that allegedly shows how the leaders are performing in the debate, based on the view of a group of people chosen by a TV station.

By agreement, the worm was not to be used in last night’s debate. Channel 9 chose to do it anyway. Their feed was briefly interrupted.

The response? Pandemonium. Accusations that the Liberal Party has been shutting down debate, free speech etc (Tim Blair gives a list of links to all the relevant coverage here). Kevin Rudd drew a parallel with the Soviet Union.

Putting aside the fact that the feed was interrupted by the National Press Club and not the government, the comparison is remarkably dumb, isn’t it? As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t know why people think that it’s ok to make references to the USSR when they wouldn’t do so about Nazi Germany. Stalin was a tyrant just as evil as Hitler – indeed, in terms of the sheer number of people he murdered, even worse.

But Rudd must have a point in the end, no? I mean, of course dissent’s being crushed in Australia – I know, because I read it in the newspapers. Of course dissent’s being crushed – the momentary interruption of transmission of a debate between the Prime Minister and his opponent on one of the TV stations showing it displays that, doesn’t it?

Sunday Observations

* What on earth was Gordon Brown doing alongside Heads of State on the Rugby World Cup platform? I was outraged of Tunbridge Wells! Why are you not surprised by that? The sight of Johnny Wilkinson pushing past Gordon Brown and ignoring him was a joy, though.

* It was inevitable I suppose that Lewis Hamilton would fail too.

* Still, at least the Happy Hammers won! Albeit somewhat fortunately...

* Chris Huhne seems to have made the more impressive start in the LibDem leadership stakes.

* Antony Seldon's new book on the Blair/Brown feud looks to be a cracker if the Mail on Sunday extracts are anything to go by. Our Prime Minister is psychotic.

* Looking forward to watching Episode 1 of new series of Spooks later. Love it.

Saturday Night Open Thread

We're off out to dinner this evening with my friend Simon Jones, who's the Tory candidate in Dagenham & Rainham, so I thought I would, by popular demand, create another open thread, where you can discuss what you like. Well, when I say "what you like", just remember I will have my Blackberry with me. I will be very annoyed if I have to use it, so behave!

Over to you!

My Next Book: 100 People Who Are Screwing Up Britain

I'm delighted to tell you about my next book - and believe it or not, I'm going to write it all on my own! More than a year ago I wrote THIS blogpost about an American book called THE 100 PEOPLE WHO ARE SCREWING UP AMERICA - (AND AL FRANKEN IS #37). Well, I'm going to write the British equivalent for Harriman House. It'll be called THE 100 PEOPLE WHO ARE SCREWING UP BRITAIN - AND.... and, well, this is where you come in. I want you to tell me who you think should be #37, and therefore on the book jacket. Actually, it needn't be #37. Polly Toynbee would of course deserve a much higher ranking.

Also, who do you think I should include in the book? Essentially, I'll be writing 100 polemical rants essays which will be provocative to anyone left of Nick Clegg. Mind you, by the time the book comes out, he may be included too.

The book will be published next September. I hope then to do a follow up in 2009 called 100 PEOPLE WHO ARE PUTTING BRITAIN BACK TOGETHER AGAIN. Or something like that.

Where are they Now? Arthur Scargill

Not that I much care, you understand. It's just that he hasn't reared his ugly head in years. Maybe he's retired to Walton on the Naze. Maybe he's plotting another socialist revolution. Anyone know the truth of his activities and wheareabouts? A nation demands to know!

The Trouble With Surveys

James Forsyth has stirred up a hornets nest with his post on the Coffee House blog that elder children are smarter than their younger siblings. He refers to the TIME story on the subject.

In June, for example, a group of Norwegian researchers released a study showing
that firstborns are generally smarter than any siblings who come along later,
enjoying on average a three-point IQ advantage over the next eldest—probably a
result of the intellectual boost that comes from mentoring younger siblings and
helping them in day-to-day tasks. The second child, in turn, is a point ahead of
the third.

I usually look at surveys and reports like these and look at them from a personal perspective. With respect, I think this one is rubbish. I have two sisters and I readily admit that one of them (I'm not saying which one!) probably has a far higher IQ than me. Indeed, when I think of my friends and relations it is often the second child who is cleverer. Maybe things are different in Norway!

Is Nick Clegg a Man of the Right?

Olly Kendall, Charles Kennedy's former press officer, has written another thoughtful ARTICLE for CiF on why Nick Clegg is the chosen one. He denies that Clegg is a man of the right in a way that doth protest a little too much, I feel. I remember doing an hour long interview with Nick Clegg and at the end of it said to him: "We've spent an hour talking and I can't think of hardly anything we've disagreed about. I'm not sure who should be more worried - me or you!"

There's no doubt that on economic issues he's a free marketeer. He's a libertarian on social and civil liberties issues. The only two areas I can think of where he's not on the right are immigration and Europe. He missed a major opportunity to differentiate himself from Chris Huhne yesterday by ruling out support for a referendum on the EU Reform Treaty. Bad move. I wonder if he still supports Ming's In or Out referendum.

I wonder if Chris Huhne will now grab the initiative and promise a referendum on the Treaty. Peter Spencer writes on the Boulton & Co blog...

Nick Clegg speaks very highly of Chris Huhne. And he means it. Chris Huhne speaks very highly of Nick Clegg. And he means it too. That'll be sexy then. Two deadly foes swopping lethal blows till it's the last man standing. Not. More like two girlies swopping Barbie accessories. And this saccharinathon will drag on for weeks. Not exactly a ratings challenge to the rugby.

Each candidate must take every opportunity to differentiate themselves. How about a referendum then, Chris?

This Week We Shall Mostly be Interviewing Actors

I've just watched THIS WEEK on the BBC's play again facility. They had some foppy haired actor called Julian Rhind-Tutt doing a film on why we should all be pro-european. It was a classic example of why THIS WEEK should steer clear of this sort of film. He came out with a series of cliches and platitudes - was quite eloquent, but had nothing very original to say.


But the telling point came when he was live in the studio and was found out. He couldn't string two words together. It indicated that for the film he had clearly learned a script - either his own or one that was written for him. In a ten minute discussion he hadn't a clue. He couldn't answer a single question put to him. What is the point of that? Wouldn't it have been better to have had a pro-european guest ... (whisper it, possibly even a politician?) who could actually articulate an argument?


It is true to say that every programme gets a dud guest from time to time. It even happens on 18 Doughty Street (!), but on a political programme like THIS WEEK surely we deserve better than a bit part actor who's got absolutely bugger all to say?!