If everyone was taxed an extra pound, would that save the NHS?

[EddyF]

Might be a silly question but if you don’t ask, you don’t learn!

I have just a post elsewhere (not MN) where people are discussing their wait time to be seen at A&E and it’s quite shocking.

I think people would be In favour of paying a slight tax increase of a minimal amount such as £1/1.50 from tax to try and fix the NHS. Is this unrealistic?

I have attended a hospital in the US, and the experience was such a stark contrast to the feel of hospitals here. I know obviously because the US is not ‘free’ like the NHS. I just remember it being like a spa service.

British AIrports Authority (BAA) wasn't (I don't think) ever a nationalised entity but it was sold to the loss-making Iberian airline in a contested takeover and it has propped up their loss-making business ever since.

It is a hugely contentious issue all around and I am probably not clever enough to hoist in all 5000 arguments that could be wrought over how economic assets and manufacturing should be properly and effectively regulated to fairly reward the shareholders, who bear the risks of investment, the staff who deserve fair treatment, and the taxpayers who seem to get b*gger all benefit for picking up the bills for everything that goes wrong.

I can see the problems @Alexandra2001 but I don't pretend to know how to solve them. I am fairly convinced that politicians have too short a time frame to understand the problems they are trying to deal with. I don't like it either.

@XingMing Apologises, i read it as BA British Airways.

BAA was privatised by Thatcher in 1987... just to raise money by the look of things.

Crucial assets like airports shouldn't be privatised and def shouldn't have been sold to overseas companies... even friendly ones.

Its complex but we have 20 plus countries close by & could perhaps learn from them esp Germany? or look at our own history on how we used to do things?

Might help if we got away from the idea that State = Bad and Private = Good, there are pros and cons for both.

Have a Great New Year!

How many suicide attempts have been stopped by the limit on paracetamol purchasing?

@Alexandra2001 The casual assumption that Public is good and Private is bad is, I agree, lazy and unhelpful.

The failure of the civil service to take forward Kate Bingham's innovations in the pursuit of a COVID vaccine which she made a fuss about on Women's Hour in early December is just one example but history is littered with the dead hand of government quangos from the 1940s onwards (and probably before). As you say, there were many UK companies that were highly regarded, but there has been little or nothing to protect smaller technology companies from aggressive international takeovers... look at the defence sector or semi-conductors. The list of companies I once worked for who were taken over and no longer exist is a very long one. Most of the blame for that should be laid on M&A teams in the City.

Germany has succeeded thanks to lots of well-thought through planning for transport, the labour force, strong technical education and constructive union-management relations, but equally to the Mittelstand of strong privately owned companies and supportive regional second-tier banks. According to a friend who specialised in bank software contracting, their national banking sector is leaden and several of the largest banks are precarious. And 20 years of the Euro has fuelled an export boom that would have been constrained if the DM were still in use.

So, as you say, it's always more complex and nuanced than it might appear.

And a Happy New Year to you, too. Let's hope 2023 is less of a clusterfuck.

BT (Post office telecommunications) was awful - it took months to get a phone line installed and your choice of phone was a few different colours (you had to rent a phone from them and couldn't buy your own).

BR was awful. Lucky if your train arrived at all. On board catering was a joke. Trains were typically filfthy, toilets didn't work, no water to wash hands, etc.

I'm not saying the privatised alternatives are perfect, they aren't, but people seem to have forgotten how bad the state monopolies were at times.

If people want to do that, they'll find another way. I read the other day that suicides involving trains had risen.

And lots of online shopping sites, such as Amazon, Ebay, etc and the new breed of modern banks such as Monzo, Mettle, Starling, etc.

It's amazing how the public sector can't do things efficiently and are ham strung by antiquated tech. When HMRC need to do a minor update to their website, it's down and out of action for an entire weekend which happens several times per year. When was the last time Ebay or Amazon were down for a weekend? It doesn't happen. They do their updates/changes seemlessly, either by making lots of minor changes that don't need the system to be "down", or by doing big changes by "outages" at the most quiet/unpopular times and doing it quickly.

We need to acknowledge that we are an aging sicker population and therefore we need access to a younger workforce that will support that. This government has failed to plan for this situation which was a known problem and to make matters worse they have restricted access to labour supply from the EU. Social care is on its knees due to chronic staff shortages which again is why people are not getting discharged from hospitals causing more problems. The whole system is messed up but I guess that's what they want - the NHS as we know it will be no longer within a few years, the Tory party have already done the deals.

Of the privatised utility companies I worked for in the 1990s, none are UK owned. EDF bought anything they could, because they were so tightly regulated in France they needed to feed shareholders, so they bought the southwest's network. Scottish Power was bought by an overseas consortium. I can't remember who bought Eastern. Southern Water was acquired by French investors. ICI was split up and sold off, because the pension liabilities were so frightening, and made much worse by Gordon Brown's raid on dividend income credit. I know, all of this is terribly technical, but it does actually affect how UK industry has reached its current parlous state.

And ASilGlitter

And @SilverGlitterBaubles has nailed the rest of the problem. Too many old people, living too long and expecting Rolls Royce health care on a Skoda spend.

BT (Post office telecommunications) was awful - it took months to get a phone line installed and your choice of phone was a few different colours (you had to rent a phone from them and couldn't buy your own)

You could buy your own, when they were available, you have to go back to the Bakelite phones of the GPO when you couldn't as they weren't made.
Lines sometime took a long time to be installed because there had to be a copper path to your house and that could mean pulling through new cable and or poles & have a physical piece of mechanical engineering for each subscriber and if there wasn't any? or not enough room to install?
A lot of existing cable was faulty, subject to wet weather as it was cardboard insulated.

Large Exchanges needed teams of men to staff them, the expense was huge.

It was only with digital exchanges that this changed but did not remove the need for a copper path.

Now the exchange end is an ip address, with a server that is the size of large pizza box handing 1000s of users, with fibre removing all or much of the copper network.

Yes there was a great deal of inefficiency and waste but having worked for BT (fully privatised) & Siemens since, i can assure you, this exists in the private sector too, a single SIP trunk might involve 4 or 5 different companies before it gets to a MS server, all keen to blame each other when it doesn't work.

You really are not comparing like with like.

I knew someone who worked in admin in the NHS locally. She bought her own pens and notepads as it was so difficult to get work to provide them. She used to come to us (small charity) if she needed any colour photocopying as it wasn't allowed.

I would guess it varies massively by area.

Most suicide attempts are impulsive decisions. So reducing easy access to common methods can reduce those attempts as if you have to go around 5 different shops to buy paracetamol, by the time you've done that you've had time to rethink.

Suicide prevention is a difficult and complicated issue, and some methods are harder or nigh on impossible to restrict access to.

@EilonwyWithRedGoldHair

I think it was the mindset she was refering too.