Warning: today’s column may severely affect your health! Stay safe and don’t drink and read!

 

 

Where would our MSM be without the weather and without the death of a celebrity or actress! Clearly, I’ve not yet reached my personal ‘peak cynical’, but I can confidently predict that the lower the MSM sink the more difficult it becomes to reach that peak. What am I talking about? The fact that the death of an actress – Miss Olivia Newton-Jones, since you ask – is the main or second important item on the front pages this morning (link).

Some papers have another go at the Truss & Sunak show, but it feels rather half-hearted. Of course, there’s still that heatwave and that hosepipe ban which could go on until October, and the ‘Sacred Cow’ is still with us, in one form or another. Since our esteemed Westminster ‘news’ editors and especially their opinion columnists are so patently incapable of connecting dots I’ll try and do it for them. 

Let’s start with yon heatwave, formerly known as summer, which is abused for another ‘health monitoring exercise’ by the NHS and their monitoring arm, the UKHSA (UK Health and Security Agency). The BBC, bless them, reports that from midday today a ‘heat health alert’ will come into force:

“The level three heat warning issued by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) covers southern and central England from midday on Tuesday until 18:00 BST on Saturday. The amber alert “requires social and healthcare services to target specific actions at high-risk groups”, but is one stage lower than the most serous level four red warning issued in last month’s heatwave. A level two yellow alert will be in place for northern England for the same period.” (link)

Note well that the BBC is already re-writing history by insinuating that there was ‘a heatwave’ last month when we all still recall that this wave consisted of two (!) days only. It’s not the nannying that is so bad, it’s the fact that ‘social and healthcare authorities’ are called upon to do even more ‘monitoring’. They must have collected huge databases to know whom all to ‘monitor’. Moreover, these services suffer from staff shortages so that they cannot help those in hospital who need ‘care packets’ in order to be released.

Meanwhile the NHS who is consistently blaming ‘bed blockers’ – those for which said agencies cannot set up yon ‘care packets’ – is warning  that patients will have to wait longer so that the covid-created backlog can be cleared up. At first glance this looks to be somewhat self-congratulatory:

“Today the NHS claimed it had “virtually eliminated” two year waits, with less than 3,000 people enduring such delays, down from 22,500 at the end of January. Hospitals are being urged to prioritise those waiting 18 months or more, with pledges to get rid of such waits by April next year.” (paywalled link)

So let’s clap for the hard-working NHS, shall we, and let’s not mention that by April next year those 18 months will have become two years. How the NHS is planning to achieve this is however hair-raising (my emphasis):

“NHS chiefs have instructed hospitals to focus on outpatient first appointments, rather than patients who have already had treatment, and are waiting for follow-up checks. Two thirds of the 10 million appointments which take place each month involve repeat visits, monitoring health conditions. […] Senior officials have said many such appointments are a “a waste of time” saying there should be more use of systems where routine slots are scrapped, and patients instead told to contact their medical team if they have particular concerns.” (paywalled link)

Statements like those make my blood boil. Never mind that these ‘medical teams’, a.k.a. GPs, are mostly unavailable, it’s the callousness with which ‘senior officials’ are describing follow-ups as waste-of-time, disregarding proper medical reasons for said follow-ups. These can also be labelled ‘monitoring’, something the ‘security’ arm of the NHS, the UKHSA, now demands for ‘Teh Heatwave’.  Moreover, this report doesn’t mention that, according to the DM:

“Nurses will start voting next month on whether to strike over pay in what is being described as a ‘defining moment’ for the profession. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said it will be recommending hundreds of thousands of its members support industrial action in a ballot that opens in mid-September.” (link)

I suppose it’s another form of triage where people, especially the elderly, are left to cope as best they can, having had just one treatment, while those who ought to monitor them are focussing instead on ‘monitoring the vulnerable’ because of yon heatwave. I’m sure by the time the hosepipe ban will be lifted there will be another ‘weather health warning’ with more ‘monitoring’.

I am looking forward to such ‘warnings’ when we get proper winter weather, with snow and frost. Will the NHS and their agencies ‘warn’ people about the dangers of hypothermia when at the same time these vulnerable people are unable to afford heating their homes? Moreover, notice that the ‘guidance’ is alway for neighbours to check on neighbours. It’s a pernicious form of outsourcing.

I leave you with two ‘news’ items. One is that a certain Sir Mark Sedwill has resurfaced, with an essay written for the DT under the appetising headline “Seize the Brexit opportunity to revamp red tape – We don’t need a bonfire of regulation. But we do need to end the ratchet of excessive risk aversion” (paywalled link). Too right – but tell that to the UKHSA and all who think we need to be monitored because we don’t know the dreadful risks lurking everywhere.

Perhaps Sedwill’s proposals have led to the decision of another ‘monitoring’ agency which has scrapped their ‘monitoring’, according to the second ‘news’ item. In this morning’s print edition the DM’s front page has the headline ‘’Police checks on Russian and Chinese nationals are axed” – scroll down at the usual place (link). However, you’ll not find this in their online edition, you have to go and look for it. This report’s headlines say it all:

“Monitoring scheme for residents from 44 countries gets secretly ditched because it is ‘no longer effective’ as Home Office already has the data – The Police Registration Scheme was abruptly halted at the end of last week – The scheme provides strict police checks on foreign nationals living in Britain – This includes thousands of people from 44 countries including Russia and China” (link)

The report isn’t paywalled so you can read the whole thing. The scandal is that this was done secretly, with nobody having been told. Funny, isn’t it, how sieve-like Whitehall can keep secrets when it suits them!

What I want to know is: why is one group of people no longer monitored while another – the ‘vulnerable’ – is being monitored, for ‘health reasons’, to within an inch of their private lives? Shouldn’t all those foreigners be monitored for health reasons as well because the dreadful health threat of Monkeypox is going to overwhelm us, according to the MSM? Is ‘monitoring’ now outsourced, from the police to the UKHSA?  I assume that neighbours won’t be asked to ‘monitor’ those foreigners because that would be racist …

Who knows what the autumn and winter will bring us in addition to inflation and ‘health monitoring’ – ‘weather’, I assume. Since these are all things we peasants can do nothing about it’s best to enjoy the sunshine, hot or ‘heatwave hot’, as best we can. Unmonitored, that is.



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