Buddy! CanYou Spare An Aircraft Carrier?

According to a report in the Mail on Sunday, do stop laughing, this is serious, the USA has signalled its intentions about its military presence in the vicinity of London during the July-August Olympics of 2012.

How good to see that the Americans seem to have taken my remarks on Tuesday 12 May 2009 on Olympics Security to heart and are taking steps to take care of themselves.

It seems that an aircraft carrier is to be in place to help with security, I suspect primarily of American citizens fleeing the rage of the British Media as they walk off with most of the medals. This is an offer the UK government may well not be able to refuse.

The more charitable of us, and perhaps some PR people might suggest, is that the denuding of local police forces in many areas to provide cover in London might lead to civil breakdown in rural areas of East Anglia and Kent. So, the hospital and other services provided by these vessels in emergencies such at Haiti will be on hand.

These could be needed because on present plans the NHS is unable to deal with any major emergency anywhere. Also, it is likely that Fire Brigades may be on work to rule to allow them to spend more time moonlighting and the UK Armed Forces will all be in therapy.

I suspect that purely for internal French reasons they will have an aircraft carrier to hand at the same time along with a large proportion of the rest of the their fleet. If you want a quiet holiday then, perhaps Toulon might be a good place.

If the government’s media operations were fleet of foot enough they could decide to hold an international Navy Month in the Thames and adjacent waters as a prestige event purely as an added attraction. Let ‘em all come.

In the meantime, the “Ark Royal” has been instantly decommissioned, not only for the running costs, but the extensive needs of repair and upgrading now needed. We are in the process of building two new aircraft carriers but this will take some years.

We cannot afford to do this, nor can we afford to run them when completed but we cannot afford not to build them either because of the way the contracts were drawn up by Gordon Brown.

One of these vessels is listed to be named “Prince of Wales”. At the moment the living one is being castigated for allowing precious antique furniture he saved for the nation to go to rack and ruin at Dumfries House in Ayrshire. However, this name sends a cold shiver down the spine.

It was in 1941 that Roosevelt and Churchill met on the battleship “Prince of Wales” to create the “Special Relationship” (see my blog of Monday 25 January 2010). On 10 December 1941 together with HMS “Repulse” it was sunk off Malaya by Japanese naval forces using aircraft carriers. Churchill had sent these battleships without the usual support and paid a terrible price.

This signalled the end of the age of the big battleship and the era of aircraft carriers. These in turn need major support vessels. In the second decade of the 21st Century it can be argued that militarily the age of the carriers is now over with all the missile technology and capability around. We need a fundamental review of just what sea borne defences we need and can afford.

Perhaps if the American carrier does arrive in The Thames in 2012 it can adopt a “hearts and minds” approach to pacify the locals.

What about organising a few tea parties?

2001 And All That

Again, looking through the personal archive there is this one from 2001 about the election that year. It is long at 2200 words and before blogging I was unable to find an outlet.

Reading it is a little spooky as so much could almost relate to the present as much as the past. So how much have we really moved on in the last decade?

Perhaps we are the prisoners of the past which will not go away.

Quote

THE GLASS IS FALLING - A CONTRARY ELECTION

The Blair Bounce Election of 2001 has been a strange experience. All along it has had the whiff of 1959, when McMillan’s Conservatives should have been punished for the grotesque adventure of the Suez Affair, their dissembling arrogance, and the cavalier treatment of the public purse.

Again, an electorate befuddled by style, unsure of the future, and lurching to the apparent safety of the certain have given authority back to an undeserving and creepy bunch of hoods. So what happened this time, and where were the Tories?

THE TEAM

Who are these Tories? Apart from Hague and a handful of others they were strangers to us all. It is possible for a party to be elected as a more or less clean slate of unknowns, Blair managed it in 1997 against the Tory misfits, but it is much better for a team to have made an impact on the minds of the electorate. This is something that had not happened, and it is worrying.

Was it simply a failure of strategy on the part of the Conservative Party, or has the media drifted away so much from routine and day to day politics and issues that we no longer know who is in the frame?

During the election most of the tabloids were rarely deflected from their style and celebrity sensations, and even the broadsheet newspapers gave cursory attention to any but the leaders. If the media cannot be bothered with the second tier politicians then why should the voter?

A part of the problem now is that few members of the House of Commons have ever done much of a real job. As one pensioner put it, they don’t know one end of a shovel from the other. This means that in dealing with the world of work, the getting and spending, and realities of the ordinary jobs, they really have no idea of what goes on and how things are organised or done, and it shows.

At one time the typical Tory could claim that by and large most of them had more experience in actually running real things than their Socialist equivalent, the sons of toil, but that is no longer true.

The generation who had some idea of how to react when things got rough quickly and things had to be done fast and firmly have gone. Blair and Major both, as well as their advisers, have been flustered and floundering in these situations.

Also, the Tories do not lie convincingly, when they have needed to temporise there has been the tell tale slack in the mouth. Their inexperience has meant that many have retained the habits of childhood, the wide-eyed frankness and the excuses that just get you into more trouble.

New Labour with its essential qualification of a total lack of any concept of truth has been able to lie with impunity. If anything there has been the smack of admiration amongst those voters in commercial life and especially in the public services for whom toughing it out is an article of faith.

Hugh Gaitskell had much the same problem in 1959 in trying to sell his new team and direction to the public. The public did not like many of the ones they knew, and were suspicious of those they did not know, especially the Bevanites. Then, as now, the Government had managed to dominate media attention, and gloss over its own troubles.

Amongst those the voters did not like, Gaitkskell had too many of the living ghosts of the past, notably Herbert Morrison, his rival and a man notorious for spite and malice. Another problem he had was the annual Easter Parade of the Left, the clergy, and the KGB-GRU remittance men on the road to Aldermaston.

William Hague has been worse off in having Sir Edward Heath, the Beast of Bexley, to contend with. In addition there has been Boyo Heseltine The Dome, the very sundry fans of Europe (Prodi and Kinnock Rule OK) led by Napoleon Howe, and as an occasional comedy turn, Baroness Thatcher, to distract people from his message.

THE POLICIES

Can anyone remember what the policies were, and did anyone really know in the first place? Oliver Poole, one of the great Chairmen of the Conservative Party averred that it was necessary to have your ideas firmly planted in the public mind a good six months before an election. Then you convinced the voters that you had a grasp of the essentials.

It is more difficult today, when there are no longer the great issues of war and peace, and we have accepted some of our limitations. Additionally, the media driven need to go after what is defined as a story about human interest or the latest gruesome sensation, remains a formidable obstacle to putting over a closely argued case on the needs of the future.

Moreover, the voter has become convinced that matters like health, education, and race are the only real items and are not secondary to the critical concerns.

Is it possible actually to have a set of policies as a means of guidance for the voter? The movement in the Nineties to legislation on the hoof, running sloppy regulations and directives past Parliament in a hurry, and taking on board as policy the latest utterance of the more influential pressure groups and public relations outfits, means that government increasingly is a game of hopscotch.

So when an opposition leader attempts to say that policy is important then the counter argument is simply “Trust me when it happens”. In a world of real and media uncertainty and incompetence it is very difficult to counter this claim. The next Conservative Leader can hope only that something comes up which causes Blair to blow a fuse big enough to lose the faith of the masses

One of the paradoxes of history is that in 1959 there was an electorate, most of whom had left school at fourteen or earlier having had only an Elementary School education, but possibly were better informed with less media facilities. The much longer educated voter of today with a multiplicity of news sources and providers of information, arguably knows little, and cares less.

So who needs policy?

THE LEADER

Gaitskell observed that he would fight, fight, and fight again, for the principles he believed in, which may have been a factor in his losing the 1959 election. The British seem to be averse to this sort of open pugnacity in their politics.

They prefer to be lied to with honeyed words and told things are easily accomplished and at much less cost than anyone expects. This is the basic reason for so many of our financial fiascos in central and local government.

Corelli Barnett has observed that Tony Blair is not a man he would care to be with in a slit trench with when the bullets start flying. He has missed the point. Blair is well aware that he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day. William Hague has given the appearance of being a bit of a bouncer who wants to get on with it. Politically this is not the British way.

One more comment is that we have to return to the question of style and the media. It is curious that the film “Kes” made several appearances in the election period. One of the leads was the late Brian Glover, an intelligent and able actor, often unfairly typecast as a dim, blundering, bruiser of a Yorkshireman.

In the dark, with the light behind him, William Hague has a passing resemblance to Brian. But worse, much, much, worse, is the voice. Close your eyes and wonder, and the intonations of Geoffrey Boycott come to mind. The cricketer arouses strong emotions amongst people, but I doubt if you would find many who would care to leave him in charge of the shop for a day.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

In the late 1940’s Bevan took the local arrangements for health care in Tredegar, which worked well in the context of a Welsh Valley, and made them the template of the National Health Service of the future for the whole of the UK. At the same time the Government imprinted on the public mind that there was a finite end in sight.

As I heard Attlee say in 1950, “It will take a long time and we will have to work very hard, but we will get there.” The trouble was that there wasn’t any “there” to arrive at; the destination was always going to be changing, as well as the roads to be followed.

The combination of Bevan’s single model with mid 20th Century administrative systems was fatal to the idea. The NHS was badly flawed at the outset, and all the reorganisations, initiatives and the rest, have simply added to the confusion. At least in 1959 you could reckon on a clean floor and a tidy bathroom and food in the mouth.

The indescribable filth of so many hospitals and the sight of the incapable old starving in their beds for lack of staff to feed them is a testament to the capabilities of our civil service and political system.

Similarly in Education, called a national service locally administered, but known to insiders as a random collection of local services nationally confused, the sluggish development of the 1950’s gave way to the conspicuous failures of management in the 1960’s and 1970’s, which all the paperwork of the last twenty years has nothing to cure. Even in 1959 it was known that things were going badly, and the same problems are still with us.

It would be possible to go through a litany of failures and incredible stupidities, and one wonders how the government of the day got away with it all. But they did so there should be little surprise that despite its manifest weaknesses and failures the government of Blair and his associates have survived, trading on the weakness of the electorate when faced with the need for change.

When the results began to come through in 1959, we were disbelieving of what we were seeing. Surely they were untypical? How could the shyster, Supermac, as they called Harold Macmillan, be going back to Downing Street? The historians have pored over the subject, but have not come up with convincing answers. Was it really the fear of radical change?

There is one possibility, though, a remark made at the time by a senior lady Labour councillor who knew her ward and city better than any. “They thought we were going to close ITV down, and didn’t want to lose Take Your Pick.” she said, talking of the virulent reaction of many Labour leaders to the introduction of the commercial television channel and the new world of game shows.

So what did the electorate of 2001 think they were going to lose? I am at a loss here and can think only that the price of houses may have something to do with it, but that is a weak and tentative gut reaction, and probably wrong.

The worry is that in 1963 the electorate lost Gaitskell as an option and in 1964 finished up with Wilson after Macmillan finally blew his fuse and left Home with insufficient time to make up lost ground. This gave us the dreadful combination of Heath and Wilson and the abandonment of any future for Britain.

Surely, we can do better than that? But it all may be academic.

In the eighties, there were commentators who predicted that the Conservative government of the day could rule forever. In the nineties, they self destructed, but can New labour be trusted to do the same?

In the House of Commons in May we had the innovation of the Government majority deeming that in law things had happened when they had not in order to push something through. Will Blair go further in 2005 or 2006 in declaring that the next election will be deemed as held when it wasn’t?

Unquote.

What I did not guess was that a few weeks after this was written 9/11 happened. But just how much has it changed?

Slumming It In Belgravia

It is a long time since I was getting by in Central London on less than £400 a year. The accommodation was limited but clean and warm. I ate (and drank) as well as most and was out and about enjoying myself. Later when a family man in the labour market the idea of paying about £5,000 for a modest family house in one of the outer suburbs seemed a large amount of money.

So to see a rental of £400 a week quoted, amounting to £20,800 a year seems an immense figure to pay. Yet this is the “cap” and it is clear that much larger amounts are being paid to many people to allow them to live in Central London whether or not they work or indeed make any contribution to the economy.

Why and how has this come about? To those outside London it is astonishing. It is clear, if nothing else, that there has been rampant inflation in housing costs. But this is not counted as “inflation” by the Government, because they have decreed that such costs are not included in the calculations.

More to the point the funding for all this in terms of “Housing Benefit” is being paid by the taxpayer. These are now increasingly the middling and poorer classes and decreasingly the upper and richer as their tax liability is exported by them to tax havens or defrayed by their political associates because of their supreme importance to whatever it is they are supposed to be important at.

Just as Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodies who benefits from the Housing Benefit other than the people to whom it is paid out to? They benefit from having living space but do not retain the money because it is paid out to someone else. In the case of local councils or social housing associations at least we have some idea of who and what.

In the case of the private sector of one sort or another it is far from clear. What is clear is the howls of rage in certain political quarters and crossing political boundaries about the application of a “cap”. Dare I suggest that only a minority of these, if any, do not have some kind of direct or indirect interest in property holdings, valuations and rentals?

Dare I suggest that some of the rental markets in London and other urban areas are closely associated with various forms of criminal activity, money laundering and other dodgy and tax avoiding/evading rackets that prey on the taxpayer and those in need of accommodation?

Dare I suggest that some of those who howl the most and the loudest are also most aware of all these and in some cases much more closely connected than they really ought to be? Dare I suggest that a loud howler who also howls loudly about the poor underprivileged banks and bankers may have more to their personal finances that meets the eye or for that matter a keen tax accountant?

Why should the rest of the UK be funding the huge amounts of ramped up profits engendered by the mindless application of a fault ridden and fraud liable scheme that has gone badly wrong in so many places? Why should the lawful population also be subsidising some of the most criminal elements in society?

On the Left is it possible to wonder about the gerrymandering of votes recently as well. This was an accusation once made of the Right. The trouble is that the Left and Right seemed to have merged. So who is Napoleon and who is Squealer?

The poor old taxpayer hasn’t a Snowball’s chance in hell. See Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.

Popping The Pills

The UK Government White Paper on Health is a centre of attention at the moment. Perhaps we ought to be looking equally hard at other aspects of health provision.

The 1300 word item (it can be skip read) from the New York Times below is about major defaults by a UK company, Glaxo Smith Kline. This is an industry that is supposed to be tightly controlled and regulated.

How strange that this story is little covered the UK media, perhaps advertising revenues are a consideration. Even stranger is what could be happening with other companies peddling untested and unregulated common chemical products for daily use, also providing advertising revenue.

Quote:

New York Times
Glaxo to Pay $750 Million for Sale of Bad Products
By Gardiner Harris and Duff Wilson - Published: October 26, 2010

GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug giant, has agreed to pay $750 million to settle criminal and civil complaints that the company for years knowingly sold contaminated baby ointment and an ineffective antidepressant, the latest in a growing number of whistle-blower lawsuits that drug makers have settled with multimillion-dollar fines.

Altogether, GlaxoSmithKline sold 20 drugs with questionable safety that were made at a huge plant in Puerto Rico that for years was rife with contamination.

Cheryl D. Eckard, the company’s quality manager, asserted in her whistle-blower suit that she had warned Glaxo of the problems but the company fired her instead of addressing them.

Among the drugs affected were Paxil, an antidepressant; Bactroban, an ointment; Avandia, a troubled diabetes drug; Coreg, a heart drug; and Tagamet, an acid reflux drug. No patients were known to have been sickened, although such cases would be difficult to trace.

In a rising wave, recent lawsuits have asserted that drug makers misled patients and defrauded federal and state governments that, through Medicare and Medicaid, pay for much of health care.

Using claims from industry insiders, federal prosecutors are not only demanding record fines but are hinting at more severe actions.

Suffering a research drought, drug makers have laid off thousands of employees. Some of those dispatched have in turn filed whistle-blower lawsuits that can lead to criminal investigations.

Justice Department officials announced the settlement in a news conference Tuesday afternoon in Boston, saying a $150 million payment to settle criminal charges was the largest such payment ever by a manufacturer of adulterated drugs. The outcome also provides $600 million in civil penalties.

The share to the whistle-blower will be $96 million, one of the highest such awards in a health care fraud case. When asked whether any individual could be charged in addition to the corporation charges, Carmen M. Ortiz, the United States attorney for Massachusetts, would say only that the investigation was not yet complete.

GlaxoSmithKline released a statement saying that it regretted operating the Puerto Rico plant in violation of good manufacturing practices. The company said the problem had involved only one plant that was closed in 2009. American shares in the company fell 0.35 percent on Tuesday.

Tony West, the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s civil division, said hundreds of such lawsuits were awaiting federal review.

“We’ve opened more investigations, we’ve recovered more taxpayer dollars lost to fraud, we’ve had more convictions, higher penalties and fines in the last two years than we’ve had in any other two-year period,” Mr. West said in an interview.

Whistle-blowers who win earn a cut of the eventual fine. Ms. Eckard will collect $96 million from the federal government, and she will collect additional millions from states.

The suits, all filed under seal, have for years been rising in size and scope, but the collective threat to the industry has been largely unnoticed because the growing mountain is obscured by a wall of judicial secrecy. Each successful claim begets more suits, with more being filed almost every week.

The suits are filed under a federal law originally intended to stop Civil War hucksters from selling rancid meat to the Union Army by paying bounties to tipsters. The pharmaceutical industry has become the law’s most successful target because the government now buys far more pills than bullets, and because fraud in health care is common.

Health care cases accounted for some 80 percent of the $3.1 billion recovered by the Justice Department under the false claims act last year, the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund, a nonprofit whistle-blower advocacy group in Washington, reported on Monday. Most of the money is typically returned to the programs in which false claims were filed, like Medicaid and Medicare.

The Food and Drug Administration and the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department both announced recently that they would pursue charges against executives personally under a strict liability provision of the law, something that has not been done since 2007 when the three top executives of Purdue Pharma were convicted, sentenced to probation and personally fined $34 million while Purdue paid $600 million.

The rule allows executives to be prosecuted and barred from government sales even if they were not aware of specific violations.

Legislation could make such claims easier to win. Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill that permits executives to be barred even if they have left the company where the fraud occurred and that permits the inspector general to prosecute parent companies for the sins of subsidiaries.

Pfizer alone has settled four whistle-blower cases since 2002, and it paid a $2.3 billion fine last year, the largest in history. Whistle-blower cases have become so routine that Wall Street no longer takes much notice of individual suits, while the growing trend remains hidden.

When GlaxoSmithKline announced in July that it was setting aside $2.4 billion for legal costs, including enough to pay for the investigation into its Puerto Rico problems, the announcement was greeted with a yawn.

Still, the case may lead to a collective industry shiver because it opens a new frontier for whistle-blower suits. Nearly all previous cases against the industry involved illegal marketing. This is the first successful case ever to assert that a drug maker knowingly sold contaminated products.

“This case will change the way drug makers run their factories,” Ms. Eckard’s lawyer, Neil Getnick, said.

Some of the antidepressant Paxil CR produced at the plant was ineffective because a layer of active ingredient split from a layer of a barrier chemical during manufacturing, the government said, and some lots contained only the barrier chemical.

“The harm is really in the public’s confidence in the health care industry,” Ms. Ortiz said. “When you go to a pharmacy and you buy a drug, you expect that drug is what it purports to be and you don’t expect it to have any micro-organisms or not be sterile or not have the power or have too much power.”

Ms. Eckard’s role in the case began in August 2002 when GlaxoSmithKline sent her to Cidra, south of San Juan, to lead a team of 100 quality experts to fix problems cited by an F.D.A. warning letter a month earlier. This was GlaxoSmithKline’s premier manufacturing facility, producing $5.5 billion of product each year.

But Ms. Eckard soon discovered that quality control was a mess: the water system was contaminated; the air system allowed for cross-contamination between products; the warehouse was so overcrowded that rented vans were used for storage; the plant could not ensure the sterility of intravenous drugs for cancer; and pills of differing strengths were sometimes mixed in the same bottles.

Although F.D.A. inspectors had spotted some problems, most were missed. And the company abandoned even the limited fixes it promised to conduct, the unsealed lawsuit says.

Ms. Eckard complained repeatedly to senior managers; little was done. She recommended recalls of defective products; recalls were not authorized. In May 2003, she was terminated as a “redundancy.”

She complained to top company executives, but she was ignored even after warning that she would call the F.D.A. So she called the F.D.A. and sued. The agency began a criminal investigation and used armed federal marshals in 2005 to seize nearly $2 billion worth of products, the largest such seizure in history.

Unable to fix the plant, GlaxoSmithKline closed it in 2009.

Unquote.

Keep taking the pills?

All Shuffle There; All Cough In Ink

Education has not been the same since the decline and fall of the Ink Monitors. At one time in an Elementary School (11-14 then leave school) each class might have one. Mostly “he’s”, they would be a trusted pupil and if they proved reliable, polite and diligent they might earn a reference to be a shop assistant or even a clerk.

They learned to check the inkpot at each desk, judge the quantity necessary and pour in the right amount of ink from a jar. To do this they would have to be entrusted with access to the classroom cupboard and would both obtain and return the jar properly and without supervision.

This was integral to a whole culture of steel pen nibs and scarce paper when writing was a form of calligraphy and care needed in the shaping of each letter, the accuracy of each word and the whole structure of a sentence and paragraph. It is a world long since lost.

But think of what might have happened in our modern age had ink still been in use. It is certain that persons of 15-17 or any younger age could never be allowed to undertake such onerous duties. Nor could teachers or cleaning staff, it would be outside their conditions of service. There would have to be Writing Materials Replenishment Assistants with negotiated salaries and comparable conditions of service.

This would take management and to avoid the post code lottery of differences a staff at local authority level to co-ordinate, manage and supply the needed staff and materials. Clearly high level consultancy would need to be brought in to satisfy the auditors and others that it was all to be done as it should be.

But could local authorities actually be entirely trusted with matters of this kind? It would cry out for central direction and thinking. Possibly, it would begin as part of one government department or another.

Then in recent years an Ink Procurement and Inspection Agency would have been established with fully staffed at salary levels to compete with senior management in the financial sector to ensure that all the angles were covered, the targets set and statistics and supervision ensured.

There would be research budgets. A new department would be funded at the University of East Dunwich or somewhere to ensure only inks of the highest quality, specifications and safety standards were in use and to develop new inks.

The standardisation of ink procurement would mean major contracts with all that this entailed. No doubt agreements would be reached in some foreign place for out sourcing all the production for transport by container ships. This would help the UK carbon footprint and rid the nation of all the nasty inky manufacturing pollutants.

By some miracle of accounting and with all the consultancy, financing and layers of management and control the filling of inkpots would become critical to keeping up the GDP and stimulation of the velocity of circulation of public sector funding.

The big question is given the need to increase the consumption of ink during a time of economic difficulty whether the use of ink pellets (wodges of paper dripping with ink used as a missile fired by the skilled use of rubber bands) by alienated victims of oppression in the classroom should be subject to reduced or no regulation.

I keep rubber bands in my desk and can still hit a moving target at fifteen paces. Will my time come again to cop the teacher or the Ink Monitor one behind the ear?

Bed Blocking For Dummies

Another from the personal archive; from 2005 and this is reflected in some parts of the text. It is 1500 words I’m afraid but it does cover the issue. Bed Blocking is now exciting the BBC and other media because of the spending review. We have been here before but then the issue attracted less attention and tears.

In the last dozen years the pre-conditions for serious problems have been in place but have gone critical only a couple of times, mercifully avoiding the worst. Whatever planning may have been done in the past there have been some significant developments quite recently so the figures have been going the wrong way. This means that critical phases will occur more often. Just when the tipping point might occur into chaos/collapse/catastrophe is an open question.

Quote

WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR GRANNY?

The ambulance arrived in the early hours of the morning, a routine event; recently there were four visits by paramedics and ambulances in one day. The reason is not mobs of drunken yobs beating out each other’s brains or local addicts overdosing, it is a quiet, well behaved, ordinary and indeed gentle group of neighbours who fall or have a medical crisis.

The problem is their longevity and its consequences. When the block of retirement flats in which they live was first occupied a decade ago, it was different. It was designed for the active retired, pensioners who were mobile, needing little care, who preferred to avoid the costs and problems of running a too large a house and garden.

They wanted to cash in on their former home to keep more of their pension for their own pleasures or protection, and to enjoy a bit of quiet easy comfort, as well as cheap warmth.

It is not just that the original occupants have grown old; there has been a substantial turnover, as in other sectors of the housing market. It is that the most of the new people are older, frailer and more dependent on personal support.

The carers come and go from 6 a.m. to midnight, and so do the medical and emergency services. Once, none had the call pendants provided for those at high risk, now there is a dedicated communications aerial to cope with the number needing this precaution.

Nationally, the number of call-outs for the ambulance services has increased sharply in the last decade; this is one reason for the added demands. Perhaps the number of man hours and the real costs involved for the 50 or so occupants of the flats is now roughly the same as for a 100 Bed Residential Home.

The wider problems in the NHS have compounded the problems. Ladies who once rivalled each other in their fashion sense and men in competitive sports now try to cap each other’s trolley horror and medical disaster stories.

They are many and various, one who visited her Family Doctor for a routine prescription discovered that the local hospital had declared her to be deceased and all her medical records had been deleted from the relevant NHS systems; so the undead stalk the land.

A desperately sick man died quietly on his trolley after a 72 hour wait. Treatment that is nearly too late, or long delayed, complicates long-term recovery, and when attention is given for the immediate issue they are packed off back to their flats as quickly as possible to manage and recover as best they can.

The local hospital has enough trouble with bed-blockers. Some soon return to the hospital, often as an emergency case. Where have all the convalescent facilities of former decades gone?

The granny-stacking flats put up by developers are rarely equipped for the disabled, nor are they staffed to deal with anything other than buildings and site management. The bungled attempt to regulate residential homes more closely by New Labour, that caused so much personal damage and distress, wiped out a huge number of temporary and permanent beds and accommodation for the elderly infirm when the owners decided to take the money and run as property prices rocketed.

In the meantime the major erosion of the income of the old by stealth taxes through the machinery of local government and national finance means they are less able to care for themselves. The effects of other regulations, Health and Safety and Euro inspired instructions and admonitions have added to costs and prices.

The petite elderly lady who lay on the floor for hours had several full grown healthy young people in attendance who were forbidden by their conditions of service to lift her onto her bed.

She had a lot to say on the subject later. Apparently, the one ambulance in the area of the Trust that was equipped with the relevant lifting gear was busy with a long list of potential clients. The cost of that little business was estimated at £900, and she does fall over quite often while waiting for her wonky knee to be looked at.

In all the planning for new housing demanded by the government, intended to be in the hands of the forthcoming Regional Governors and their development directorates, the bit that is missing is what to do about the old.

The provision of half-way house accommodation, developments of self contained units, but with built-in support services and meals provision, and the further stage of residential facilities for those requiring rather less than full nursing home needs is absent from any visible state thinking.

Those in the retirement flats are often the lucky ones, where there is at least some company and administrative support, because for every one of them there may be twenty or more living alone and in virtual social isolation in houses that few can manage or maintain. Some will succumb to hypothermia because of the heating costs; others will suffer from malnutrition or dehydration.

The vagaries of the housing market add to the complexity of the problem, as do the serious dangers of boom and bust. In boom, there is a tendency to hang on for the best possible price, and that is always a little too long. In bust, the old who cannot cope also cannot sell their homes in the new situation.

Because of what has happened already it is possible that one way or another over the last few years the number of ordinary houses and properties effectively removed from the market and occupied by single old people needing daily care is more than the numbers of new properties demanded by New Labour as vital for “new needs”.

A lot of these “new needs” arise from the expansion of the holdings of second and third homes and the buy-to-let sector fuelled by cheap credit. The people who benefit from this surge in property buying are subsidised, probably, through the tax and benefits system far more than the struggling pensioners, and the ones who benefit from the ramp include almost all of the current political and media elite.

It is not surprising that New Labour seem to care so little for the old. One of the prime industrial dispute tactics of some of them during the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent when they were young militants promoting the Workers Revolution was to have lightning strikes of care workers in local authority nursing and residential homes and in special schools, where the deaths could be written off as “necessary casualties”.

We know that the slow disintegration of the pensions system since 1997, part of the assault by Brown and New Labour on the Lower Middle Class, the “peasants” as they engagingly call them, will create intricate problems in the decades to come.

More pressing for the immediate future is a disaster about to happen; one serious pandemic of influenza could be enough. Although the government may well put it down to a necessary conjunction of statistical trends relating to demographic factors inherent in the age structure of the population, the electorate may take the view that the state has a responsibility.

Given the state of the A&E and geriatric facilities in most hospitals, the serious and growing problems in community medicine and general practice, the tipping points from pressure to crisis and from crisis to disaster are perilously close to daily experience.

To add a stomach churning thought the limited provision of mortuary, pathological, coroners, and burial and cremation services could resurrect in the present the nastier effects of the great plagues and geophysical disruptions of the past.

There may be worse, for the increasing numbers of the criminal elements that prey on the old already with no fear of arrest, or of being troubled by Police Forces who have other targets to meet, will be very active, stripping the bodies and ransacking their homes while the dead lie and decompose for days or weeks in their isolation.

This would not be new, during the Second World War Blitzes the looters often arrived at the scene first. In the summer of 2003 in France, that paragon of social welfare provision and human rights, a long hot spell during the holiday season did for thousands of the old who were living alone. In the USA, Hurricane Katrina taught a few sharp lessons in complacency.

The only considerations that will worry the government, of course, are the poll ratings amongst those able to vote, the question of how the young voter will react, and the serious worry that the sudden availability of up to a hundred thousand houses could crash the property market in the run up to the next general election. In the meantime we give almost all our attention and thoughts to the media excitements of the day.

In the night, the ambulances come and go, and the carers wake long before the dawn.

Unquote.

Christmas is coming.

The Thoughts Of Chairman Demetrius

In January 2007 I did an entry for the “Ecologist” essay competition. Below are selected extracts from a near 3000 word document. The question is was I right or was I wrong?

Quote

To have a future, it is necessary to have a past. But a past does not guarantee a future. My past has offered many futures, and none of them have worked. In the decade of my birth a number of luminaries went to Moscow and claimed that here was the future, give or take the odd purge, pogrom, ethnic cleansing, or holocaust of the disagreeable elements.

In the next decade Lord Beveridge promised a freedom from want, and other things. That did not happen, and nor did the later “Butskell” ideas of a Keynsian Society, or Socialist Planned Keynsianism, according to taste. I realised that both were non-starters when I drew up a monstrous flow chart of how the system was supposed to function, and when it was finished, realised that it couldn’t.

Of the other futures around at the time and later, the Gosplan-Stasi variety was a hallucination doomed to self destruct as we will soon find out when the Blair-Brown version collapses in time for the London Olympics.

The happy clappy love-in of the hippies dissolved in a welter of pox, disease, and dysfunction in sexual relations. As for what philosophers and economists have assumed to be capitalism; that has long disappeared into debt leverage, with Globalisation and Private Equity never to be seen again; creating a footloose world of cheap transport operating on a basis of rapid resource depletion, and quasi-slave labour.

So now, in creaking old age, I daily hope for a sign in the web sites of the US Geological Service and Volcano World. Many of the Sky documentaries tell me that the end is nigh, but it seems a long time coming, and not even the Hedge Funds are taking bets. At least in HDTV it looks a lot prettier, and to hell with the carbon footprint if a super massive black hole beckons.

The end has been promised since the first Christian Millennia at least in one form or another. More recently it has been the threat of nuclear annihilation that has concentrated the minds, but now there is serious competition for what happening is about to see the human race off the planet.

Which brings us back to the money, and it is only relatively recently that a handful of daring historians have suggested that this is often the problem, rather than the scribbling of either philosophers or dogmatic theologians.

Our world in now becoming one of illusions, more and more produced and promoted by limited numbers of media operators. In the past the number of visual images seen by humans was relatively small, and limited to a narrower variety of sources.

Many communities experienced very few images at all in their lives, the vision of their minds being created by only the world around them, or the occasional hallucinatory substances, intended or accidental.

Today, there are few people or groups who manage to escape the pervading flashing of images on screens or other forms of presentation. Within a generation or two these have altered our past, and have given us a present that is a world of mirrors and falsity.

Media and marketing are now the dominate elements in the creation of the human experience and psyche. As humanity has engaged in several destructions, and seems intent on destroying its own habitat, as well as its own capability for survival, it seems to have developed the arrogance that it can determine its own future.

At least that is the message of governments, their agencies, and the marketing departments of the predatory commercial entities whether state or privately owned, and the whole shebang assumes that the financial wheels will stay on the wagon.

Our world is urbanised and more and more dependent on complicated means of distribution based on monetary systems and means of finance that are a chimera. This is the Grand Illusion, that all is financially the best in the best of all the monetary worlds.

It is just as vulnerable as any tectonic plate, sun burst, or weather system, and is different in that it can collapse in the short period rather than the long. What could happen might be a reversion to a previous world, perhaps a nasty form of tribal warfare in an unwelcoming planet, or back to a few hunter gatherers striving in one or other environment.

The one certainty is Chaos and in that event Catastrophe may be the saving hope. If geophysics fails to get us first, and we are left to our own devices, one major systemic financial failure might be enough to do it.

The consequences will not be pretty, will not smell nice, and almost certainly will be contaminated. So our future will be a past, only one that is more dangerous and more difficult, because we have expended already all the alternative futures save that of nothingness.

Unquote.

I did not win, the item that did was a thoughtful piece about making better use of open spaces in places like Bristol to be brought about by substantial increases in government funding under the care of a new agency.