The Brexit Arms. Is this Ben Elton? Is it free mulled wine and mince pies for everyone or a Corb-free Christmas 🎄?

[SingingLily]

Welcome to the Brexit Arms!

The temporary Landlady is back but worry not, all is festive good cheer with just another three days to go until we reach the Only Poll That Really Matters. Till then, the gloves are still on!

A quick recap of the events of the last week or so:

📋❓💙❤️💛⁉️💙‼️🤷🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️😀☹️😀☹️😧😱🙄😬🤥🤔🤕🗳

Anyone of any political persuasion who is prepared to join in, eschew goadery, and enjoy a laugh, welcome. First drinks are on the house.

Belle that twitter feed is spot on.

There is a well known socialist poster on mn (not these threads apart from one unpleasant foray) who to surmises everything that's wrong with labour.

No actual roots in poverty or working class life anymore. All grammar school or privately educated. They tell us what they think should happen with no first-hand experience at all.

On the subjects of schools in particular grammars /awful comps. And mils!!

I've had posters pm me asking what the hell she's on. Asking questions to which posters lay their souls bare and give sometimes deeply upsetting answers and she ignores those she can't handle and comes back with needling questions.

Anyway... Epic... I could add to that list too.

My own birth experience was actually OK but the major anxiety and sheer worry I faced before was horrific because it was at the time when everyday the paper was filled with utter barbaric horror stories of women giving birth alone, at road sides, on corridors, one midwife to several labouring women, dirt, filth, wrong injections, utter chaos, retained placenta from so many women at similar times in one hospital, resulting in sepsis.. People discharged with the wrong notes, cannula left in.

Everyone was terrified of falling ill and ending up there constantly closing doors as ward full... All around me, toddler groups, nct, nursery was horror story after horror story.

Then I've had several relatives in too and again, some nurses were amazing but the ones that weren't.... Disgusting.

It's not perfect and needs over haul. The Netherlands one sounds good

I hate to say it but some consultants are fucking arrogant and rude too. The way I was spoken to when my father was dying....

Hello yolo

Did you see the stuff on the old thread about Priti Patel, Ireland and fake news?

Meanwhile, as I’ve said before, I’ve voted Labour in the past. Some old articles on NHS under Labour

www.theguardian.com/money/2006/apr/19/publicfinances.politics

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4555344.stm

I do actually think no matter what happens, politicians will just find different ways to fuck things up. This might be the last election I vote in, I think.

It all came out in that book someone wrote about Blair...

“so, what do we all think about a 4 year old with pneumonia having a bed made up on a floor?”

I think it’s fucking awful. As I think people dying on trollies in corridors under the last labour government was awful too. We have done a couple of pages discussing the NHS and various personal experiences around this today already actually.

The NHS needs a cross party solution, tackled across the whole of parliament and perhaps in a similar way to the climate change emergency, not to be used as a political hot potato to cynically win votes, we ALL deserve better than that! Both parties have a piss poor record on managing or solving the issues in the NHS. On that basis, I don’t currently trust either of them to adequately deal with or fix it. You can’t just throw money at it, it’s too big and complex an issue. There has to be a comprehensive plan and some critical thinking that doesn’t involve sentimentality or misty eyed nostalgia for the baby days of the NHS. Times are different, modern life is different, healthcare is different, therefore we need full reform and a different approach. Perhaps like an earlier PO referenced, we look further afield, to see how other countries do it better, and if we can emulate one of these successful and socially viable structures.

Maybe a Rory Stewart style "people's assembly" on the NHS with members of the public, experts and representatives from each party? It's not a party political issue, and many who blame the Tories fail to talk about cases like this: www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-50491894

That video is quite stark Belle...

That's the sort of anger & let down feeling that I've been seeing through those pals of mine who have always been dyed in the wool working class labour.

It's hard for Labour, I see that - the Party of the left has to straddle two worlds: left leaning middle class - typically socially liberal, and also the working class who are typically socially conservative

But Brexit has definitely fractured them as a party - members overwhelmingly remain, volume of voters majority remain, but constituencies which they usually count on are more likely to be leave.

They began to take the working class vote for granted a looong time ago I think, and now is possibly going to be the time that it bites them on the ass?

Maybe not though... when it comes to the crunch in the polling booth, how likely is it that a lifelong, working class labour voter, who has been anti Tory for ever, would take the plunge & switch to Tory??

I do think it will be the working class voters who ultimately decide this election, one way or the other

Vote them in under that manifesto and we've probably got them for a long time. #Page48

Hang on a sec whilst I don my tinsel tiara... 🙄

Fucking page 48 conspiracy theorists 🙄🙄

The NHS is on its fucking knees... listen to what health care professionals are saying! DB and I attended a meeting at our trust last Friday - think they were expecting "why did you let our mum die, you are all amazing". Instead they got an hour of really difficult questions about the attitudes towards the elderly, lines of reporting, elder abuse - and none of it is their fault, it is because the NHS has too much to do and is underfunded. DB worked for the NHS for 40 years as a CPN, he was distraught about the treatment DM received (or lack of).

I do agree it should not be a political football - but nor should education or transport, and I simply dont trust the Tories to manage things for our benefit rather than for shareholders' benefit.

Maybe a Rory Stewart style "people's assembly" on the NHS with members of the public, experts and representatives from each party? It's not a party political issue

It's def got to be a joint venture going forward

It helps no one when it's weaponised for political game playing

“The NHS is on its fucking knees... listen to what health care professionals are saying!”

Fairly sure, that if you go over the last few pages of our discussions, you will not find anyone (myself included) disagreeing with you?

We ARE however, saying, it’s been in big trouble for at least 2 decades, not just conveniently since 2010.

Yolo what do you think of people on the trollies in corridors under labour then they were just chilling were they? It's laughable.

I agree with pp re dmitri and the precious vote.... they had better not let these people down.

And Yolo, I’m so sorry about your mum.

what do we all think about a 4 year old with pneumonia having a bed made up on a floor?

I would love to ask Brown/Blair exactly that question. Why the fuck did they saddle hospitals with so much debt, crippling them for decades. Any why did they go on to borrow so much money that when the banks crashed the country had nothing left to fall back on.

Have we learnt nothing from history that we could potentially elect a man who will borrow ten times more than that and destroy what is left of our country.

If anyone is to blame for a 4 year old lying on a hospital floor its Labour.

Quoting from another thread, and the poster was discussing the difference between her country of residence, and contrasting negatively with the NHS. I won't credit her at the end, because I have not sought her permission to re-post, and I am going to re-type her post verbatim.

"Compulsory insurance scheme - everyone is covered and it is free at the point of delivery. Contributions are MEANS TESTED. Those with no money pay nothing. The wealthy pay up to a ceiling of c700 euros per month of which the employer pays half if you are employed. If you are not employed but still have a high income from investments, rents etc. you pay the whole thing yourself. Income from state pension is disregarded. But wealthy (I presume with a secondary/occupational pension) pensioners continue to pay contributions. There is an element for adult social care."

She goes on to say: Same day GP appointments. Self referral to certain specialists: opthalmic, derms and gynae. Hospital wards of 2-3 beds. Standard equivalent to UK teaching hospitals.

This is what I mean when I say co-payment, and where I think a UBI, but a much reduced welfare benefit system, with tax payment starting from a little over the UBI level, moving up from 5% to 10% to 15%, and with anyone offering zero hours contracts required to contribute an appropriate amount to health insurance payments (calculated monthly by employer payroll). I reckon the big supermarkets and zero hours cheats would quickly move away from offering a max 16 unpredictable hours a week, because the admin would be shocking. Better a proper job, instead of insecurity. How helpful it would be to parents working around school hours, I couldn't suggest.

Thought you might be interested anyway.

Our local hospital wasn't on its knee under labour by the end it was broken. I'm sure at one point it was named the worst hospital in the UK. It's '' functioning '' now... Not great by any means but functioning.

@Yolofish, I agree that nothing written on the Arms thread endorses the "sale" of the NHS to overseas health care interests. But as you will have read elsewhere, we DO need to think about how the NHS is properly funded and managed for a population where life expectancy averages 80+ and medical science forges ahead, in which take aspirin and come back in a week doesn't pass for adequate advice.

The NHS at its creation, in 1947, could barely muster a supply of antibiotics. It set broken bones, carried out appendectomies and amputations, and dealt with abnormal births (normal ones happened at home with older female relatives and midwives in attendance). It was that basic. There was no innoculation for Polio (1962) or whooping cough or measles.

My DM, a SRCN qualified in 1955, worked on a TB ward where children spent their days and nights outside in the fresh air, in Birmingham. As people died younger, and ate a different diet, Alzheimer's was rare. Pre-term babies often didn't survive, and foetuses with major defects were mainly still born or miscarried. Tragedies for their families, but normal then.

A great deal less was medically possible then. But science and research has moved forward enormously, yet the idea has grown up that the NHS should still be free for all from delivery to grave, and funded from general taxation. We have to (all of us) understand that paying for the NHS where all unicorns fly will take a much larger share of national income, and agree what we are prepared to pay towards it. Divisively, I would venture that if a person is unwilling to maintain a decently healthy lifestyle, then their fellow citizens have a right to limit their access to anything beyond emergency care, except for children.

But, see my post ^^ for a different route.

FFS, I need pictures and memes! I've stopped the thread again. Or is there something worth watching on the TV?

Xing Some well thought out posts there. Unfortunately I think Labour has poisoned the well so much that any change to the NHS over the next 20+ years will be portraited as selling our hospitals to Trump, China, Russia, Amazon, Google, Virgin or whoever.

Their is another BBC QT debate on at the moment for the under 30's.

It can be summed up in one sentence:
"The person I voted for didn't win, therefore our system is broken, undemocratic, and my vote isn't being listened to."

Xing, great posts! You haven’t stopped the thread at all! ☺️ I’ve been lost in aibu for a while, it’s good comic relief!

"The person I voted for didn't win, therefore our system is broken, undemocratic, and my vote isn't being listened to."

Exactly the kind of predictable shite that made me decide not to bother! 😂

Agree with Walking, this has been an interesting discussion on the NHS. It's such a holy cow but we do need to talk about Kevin one day.
In other news have you all seen the poll from Wales ? If it's at all accurate, looks like Labour might be in some trouble outside its city strongholds.

The me at the centre of the universe. Again. I weep.