Quotulatiousness

May 30, 2013

Latest EU legal move may drive support to UKIP

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

Mats Persson explains why Nigel Farage and UKIP may see a spike of support when the latest legal challenge gets going:

The European Commission will today take the UK to the European Court of Justice — the body meant to police the EU treaties — over its rules on EU migrants’ access to benefits. The Commission says the UK’s so-called “right to reside” test — a filter used to make sure that EU migrants are eligible to claim benefits — is illegal under EU law as British citizens pass it automatically. The UK Government is disputing this claim saying it is clear that the UK rules “are in line with EU law.” In other words, the folks in Brussels are about to throw a hand grenade into the already red-hot domestic EU debate.

The legal details around this case are hugely complex as are the rules governing EU migrants’ access to benefits […] But essentially, this is about the EU’s one-size-fits-all model sitting poorly with the UK’s ‘universalist’ welfare system, which is largely made up of means tested benefits rather than contribution-based benefits — unlike many other systems in Europe. The UK government feels it needs a filter — practically and politically — to make sure migrants come here to work rather than to claim benefits. Legally this is a grey area but it’s clear that the Commission is taking the strictest interpretation.

As I’ve argued before, claims that EU migrants come here in droves to claim benefits are widely exaggerated — and free movement of workers has been largely beneficial for the UK and Europe. However, it’s clear that the combination of immigration, Europe and benefits is one of the potentially most toxic ones in modern day politics, so needs to be treated with kid gloves. Even if all the evidence suggests EU migrants are less likely to claim benefits than British citizens, the perception of “benefit tourism” is still absolutely explosive.

High speed steam run

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

LNER A4 Class 4464 (60019) “Bittern” has been given dispensation to run at 90MPH on the East Coast Main Line in July, to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Mallard’s world speed record, subject to a satisfactory high speed test. This is that test. The weather was perfect — damp, cool, no wind. Bittern left Didcot at 05:23 am and flew through Slough 05:58 at full pelt for an average of 60mph over the 35 miles. The 6.2 mile section between Maidenhead and Slough was completed in 4 minutes, an average of 93MPH. Using film time markers I timed the whole train at 90mph through Taplow where this film was shot.

Given the two sets of hand cranked data, and with no speed gun to hand, I am happy to put the 90MPH stamp on the film title.

H/T to Jim Guthrie for the link.

May 26, 2013

Reporting (and omitting to report) certain news items

Filed under: Britain, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

Mark Steyn on what was top of the issue-sheet for journalists discussing the Woolwich murder and the Swedish “youth” riots:

For the last week Stockholm has been ablaze every night with hundreds of burning cars set alight by “youths.” Any particular kind of “youth”? The Swedish prime minister declined to identify them any more precisely than as “hooligans.” But don’t worry: The “hooligans” and “youths” and men of no Muslim appearance whatsoever can never win because, as David Cameron ringingly declared, “they can never beat the values we hold dear, the belief in freedom, in democracy, in free speech, in our British values, Western values.” Actually, they’ve already gone quite a way toward eroding free speech, as both prime ministers demonstrate. The short version of what happened in Woolwich is that two Muslims butchered a British soldier in the name of Islam and helpfully explained, “The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day.” But what do they know? They’re only Muslims, not Diversity Outreach Coordinators. So the BBC, in its so-called “Key Points,” declined to mention the “Allahu akbar” bit or the “I”-word at all: Allah who?

Not a lot of Muslims want to go to the trouble of chopping your head off, but when so many Western leaders have so little rattling around up there, they don’t have to. And, as we know from the sob-sister Tsarnaev profiles, most of these excitable lads are perfectly affable, or at least no more than mildly alienated, until the day they set a hundred cars alight, or blow up a school boy, or decapitate some guy. And, if you’re lucky, it’s not you they behead, or your kid they kill, or even your Honda Civic they light up. And so life goes on, and it’s all so “mundane,” in Simon Jenkins’s word, that you barely notice when the Jewish school shuts up, and the gay bar, and the uncovered women no longer take a stroll too late in the day, and the publishing house that gets sent the manuscript for the next Satanic Verses decides it’s not worth the trouble … But don’t worry, they’ll never defeat our “free speech” and our “way of life.”

One in ten Britons under 25 is now Muslim. That number will increase, through immigration, disparate birth rates, and conversions like those of the Woolwich killers, British-born and -bred. Metternich liked to say the Balkans began in the Landstrasse, in southeast Vienna. Today, the Dar al-Islam begins in Wellington Street, in southeast London. That’s a “betrayal” all right, but not of Islam.

More on Scotland’s proposed “child protection” scheme

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

Last week, I linked to a story about the Scottish government introducing a new “child protection” program that would assign a “named person” as guardian for every child. Christopher Booker has more on this rather disturbing Big Brother initiative:

We are familiar with the idea that state employees are expected to take an interest in a child’s welfare, from health visitors to teachers at school. But this proposal that local authorities should be empowered to appoint an official to act as a personal “guardian”, or social worker, to oversee every aspect of a child’s life from birth onwards is a world first.

In fact, the Bill is remarkably vague about the powers to be given to these “named persons”. Will they be free to arrive unannounced at the family home to check on how a child is being treated by its parents, when it goes to bed, what food it is given, what political or religious opinions it is being brought up with? In other words, the Bill gives no idea of how this hugely ambitious scheme, estimated to cost Scotland’s local authorities up to £138 million a year, will work in practice. And most worrying of all, to anyone familiar with the failings of our existing “child protection” system, is how often the most damaging errors can arise when professionals are charged with reporting to social workers their suspicion that something in a child’s life might be amiss.

In too many of the cases I have followed where children have been removed from their families for what seems to be no good reason, their nightmare began with a report by a teacher or a doctor that got some overheard remark or slight injury absurdly out of proportion. Too often, such suspicions then harden into allegations that are never properly tested against the evidence, and the damage is done. However admirable, in theory, the thought of appointing a “guardian” to watch over every child might seem, experience suggests that, in practice, this may exacerbate those weaknesses in our existing “child protection” system, which make a mockery of the noble aims it was set up to promote.

May 25, 2013

James Delingpole, that intellectual lightweight

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

Here he is again, banging on about his failings, particularly over the Woolwich murder:

On occasions like this I really do feel a bit of an intellectual lightweight, I must say. There am I, stuck in the fuddy-duddy mindset where you see a 25-year old father of a one year old boy being hacked to death with meat cleavers on a busy London street and all you can do is respond with the gut feeling that “This is wrong. This is totally wrong!”

Whereas if I were a bit younger, less reactionary and I’d had a proper educational grounding somewhere serious like the LSE, what I would have realised is that you just can’t judge things like this at face value. Sure, there’s a temptation to dwell on what a terrible way to go it must have been for that poor young man; to think about what his family must be going through — his wife and mother especially, who will surely be re-living his imagined death every day from now on till they die; to get quite angry, even, about the perverted political values and warped mindset that led to this barbaric act — and also about the cultural relativism that helped make it possible. But succumbing to this temptation would, of course, be a serious mistake.

No, if you’re a truly enlightened citizen of the modern world, the correct way to respond is the way all those sophisticated intellectual types on Twitter did. You recognise straightaway that the horror of the murder is just a distraction from the real issue. The real issue being, of course, that this regrettable event was the sadly inevitable consequence of Britain’s racism, intolerance and Islamophobia — as demonstrated by Nick Robinson’s bigoted, ignorant and inflammatory use of that reprehensible “of Muslim appearance” comment on BBC news for which he has since, quite correctly, apologised.

Until, as a society, we learn to face up to our collective responsibility for Drummer Lee Rigby’s death, young men like Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale ought to have every right to go on drawing attention to this rampant injustice in whatever way they deem fit. It is frankly outrageous that in order to make their point they had to resort to the blunt instrument of execution by motor vehicle and butcher’s knife. A truly considerate society would have made public funds available for them to afford some properly functioning automatic weaponry. That way these gallant, oppressed freedom fighters could have made their vibrant and refreshingly direct contribution to our national debate with a lot less fuss and a lot less mess — perhaps preventing the disgraceful public overreaction we have witnessed over the last couple of days, everywhere from the hateful, violent racist English Defence League to the hardcore, fascist right-wing BBC.

May 23, 2013

Identity politics and the Woolwich murderers

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:26

Brendan O’Neill on yesterday’s brutal murder in Woolwich:

One of the most shocking things about the brutal attack in Woolwich yesterday was the arrogance with which one of the bloodied knifemen claimed to be acting on behalf of all Muslims. In what sounded like a South London accent, this British-seeming, casually dressed young man bizarrely spoke as if he were a representative of the ummah. He talked about “our lands” and what “our people” have to go through every day. He presumably meant Iraqis and Afghanis, or perhaps the broader global “Muslim family”.

How can a couple of men so thoroughly convince themselves that they speak for all Muslims, to the extent that they seriously believe their savage and psychotic attack on a man in the street is some kind of glorious act of Islamic resistance? Perhaps because they live in a country in which claiming to speak “on behalf of” a community, even if you’ve never been elected by or even seriously talked to that community, is taken seriously. A country where one’s identity, one’s racial or religious or cultural make-up, now counts for everything, certainly for more than what one does or what one believes. A country in which the politics of identity, the narrow and deeply divisive communal politics of shared cultural traits, has been privileged over all other kinds of politics.

The Woolwich murderer’s impromptu claim to be acting on behalf of the grievances of Muslims everywhere echoes the statements made by the 7/7 bombers. “Your democratically elected governments continue to perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world”, said chief bomber Mohammad Siddique Khan. “My people” — what extraordinary arrogance and self-righteousness. Did Khan ever talk to “his people” or win a mandate from them? Of course not, no more than the knife-wielding nutter in Woolwich engaged with the inhabitants of what he thinks of as “his lands”. Rather, in this era in which any old fool can claim to be a “community spokesperson”, and can be treated seriously as such, these murderous loners seem to be trying a psychotic version of the same trick — claiming that by dint of shared skin colour or common religious sentiment they have the authority to speak on behalf of millions of people they have never met or whose lands they have never visited.

May 21, 2013

“… and Lord Tebbit as the Bursar”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:05

In case you didn’t catch it, this is a Discworld reference.

Last of the Royal Navy’s Type 42 destroyers to leave service

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:22

HMS Edinburgh, the last of the Type 42 destroyers, will be hauling down her flag on June 6th:

In 1966 the Labour government cancelled the CVA-01 aircraft carrier project and the Type 82 destroyers that were designed as the carrier’s main escorts. The Type 82 programme was quite advanced and HMS Bristol was eventually completed. The Type 82 was really a light cruiser, large, heavily armed and expensive, with complex steam & gas turbine propulsion. In some ways it was a blessing that the costly Type 82′s were axed as the RN was able to get decent numbers of the alternative cheaper Type 42s.

The Type 42 was always an ‘austerity design’ and although by the batch 3 ships many of the problems had been cured, they were always considered only a partial success. Sometimes the quality and excellence of the RN crews could overcome these deficiencies, sometimes not. In the design stage it was decided not exceed a certain hull length in the erroneous belief that would save on cost, the first 8 ships were too short and this caused various problems throughout their lives. Poor sea-keeping was not only tiring for crews but affected the operation of the gun and delicate missile launcher on the foredeck. Rather cramped with a crew of around 250 (300 could be crammed in at a push), there was small margin for additional equipment but the RN just about managed to keep them effective with small incremental upgrades. The Type 42 was built around the Sea Dart missile system that was designed to provide area defence for the fleet from medium or high level Soviet bombers. The Sea Dart was pretty effective when the targets obliged by flying high but lacked the ability to engage close-in and low-level aircraft and anti-ship missiles. The RN developed the excellent Sea Wolf system for this role but it would be too costly to fit to the already cramped Type 42. Inexcusably for an air-defence destroyer, close-in weapons (CIWS) amounted to just 2 of manually–aimed WWII vintage Oerlikon 20mm cannons. This was quickly remedied after the Falkland’s war with fitting of 4 modern 20mm cannons and ultimately by the 1990s all ships were properly equipped with 2 Phalanx 20mm radar-controlled gatling guns. Unlike the Type 82, there was a hangar and flight deck which allowed the carrying of a Wasp and then the superb Lynx helicopter which gave the ship a major anti-submarine capability and light anti-shipping punch. Finally the Mk 8 4.5” gun provided limited air defence capability, last-ditch anti-shipping role, but was mainly used for bombarding land targets.

[. . .]

The Falklands war has dominated the story of the Type 42. On 4th May 1982 HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile, caught unawares while transmitting on satellite comms, she failed to detect the missile but without adequate CIWS would probably have been unable to save herself anyway. The missile failed to explode but the resulting fire eventually destroyed the ship, killing 22 of her crew. On 12th May HMS Glasgow was hit by a 1000lb bomb which fortunately passed right through the ship without exploding. She was patched up but had to limp home leaving HMS Coventry as the only remaining air defence ship in the task force. Coventry was sunk on 25th May 1982 by bombs while bravely operating in an exposed position to defend the landing ships with Sea Wolf-armed HMS Broadsword. The idea was that the combination of Sea Dart and Sea Wolf would provide long and short-range anti-aircraft coverage but although initially a success, Coventry’s luck ran out when she accidentally blocked Broadsword’s field of fire. This would not have been a problem for a single ship fitted with both weapons. HMS Exeter and Cardiff arrived as replacements and Exeter (with her better radars & electronics) achieved 3 aircraft kills. The Sea Dart system was a partial success in the Falklands war, exact figures are disputed but it achieved a roughly 50% hit rate. Its greater achievement was to force Argentine pilots to attack at low-level where their bombs sometimes didn’t fuse properly and failed to explode. What can be seen is that the presence of fighter aircraft (Sea Harriers) was a more effective weapon against attacking aircraft. Ship launched missiles are generally inferior to fighter aircraft, although missile systems in theory can be available 24/7 when it is difficult to maintain continuous combat patrol (CAP) cover. Although 2 were lost and 1 damaged the ‘expendable’ ‘fighting 42s” achieved their main strategic objective that was to defend the carriers and other ships that ultimately won the war.

May 19, 2013

Scottish government assigns state guardians to all children

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

The SNP has introduced brand new form of interference in the lives of Scottish families:

Under the “scary” legislation, known as Getting It Right For Every Child or GIRFEC, every child aged under 18 will have a ‘Named Person’ with the legal right to ensure they are raised in a government-approved manner.

It will also mean that sensitve personal details about every child — even down to the names of their pets — can be recorded, stored and shared on a central database.

Incredibly, GIRFEC has already been adopted by almost every local authority in Scotland and yet most people — including some MSPs — have no idea of the full extent of its Big Brother-style interference.

[. . .]

For children under five, the state guardian will usually be a health visitor, while for school-age children it will usually be the headteacher or deputy head.

They will have to record “routine information” about their charges, which is then stored in a vast database, and can raise concerns about a child’s wellbeing that could ultimately result in them being taken into care.

Marion Samson, headteacher at Westquarter Primary and Nursery in Falkirk, is a ‘Named Person’ who says her role is to “challenge” families who are not bringing up their children properly.

However, in response to her profile on the government’s Engage for Education blog, one teacher – giving her name as Sian Dawson — described GIRFEC as “quite a scary notion”.

She wrote: “Perhaps the Scottish Government would be far better tightening up the processes surrounding child protection for those who actually need help rather than not trusting the majority of families to do a good job.”

According to a Scottish Government training document seen by this newspaper, the specific aim of GIRFEC is to undermine parents and give the “community” a greater role in raising children.

May 18, 2013

The micro-state of Sealand

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Liberty, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Thomas Hodgkinson reports on his week-long visit to the tiny nation of Sealand:

Sealand

Seven miles off the coast of Suffolk, there is a country. It isn’t a very big country. In fact, its surface area extends to no more than 6,000 square feet, which is about twice the size of a tennis court. You won’t find it on Google Maps and it isn’t a member of Nato or, indeed, the EU. But it exists. And I know, because I’ve been there.

[. . .]

The reason for this suspicion of strangers in general lies in the violent, picaresque nature of its past. Sealand was built in 1943 by the Royal Navy as an anti-aircraft fortress designed to shoot down Luftwaffe planes. In those days it was equipped with two 94mm Vickers heavy anti-aircraft guns and two 40mm Bofors light anti-aircraft guns, and manned by 120 seamen crammed into accommodation in the hollow concrete towers. It was known as HM Fort Roughs, or Roughs Tower for short. Abandoned after the War, it gathered rust and guano, a gloomy relic of conflict, until the era of pirate radio in the 1960s.

Then two rival entrepreneurs competed for possession, regarding the fort as the perfect place (since it was outside the three-mile zone that then constituted British territorial waters) from which to broadcast pop music to a grateful generation of teenagers. The piratical pair were the long-haired Irish chancer Ronan O’Rahilly, of Radio Caroline fame, and one Roy Bates, a cravat-wearing former Army major.

Each time one of them put men on Roughs Tower, the other would send people to eject them, sometimes forcibly. It was a question of who was prepared to go further, and the answer turned out to be the Englishman. For Bates, the solitary fortress became far more than a radio project. It became an obsession that would absorb not only his life, but also the lives of his wife and children.

The key thing, he knew, was to maintain a presence. With even one occupant, Roughs Tower was tough to take. But Roy couldn’t afford a guard, so instead he plucked his 14-year-old son Michael out of school and put him up there, sometimes with his daughter Penny, sometimes with his wife Joan. For Michael, this was a welcome escape from the dreary rigours of a public-school education, but as he confided to me during a long lunch on-shore after my visit, “I expected it to last six months, not 40-something years”.

Sealand2

May 17, 2013

Zoe Fairbairns’ Benefits

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Neil Davenport talks about the recent re-publication of Zoe Fairbairns’ dystopian feminist novel, Benefits:

Written in the febrile political atmosphere of late-1970s Britain, Benefits is about a future state’s sinister attempts to control women’s fertility, and to encourage responsible parenting, through the introduction of a universal ‘wages for housework’ benefit.

Although rarely out of print since it first appeared in 1979, Benefits has recently been re-issued, with a new introduction by Fairbairns, for the e-reader age. It is now being marketed as a political attack on ‘anti-welfarist Tories’, yet as Fairbairns points out, anyone who views Benefits as simplistically ‘anti-Thatcherite’ is missing its key point: that welfare benefits can become a weapon of social engineering and control. On top of critiquing aspects of welfarism, Benefits lays into radical feminism’s self-defeating slogan, ‘The personal is political’, while passionately championing women’s liberation and equal rights — feminism’s one-time aims.

Like many dystopian novels, Benefits is rooted in the fears, the panics and the politics of the period it was written in. So although it is set in the dying days of the twentieth century, it rather charmingly echoes the late 1970s: all tower-block grime; politico slogans on walls; squats; communes; poorly designed radical pamphlets. It also speaks to the more alarmist rhetoric of that period of the mid- to late 1970s. From ecologists predicting Europe-wide famine to the New Right’s panic over single mothers to respectable racists complaining about ‘coloured immigration’, the political feeling in Benefits is unmistakably mid-Seventies.

[. . .]

Equally prescient in Benefits is the way its fictional state believes that ‘poor parenting’ can have a corrosive impact on the individual and society; this has become an unquestioned orthodoxy today.

Many dystopian novels hint at a future in which pornography has become staple entertainment. Benefits does that, too, and this also speaks to the reality of twenty-first-century life, especially to today’s increasing separation of sex from genuine intimacy (it talks about ‘all that sex and no babies’).

In Fairbairns’ nightmare vision, women who want to receive benefits must undergo ‘a programme of education for motherhood’. This sounds suspiciously like parenting classes, which are increasingly common today, especially for poorer families, or what David Cameron calls ‘chaotic families’. Also, in imagining a future in which parenting is redefined as a ‘national service’, Benefits hints at today’s creeping nationalisation of individual families. The novel even features a supra-sovereign state called Europea, where British politicians willingly offload their own parliamentary responsibilities. Sound familiar?

May 16, 2013

You don’t have to be a “Little Englander” to think the UK would be better off outside the EU

Filed under: Britain, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

In sp!ked, Rob Lyons explains that it’s not just the neanderthal throwback Tories who are questioning whether the UK should leave the European Union:

Over the past week, there has been the most serious discussion about Britain leaving the European Union since it first joined in 1973, and since the British electorate voted in its only referendum on EU membership, under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, in 1975. This discussion a good thing, because it really is time we made a collective dash for the exit from the EU.

[. . .]

The EU doesn’t only elevate technocrats in the economic sphere. More and more political and social policy is also effectively being guided from Brussels. Consider an opinion piece [in the] Guardian this week, by the head of policy at Friends of the Earth UK, Craig Bennett. Bennett argues that the ability of the EU to impose rules and regulations on Britain has improved our health and environment. To be explicit: Bennett thinks it is better that people outside Britain impose these things upon us, even over the heads of our elected representatives. Where a national government might have to balance costs and benefits, and take into consideration the stated desires and priorities of voters, regulations and directives from Brussels can be imposed free from such consequences and accountability. From the point of view of NGOs and lobbyists, this is great news. Why try to change popular opinion when you can simply get the green light from some unelected body of technocrats?

To be anti-EU does not mean being anti-Europe. True, there is a fair degree of parochialism and anti-immigrant sentiment among many of those in Britain who want out. But those of us who believe in having closer ties with Europe and greater freedom of movement across the continent should also be opposed to the EU. Because, thanks to its anti-democratic institutions and its imposition of draconian policies on unwilling citizens, the EU is now doing more harm than good for the cause of creating a sense of European common interest. It might be uniting national elites, allowing them to take refuge from their electorates in the citadels of Brussels, but it is disempowering and even dividing the peoples of Europe — Germans vs Greeks, for example, or enlightened Western Europeans against allegedly backward, racist Hungarians.

Despite the creation of the European Parliament in 1979, there is no meaningful European demos. But the ability to move and trade freely is a good thing — something we could surely retain without the bureaucratic honeypot of the EU’s institutions. It’s time for all Europeans to reimagine how we might live and work together — and Britain marking a sharp exit from the anti-democratic, pseudo-unifying mess that is the EU could be the perfect catalyst for that.

May 15, 2013

Google UK marks the 150th birthday of Frank Hornby

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

If you go to https://www.google.co.uk/ today, you’ll see the Google doodle has a distinct toy train motif:

Google UK doodle for Frank Hornby

At The Independent, Matilda Battersby tells the story:

The search engine Google is celebrating the 150th birthday of visionary toy maker Frank Hornby, whose model railways, Meccano sets and Dinky toys are still being played with by children today.

Born in Liverpool on 15 May 1863, Hornby was behind three of the most popular toy lines of the 20th century despite having no formal engineering training.

[. . .]

Meccano’s turnover for the 1910 financial year was £12,000. His son Roland joined the business, and when the operation began exporting to Europe, he opened Meccano France Ltd in Paris. Two offices in Germany soon followed.

Having dabbled in politics in later life, Hornby died of a heart condition and diabetes in Maghull, near Liverpool, on 21 September 1936. Two years previously he had set up Dinky Toys to manufacture miniature model cars and trucks.

In 1938 his son Roland launched the Hornby Dublo model railway system — a posthumous honour to his father.

Enthusiasts around the world still collect Hornby train sets, Dinky Toys and Meccano models. The modern business also make Scalextric cars and Airfix kits.

H/T to Roger Henry for the link.

May 12, 2013

British emergency wards are overcrowded … so we’ll fine the ambulance service!

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Hard to come up with an explanation for this perverse policy:

Ministers came under fresh criticism for their handling of the NHS last night after it emerged the ambulance service will be hit with £90 million in fines — as punishment for the chaos blighting casualty departments.

Critics said the fines will simply deprive trusts of vital funds that could help tackle the deterioration in patient services.

A new penalty clause that was written into ambulance trust contracts from last month will levy fines of £200 for every patient who has to wait for longer than 30 minutes for admission to A&E, and £1,000 for each patient forced to wait more than an hour.

You can understand the desire to speed the delivery of injured people to the emergency services they need, but how does it make any kind of sense to punish the ambulance service because the emergency wards they need to get their patients into are overcrowded? Unless the ambulance service has some kind of magic ability to shift priorities in the hospitals, fining them for patients’ wait times makes less than zero sense.

But acute overcrowding in A&E departments has led to increasing ambulance ‘jams’ formed as they queue to unload, with waits of four hours recorded at some hospitals at the busiest times.

Damning new figures reveal that during the past year there were more than 265,000 occasions in England when ambulance staff took more than half an hour to deliver patients into the hands of hospital doctors.

And shockingly, more than 37,000 patients had to wait over an hour to move on to the wards.

Official guidelines say ambulances should deliver patients, clean the ambulance and be back out on the road within 15 minutes. A longer wait is seen as ‘unsafe’.

Yet the chaos in A&E departments is so bad that at one, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, doctors were forced to put up a tent to act as a makeshift ward to treat patients alongside the ambulance queue.

May 11, 2013

Britain’s latest wave of snobbery

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Brendan O’Neill examines the worldview of the supermarket-hater:

A malady is spreading through the leafier bits of Britain. It’s causing fevered thinking among its sufferers, who can’t even walk down a high street without experiencing distressing symptoms: cold sweats, anger, an urge to shout rude things at dumb shoppers.

Their ailment? Tescophobia, an irrational loathing of Britain’s biggest supermarket.

A certain tranche of the middle classes hates nothing more than the sight of a Tesco store. Except perhaps the sight of Tesco patrons, whom anti-Tesco author Andrew Simms snobbishly describes as always looking “listless and depressed… slumping from place to place”.

It is nothing more than thinly veiled class disdain for the plebs:

But there’s a reason Tesco and other supermarkets have been a roaring hit: it’s because they’ve made people’s lives, especially women’s lives, so much easier.

Remember when we had to traipse from shop to shop almost every day of the week just to have enough grub and stuff to live on? I have vivid memories of going shopping with my mum, accompanied by my five brothers, back when supermarkets weren’t as common as they are now.

We’d go to the butchers, the bakers, the greengrocers, the corner shop, packing our wares into tatty bags and dragging them home, before having to do the same thing again in a couple of days’ time because the foodstuffs sold by small shops didn’t tend to last long. The arrival of the supermarket revolutionised all that.

Suddenly, everything you might need or want was under one roof. A family larder could be stocked in the space of an hour, where once it was a never-ending task. How much of mankind’s, or rather womankind’s, time has been freed up for other pursuits by the spread of Tesco?

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