Labour isn't Working - Thread 38

[Nuthatch26]

A chat thread for those who don't like this Labour government. 💙

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

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@strawberrybubblegum I could be wrong but I think somewhere I saw a figure of 40 million of unpaid loans we won't get back

Student loans are privatised now I think. The interest rates are higher than the banks. Trying to over pay is penalised financially. It's a huge scam too big to fail I think.

Student loans were unknown before Blair turned further education into an industry. Something else to add to his "achievements".

@strawberrybubblegum I have said many times that I think the country is being quietly sold off (some people might remember me saying that Keir Starmer made me think of the song "the man who sold the world" except it is us he's selling)

Then I progressed to thinking it was actually just being given away - because none of the profit stays here

All of this actually started long time ago (a long long time ago to quote the song LOL)

But there's an awful lot that you can't say on here

Anyway, I have very much written it all off now

I think there are limits to how much any party can stand against the things that are going on.

it is obviously hard to tell as an outsider, but it does seem as if there are some countries who are going about it differently, and the public don't suffer as much from globalism - but as I say, you can't really tell from the outside.

@justasking111 if you're seeing stuff being dropped in on Facebook and Instagram, my first question is - are you absolutely sure it's real? There is some quite convincing stuff doing the rounds.

Reality on the ground is bad enough of course.

We're living in a country of around 70 million, whose infrastructure and services seem to be set up to service about 50 million people.

What confuses me isn't that it's all shit - it would be, being that overstretched - it's why it costs more and more money. My conclusion there is that the additional millions have correlated more with additional welfare benefits than additional taxation.

This is going to end very badly.

@SpaceRaccoon but everything is designed to be more and more expensive

So for example, the council redoing a small area of pavement will literally cost millions. It's designed so that private contractors can squeeze as much money out of the public sector as possible and the tax burden is bound to increase.

if you look at what local government are doing, the amounts of money involved in small jobs are absolutely astonishing. Even just going to a local meeting is an eye-opener.

I actually had a conversation with AI about this once. It was quite good to ask AI because you can get the neutrality without the hysteria.

So it was very straightforwardly telling me that my taxes have disappeared into the pockets of people who are drastically overcharging, because the system is set up so that they can. In fact, it's set up to encourage them to do it.

It actually got as far as saying that we are a rich country, but most of the money is being siphoned into the pockets of those who know how to take advantage. Obviously AI can only work within the parameters I give it but I promise I did not give it a direct instruction to say that! 😂

Is any other European country caught in this trap? Everyone of us paying tax is funding the student loan scam.
I stop reading X months ago as what was truth or not became increasingly difficult to tell. Now it seems we’ve all been sold up the Swaney by the very people we elect (and should trust), by them essentially hiding the absolute truth of the impact of too many people taking too much advantage, in every way imaginable. Should life not be fair, whatever colour of politics is leading?
in ways I’m glad I’m 68, living in the middle of Wiltshire and have little need to go to bigger towns. But I do worry about the longer term future of my children, their spouses and my grandchildren.

That makes perfect, horrible sense. I think NHS procurement is similar.

It's no better than the Mafia, people should be in jail for this really, it's deeply corrupt.

I have experience of NHS procurement. I briefly worked in a company which sells various single use items to hospitals. The more they buy in one order, the cheaper they are.

You'd get each theatre ringing separately to order one box of <equipment> for their use. Then half an hour later, another theatre in the same hospital would call, for another box of the same thing. And so on and so forth. Had they had centralised purchasing, they could've saved money. And whilst it wasn't much saving per box, the amount they got through means that over a year it was a significant amount of money.

I've no doubt that the procurement process is the same on larger purchases too.

@SpaceRaccoon don't get me started on NHS procurement - we'll be here all week.

The only contract job I've ever abandoned was for the department of health. I couldn't for the life of me see why they needed my skills and the reality is they don't. I was placed with a team making high salaries and in some cases their hotel costs were being covered because they had come from another part of the country.

absolutely nothing they did benefited patients in any way, and I would say that their work was an active hindrance to nurses. I think I lasted three days.

The agency told me not to worry and they said lots of people can't do it.

That was a while ago, though. If you gave me that job now, I would probably just consider it getting my tax money back? And I would try to do nothing. Because then I wouldn't be part of the brainchild of making life harder for nurses.

This is another area where AI was extremely helpful. If we involve the current situation with recruitment, you can see that the NHS, the Home Office, the Treasury and the department of health operate without speaking to each other except occasionally making demands for more money. These have often been covered by the other three, but nobody even knows.

It's actually really hard to even extract information and I came across one person who was using the budgetary overflow in one way and blatantly lying about it because as she said "if they knew where it was really going, they wouldn't grant us the money again".

I don't want to name names, but there is another architect of our demise (behind-the-scenes person strongly associated with the Blair government) who I would say has been a key reason that the NHS has got increasingly messy in the last few years. Typical public sector approach of creating more layers of administration that do not benefit patients or staff. Just there to create more paperwork jobs.

Before any of our visitors jump on me, I have nothing but respect for people who are doing actual jobs in the NHS - but there are a huge number of people usually management consultants, who are doing things that have literally no positive outcome for the NHS.

As I've said before many times on these threads, the problem is once you've created the job, you've got a huge number of people who are invested in keeping things going that way because that's how they pay their bills and understandably they are terrified of being made redundant.

I gather that Denmark had some similar problems with its health service but managed to sort them out - I haven't got as far as finding out how they did that.

I read yesterday about an injection alternative to knee replacement, available privately in UK, at £2700. Instant results, last a few years. Contrast that with an NHS replacement, which costs roughly between £9-14k, seemingly far from being a guaranteed success (that’s me collecting anecdotes as I really need something). There’s no bar to this new treatment in this country so it makes you wonder whether keeping ortho surgeons in a job hasn’t swayed its adoption.

@Loopylalalou my auntie had both knees done

There's a lot of reasons why that's better than the injection, which is often just delay the inevitable

I don't think ortho surgeons being kept in work is a consideration here - there's no way that injection would replace the knee replacement work they do.

if the NHS do start doing it, it will probably be to kick the can down the road in terms of the costs of doing knee replacements.

I must step away from this thread because I really could talk about this all week or month, etc 😂

If there's ever a task force for restructuring the NHS, I might actually sign up! I mean a genuine restructure - not a fake one!

@SapphireCasino thank you, that's fascinating. Re Blair, weirdly enough I used to read a quite lefty Scottish author called Christopher Brookmyre - fiction, but he had a lot to say about the Blairite NHS public/private stuff, and that was late 1990s.

It's also so interesting because the two narratives re the NHS tend to be leftwing = "it needs more money" and rightwing = "too many immigrants using it", and actually there's just those whole layer of skimming and incompetence.

@SpaceRaccoon yes no one talks about what the problems actually are

But I get the impression that doctors and nurses, any kind of whistleblower, is heavily penalised for speaking out

I think the NHS is effectively cash cow at this point. And I think most people don’t know that. But like other things, I sense that even on this site, support is breaking down and people are starting to ask questions.

I hate dealing with the NHS as a patient - it feels almost Soviet. I don't mean the individual HCPs, most I've had dealings with have been perfectly lovely, but the whole horrendous lumbering poorly-run system of it.

How is the NHS a cash cow? A cash cow is a mature/flatlined or declining business or enterprise that generates suubstantial revenue streams and hence the milking analogy. I don’t understand how the NHS can be this.

It is for the businesses that provide services and materials at inflated costs because the NHS can’t be arsed to get their act together.
It’s a self inflicted cash cow situation.

That is exactly what the NHS is at this point

it generates money for organisations… i’m not sure how to explain this because I feel as if we’re arguing about whether the sun rises or not.

There are lots of organisations making money out of the NHS. There are lots of individuals making money out of the NHS. I don’t object to a profit based business. But people are taking huge amounts of money out of the NHS and giving nothing back. So effectively there’s no money being reinvested. They just get more and more from the taxpayer every year.

Maybe another clever poster can help out with the explanation

It’s also a firm belief in the NHS that they are above mundanities such as money.

I've had too much experience of it recently and it does feel soviet. I won't mention the horror stories I've had suffice to say we are really well and truly fucked.
It's abominable and I think to myself at the moment attending urgent care or a and e feels like a punishment where you are left in a germ factory for hours, how will I cope when I'm older and frail ??

It needs radical root and branch change and I think private hospitals systems that run as a business need to over haul it.
We have lost the basics of hygiene control and cleaning.

I'm sorry you've had to deal with that, I hope you're doing well now.

What really galls me is that we're somehow expected to be grateful for dangerous, humiliating treatment. That we all pay for!

I've worked in finance in the NHS and this is rubbish. I've also worked in finance in the private and charity sector and I saw very little difference in attitudes to money across all of them.

If I may ask a question
I'm 50

The last couple of years, I've seen a lot of stuff come back round the political turntable. It's a bit like the workplace really. One of the weirdest things about getting older is watching the same shit go round and round the turntable... do you feel like that?

it's like with the banking crash and kicking the can down the road. I remember thinking it, but it's quite weird that we've actually run out of road... Even though we knew it was coming.

Charities and the private sector are happy to run in deficit? 🤔