To invite Conservative voters to gather here

[Goddessofgrowth]

It’s ‘best of a bad bunch’ in my case but there are three threads petrified of BJ/Tories so wondered if any MN Tories would like to gather here!

Still can’t answer the question obviously because we both know it’s indefensible.

Yes, it’s indefensible, you’re right. And also, because it’s all too boring and I can’t be arsed.

So very Sorry to hear about your Mum, Death,

A strikingly similar situation sadly happened to my 71 yr old Grandmother in 2005-2007 who died of Ovarian Cancer after numerous blunders and dire care.

That was under a labour government.

Agreed, BuzzShitbagBobbly I think that does not help anyone.

The big freeze’ of 2010.
Swine flu.

Both of these happened before the data collection period which started in 2011

An increasingly elderly population.
This could well be a factor, I agree

Explosive general Population increase.
There wasn’t a population increase in those years (see graph)

Poor management.
Of the NHS? Not sure that’s an argument against the study findings to be honest. Poor management is inevitable when services are under-funded.

The sharp rise in obesity.

Obesity rates fell in that period (see other graph)

I agree, there may well be other factors in play, but the extreme rise in mortality cannot be divorced from health and social care cuts just because it suits.

There have been issues with the NHS for a very long time, certainly mismanagement has been a big factor for decades so funding is only part of the issue, but my own experiences of the service as a patient and parent are unrecognisable to when I started needing surgeries (2001 / 2002).

Goddess I’m so sorry about your mum, it’s an horrific thing to go through.

And I want to add I am so so sorry for the posters whose families died and suffered for lack of good hospital care. That just should not happen in a civilised society.

2010? Apologies, I was working from the fact checking site which cited figures being used from 2010-2014.

A strikingly similar situation sadly happened to my 71 yr old Grandmother in 2005-2007 who died of Ovarian Cancer after numerous blunders and dire care.

I’m so sorry. It was ovarian cancer that my mum was misdiagnosed with, as apparently secondary ovarian cancer “never happens” so despite the biopsy being inconclusive, they didn’t want to spend time and money investigating further.

Awareness and funding into gynaecological cancers is one of my big issues, I bore my (utterly useless) MP with it on a regular basis. The survival rates are truly horrifying. to you and your family. It should not happen.

@EntropyRising - thanks! New Yorker here. How about you? Are you an American ex-pat living in the UK?

@Puzzledandpissedoff

Perhaps it's influenced by the thick seam of anti-Americanism we tend to see on MN?

This was my working assumption, actually.

Regarding the whole idea of an American "corporate take over" of the NHS, it's ludicrous. The NHS is a government funded service run on a money allocated by parliament. However much money is pumped in, that's how much healthcare you get. The demand is balanced against the supply by waiting lists and not offering certain treatments.

US healthcare is run on a fee for service model, or to a much lesser extent a capitation model. A big US hospital chain could easily contract with the NHS to do hip replacements for 10,000 quid per patient but they're never going to let politicians decide how much they'll get for running the whole show. There's also the dependency on facilities. You can't provide healthcare without specialized buildings and equipment. Those are all government owned assets in the UK. No firm is going to take responsibility for delivering healthcare services without also controlling the physical infrastructure that makes it possible.

I can't imagine any US firm wanting to touch a "takeover" of the NHS with a 30 foot barge pole without a fee for service arrangement and control of the infrastructure. I can't imagine the government in the UK agreeing to either, let alone both.

I've worked in hospitals in NYC that had lots of overseas patients and cared for many people from the UK who came over for urgently needed treatment or treatment that just wasn't available in the UK. The vast majority of them were just lovely and it was a pleasure treating them. But they paid a flat fee for service and they had the treatment in our facilities. That's how I think American firms would like to work with the NHS, not by taking over what is essentially a political entity.

The study itself says they looked at deaths from 2011-2014

I think it’s actually quite a reasonable study but of course without a sliding doors moment it’s impossible to say for sure!

On another point.

I had maternity care in a large hospital, in 2000 that was no less than shocking. One particular post partum highlight was losing copious amounts of blood, being deathly pale and on the verge of passing out. My husband went to find a midwife for help, who said snarkily after being interrupted “well, what do you want ME to do about it??!” I kid you not.

There is a very long list of serious blunders in my maternity care during that time (including a filthy ward), and that of other sick relatives during the blair years, but I don’t need to list them all here. Labour are not necessarily the magical elixir needed to fix this problem.

I can understand why voters would go for the Tory party (now BXP in all but name) to get Brexit done, but I don't get why they trust Johnson to deliver it. This is the man who left his wife for another woman whilst she battled cancer, lied to the Queen to illegally pause Parliament and wasted millions during his time as Lord Mayor (water cannons, anyone?). That's just the tip of the iceberg....

The only way I can square the circle is through a crash-out Brexit that requires almost no input from the Government.

The Dispatches investigation was looking at deals with US pharmaceutical companies on the supply of medications and the cost of them, alongside rules surrounding the prescribing of generics if we end up with a US trade deal. IIRC the cost to the NHS is such plans going through was somewhere between £25bn and £30bn.

I think this graph is very interesting - it shows labour’s proposal for government spending as a percentage of GDP compared to the current situation and that of other countries. It really isn’t what some believe it to be.

This comparison between Swedish and US spending vs quality of life is interesting - yes it’s the Guardian, but the figures are evidenced and quantified. It’s worth a read, even if you disagree. And it’s balanced since it points out potential pitfalls.

www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/24/labours-spending-plans-arent-especially-unusual-just-look-at-sweden

Deathgrip I taught in a mainstream school for 14 years - 7 under Labour and 7 under the coalition/tories.

Both were equally frustrating. Yes, there was more ‘money’ under Labour but it was often really poorly targeted from a classroom teacher’s perspective. There were weird ‘funds’ like specialist schools and those awful ‘laptops for teachers’ (which were crap and broke within 3 years). However, it certainly didn’t feel ‘great’. There were just as many frustrating new ‘initiatives’ and curriculum changes and the identification and correct support for pupils with SEN was still not great.

The biggest issue under tories/coalition was Gove/Wilshaw and the new ‘regime’. However, when you look at the ‘big picture’ aims of this pair no one could ever accuse them of ‘not caring’ about the educational outcomes of the most vulnerable. Misguided and dictatorial, yes, but lacking compassion and caring, no.

I hope you are starting to see that voting intention is not about being ‘selfish’ and ‘nasty’ and ‘not caring about others’ but more about being sceptical that the promises offered are actually realistic or well thought-out.

Labour are not necessarily the magical elixir needed to fix this problem.

I’m genuinely not suggesting they are. I appreciate my role on this thread has been cast as the unthinking Corbynista but that’s not the reality.

I don’t think Corbyn is perfect, I don’t think that his plans will fix every one of the country’s problems and we will live in a utopia. I certainly don’t think there are any quick and easy answers for the NHS.

But the man wants to try. Many acknowledge that things need to change but are afraid of any radical plans to change things. There is a lot more that can be done to try and make life better for a huge segment of the population for whom life is absolutely dire right now. And we will all benefit from that.

After the war the conservatives argued against the inception of the NHS. Many said it was a flight of fancy and couldn’t be done. But it was done, at a time of enormous financial and social difficulty.

For all its faults and the assaults on its funding, it’s still here and it does still save lives. It could be vastly better, we know this. We need to try. Same with poverty levels and homelessness and policing and education etc etc. We can do better than this. The conservatives are not proposing anything more than the status quo - laying off 21k police and then saying you’ll get 20k new ones is the perfect encapsulation of their attitude.

I don’t want to make people feel like shit - you are of course free to vote for whomever you choose, I’m merely discussing the reasoning behind those decisions.

Thanks OP.

Lifelong Tory, tunic minority Brexiteer here, I work in the public sector and partner is a nurse. We will both vote Tory.

Many reasons for that - we use the NHS, it’s great but needs ongoing reform - money isn’t then full answer but there won’t be any of that if we end up like Venezuela following Corbyn and his reds!

How refreshing to have a pro conservative thread. I’m voting conservatives and always have.

Misguided and dictatorial, yes, but lacking compassion and caring, no.

I’m sorry but I can’t agree. A government with compassion and caring wouldn’t slash local authority budgets to a £3bn deficit, knowing that this is the only source of education for children with SEN. They’d be concerned about the thousands of parents with disabled children - parents who are already drowning in their caring responsibilities - who’ve had to give up work and rely on benefits to home educate their disabled children because otherwise they’d get no education at all.

I know so many parents whose disabled children have no school place at all, and many more who get two or three hours a few days a week at a mainstream school. This is the very definition of kicking the can down the road when investment now could educate these children and enable them to support themselves in many cases.

If you think I’m saying that the last labour government were perfect or that this one would be, you’re misunderstanding me. I don’t think any government has ever done a perfect job of everything.

Funding is only part of the problem but it’s a pretty crucial part.

@Deathgrip Your entitled to your opinion, so are we. So why don’t you respectfully go and start your own thread about the wonders of Corbyn instead of crashing this one.

• tunic! Read ethnic!

Just seen the part about your mum, Deathgrip - I'm very sorry to hear about that

Your entitled to your opinion, so are we. So why don’t you respectfully go and start your own thread about the wonders of Corbyn instead of crashing this one

Threads aren’t parties. Anyone can post on them. So sorry challenge is so unwelcome but you’ll just have to scroll past if you don’t like it.

Many reasons for that - we use the NHS, it’s great but needs ongoing reform - money isn’t then full answer but there won’t be any of that if we end up like Venezuela following Corbyn and his reds!

You cannot possibly compare us to Venezuela. Almost their entire GDP was based on a natural resource which fluctuates in value, and they bought in almost everything the country needed rather than producing or manufacturing it themselves. So when the country’s income from oil fell, they couldn’t afford to meet the basic requirements of society.

Even without the problematic governmental issues (which were not even vaguely close to Corbyn’s policies), it was a recipe for disaster. Neither of those things apply to us.

It’s difficult to find a close parallel to the current Labour Party but left wing politics and economic policy has done well for Portugal, much of Scandinavia and Canada. There are of course distinctive differences, and issues in every country - nowhere is perfect.

But we currently have the lowest life expectancy for women out of the top 20 world economies (19th for men, ahead of America). This is just one metric amongst a great many which shows just how far our quality of life is out of step with our wealth.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45096074

I don't comment on political threads as they aren't really debates as such. People have made their minds up and just resort to hyperbole. I think describing the prospect of a labour or conservative government as terrifying or horrific is really OTT. It's as if people have lost the ability to express themselves properly and resort to meaningless extremes. Very disappointing. Where can you go these days for a genuine discussion I wonder.

This IS an interesting thread.

Sorry to barge in. Not a Tory but FASCINATED to read this.

Although Deathgrip is talking some sense there.