Witnessing the end of the NHS

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Stevek76
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Stevek76 »

Bonzo Banana wrote: 23 Jan 2023, 8:34pm Of course the NHS will be scaled back and the police will have less resources etc. That is the reality of a country close to needing a IMF bailout. You only have to look around to see the absence of factories and wealth generating infrastructure.
Despite the apparent best efforts of the government this country is not poor. A relatively small wealth tax would be ample to fund the increased public service requirements.

Regardless there are numerous confused and incorrect points on economics in your post. You conflate public and private debt several times and the idea that we would need an imf bailout is nonsense. This is not the 70s, we have moved beyond trying to keep currencies backed by gold. We can make a mess of our economy but we cannot 'go bust'.

You also appear to overestimate the overseas deficit. Only about 30% of government debt is held overseas, a figure that's not changed much for over a decade, it's also all sterling denominated so not really a problem. The government itself (in the form of the boe) holds 33% of its own debt and most of the rest is held by pensions.

As for private debt, whilst there is plenty of that about, ultimately all money is debt, where there is a debt there is a matching asset. If you did want to crash the economy, mass paying off of debt, and thus destruction of the money supply, would be an excellent way to do it.
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Stradageek
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Stradageek »

Stevek76 wrote: 25 Jan 2023, 12:05am Despite the apparent best efforts of the government this country is not poor. A relatively small wealth tax would be ample to fund the increased public service requirements.
Quite agree, the figure I have seen quoted is that if all the UK's offshore wealth was taxed at a minimal corporation tax rate we could pay off the entire national debt in a few years.

Which is why the element of the Zahawi scandal that annoys me most is that no one has even mentioned that the offshore entity he used to set up YouGov was essentially a tax avoidance scheme, if not yet illegal, certainly immoral.

But I guess that when lying and cheating has been almost normalised by our incumbent tories this no longer registers on our radar. :evil:
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Mick F
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Mick F »

We need a general strike until we get a general election.
Mick F. Cornwall
reohn2
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by reohn2 »

Mick F wrote: 25 Jan 2023, 2:27pm We need a general strike until we get a general election.
+1
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Sweep
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Sweep »

Mick F wrote: 25 Jan 2023, 2:27pm We need a general strike until we get a general election.
you planning to strike mick?
Would you have struck in the Navy?

(no friend of the government I stress - took the following pic the other day - poster in a Preston business window)
IMG_20230124_151438_620.jpg
Sweep
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Mick F
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Mick F »

Sweep wrote: 25 Jan 2023, 3:06pm you planning to strike mick?
Would you have struck in the Navy?
Strike in the Navy?
I did do - sort of.

I was on my way to work, walking along the jetty to HMS Argyll.
I hated the job, as I was a highly trained electronics engineer but my task in my "high" position was to look after manpower using all my technical skills to detail off junior ratings for store parties and painting duties etc etc with a job of "Departmental Co-ordinator".

There I am, walking along the jetty, and stopped. I very nearly turned round and went back home.
Instead, I went to the boss, and handed my notice in then and there. I saw the Commanding Officer too and explained why. I was off the ship in a couple of weeks, and released from the service within a year.

If all the armed forces did that, someone in the hierarchy would have to do something.
If all the workforce in the whole country did that, the government would fall.
Mick F. Cornwall
Bonzo Banana
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Bonzo Banana »

Stevek76 wrote: 25 Jan 2023, 12:05am
Bonzo Banana wrote: 23 Jan 2023, 8:34pm Of course the NHS will be scaled back and the police will have less resources etc. That is the reality of a country close to needing a IMF bailout. You only have to look around to see the absence of factories and wealth generating infrastructure.
Despite the apparent best efforts of the government this country is not poor. A relatively small wealth tax would be ample to fund the increased public service requirements.

Regardless there are numerous confused and incorrect points on economics in your post. You conflate public and private debt several times and the idea that we would need an imf bailout is nonsense. This is not the 70s, we have moved beyond trying to keep currencies backed by gold. We can make a mess of our economy but we cannot 'go bust'.

You also appear to overestimate the overseas deficit. Only about 30% of government debt is held overseas, a figure that's not changed much for over a decade, it's also all sterling denominated so not really a problem. The government itself (in the form of the boe) holds 33% of its own debt and most of the rest is held by pensions.

As for private debt, whilst there is plenty of that about, ultimately all money is debt, where there is a debt there is a matching asset. If you did want to crash the economy, mass paying off of debt, and thus destruction of the money supply, would be an excellent way to do it.
That makes no sense at all and is very simplistic view of finance. The UK is a large debtor nation with a very poor international investment position. Basically other countries own more of us than we own assets there to the tune of about 0.8 Trillion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_inter ... t_position

Overall debts are about £77k per tax payer and last I heard there is about £3k of interest paid per person per year on our debts, not sure if that was working people or a rate for everyone even if not working.

https://www.nationaldebtclock.co.uk/

The idea that the UK is rich is utterly moronic with a huge asset deficit and huge debts and this is no surprise when most of our industry is gone. It doesn't matter what ridiculous viewpoint people express in forum comments those debts still have to paid and we as a people have to stop the trading deficit which is so crippling to our economy. Even when we do so there will be decades of hardship to pay back those debts. To have to spend £3k or more of tax servicing debts every year for every person without actually paying any of the debt of but infact constantly increasing that debt is clearly hugely damaging to public services like the NHS. You cannot sort our problems by pretending you can find money from taxing people when the real problem is a trading deficit caused by a huge number of issues. The solution will have to come from a trading surplus, we need that to pay our debts and lower our interest payments.

£77k of debt per head is huge and servicing that debt is a huge burden. That's like a hidden mortgage for a small flat on everyone's head.

You have to tackle problems like this by facing them and not pretending such debts don't exist. Rich countries don't have crippling debts and huge liabilities.
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al_yrpal
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by al_yrpal »

Thats the same debt position of the US, France and Japan too I believe although they have all done more to preserve their manufacturing base than we have. Maggie and Sir Keith the mad monk started the rot.

20 years ago, with a lifetime in the NHS my Mrs was always telling me the outfit was a basket case due to poor management. Apparently it still is and on top of that it had to deal with a pandemic.

Al
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Stevek76
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Stevek76 »

The US is in a far 'worse' position (relatively as well as absolute) than us concerning NIIP - though again, NIIP covers both national/public and private debt and we see to be conflating the two quite often here. Regardless, is the US not 'rich'?

Again, if you're really actually worried about national debt (which you shouldn't be), then a fairly low wealth tax would also assist with this as not only would it increase government revenues, but some of that would come from the assets owned by overseas investors, thus directly reducing the debt.

As it is, a far better reason for a wealth tax is simply that the balance of wealth vs income in this country is completely out kilter, actively encouraged by pretty much every government from thatcher onwards.
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gbnz
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by gbnz »

al_yrpal wrote: 27 Jan 2023, 9:03am NHS .............. the outfit was a basket case due to poor management. Apparently it still is
+ 1. It's a joke. Perhaps if the &*%$$%^& spoke to their patients, they might learn something?
Stevek76
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Stevek76 »

Most big organisations, private and public, are a management basket case in my experience. I'm not sure that one really has an easy answer, other than long term efforts to improve management culture in the uk generally.

The graphs posted earlier are however still more relevant here. Dubious management but actually funded properly (along with social care funded properly) = decent patient outcomes. Dubious management with poor funding and unnecessary demand loading from bare bones social care provision = rubbish patient outcomes.
The contents of this post, unless otherwise stated, are opinions of the author and may actually be complete codswallop
Bonzo Banana
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Bonzo Banana »

al_yrpal wrote: 27 Jan 2023, 9:03am Thats the same debt position of the US, France and Japan too I believe although they have all done more to preserve their manufacturing base than we have. Maggie and Sir Keith the mad monk started the rot.

20 years ago, with a lifetime in the NHS my Mrs was always telling me the outfit was a basket case due to poor management. Apparently it still is and on top of that it had to deal with a pandemic.

Al
From memory Japan is asset rich and much of their debts is because of achieving those foreign assets. Once factories are setup abroad they bring in a large amount of revenue over time contributing to the Japanese economy. The complete reverse of having most of your industry foreign owned with profits exported to other countries. France has protected more high profile manufacturing companies but they too have lost a huge amount of their manufacturing base. We are very similar in that regard. The point is our level of debt is crippling and there is no real way to reduce this debt without running a trading surplus which is reducing our imports and increasing our exports. We have to generate funds to pay our creditors back and get back sterling.
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Cugel
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Cugel »

Stevek76 wrote: 27 Jan 2023, 10:47am Most big organisations, private and public, are a management basket case in my experience. I'm not sure that one really has an easy answer, other than long term efforts to improve management culture in the uk generally.

The graphs posted earlier are however still more relevant here. Dubious management but actually funded properly (along with social care funded properly) = decent patient outcomes. Dubious management with poor funding and unnecessary demand loading from bare bones social care provision = rubbish patient outcomes.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was an olde fashioned civil servant working at a low-grade level in a local office. The management there was minimal, since the traditions of how to do the various jobs were long-honed, well-described in various manuals, taught effectively in a 13 week induction period for new staff and practiced without anything other than a series of work-checks by a simple hierarchy of supervisor-managers.

There were a couple of motives on top of the public service ethic that tended to encourage good work rather than bad - semi-annual audits by the NAO and by the regional office auditors. Error rates, fraud signals and much else were assiduously detected by those auditors, who enjoyed finding the most minor of such things.

The penalties were nothing worse than a poor reputation for an office found wanting. Error rates of 1 - 1.5% were just acceptable (and had to have the associated cases corrected toot-sweet)! Anything more - or (worse case, a fraud detected) were a case for more serious probing along with the descent of the office's reputation into the pit of the damned.

*********
In short, the staff managed themselves and their work within a light framework of well-honed traditions, checks and a culture in which pride in one's work was prominent.

Then the Thatcher Thing came and everything was "reviewed and improved" (double-speak for "interfered with and degraded").

"Management" suddenly seemed to be the be-all and end-all, especially "management" operated from on-high by ideological dogmatists that we now call neoliberals. It all became about profit and loss, especially profit for various private companies brought in to "manage" various aspects of the work "with business efficiencies". The "efficiencies" were only about them making loadsa profit by diverting the government income stream from citizen services to shareholders and CEOs of the outsourced robbers and despoiler companies.

From the Tory instigator point of view, this was double-good. They could service their mates in the private sector by outsourcing, PFIing and otherwise handing over as much as they could of public services to private profit making. In addition, they could contract with those private profit makers to do the various dirty deeds that resulted in less service going to "the undeserving poor" that Tories see as the majority recipients of public services.

*******************
Profit making business - especially of the modern kind acting without of any framework of moral responsibility or similar wider considerations supportive of the society on which they prey - is the dirty oil to the life-giving water of public service. The two don't mix. The oil floats on top and pollutes everyone trying to get at the public service mode of working and living.

Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
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Psamathe
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Psamathe »

Sunak interview on TV last night (or an excerpt from a face-to-face interview he did with somebody) and it concerned me that he was talking about increased use of private healthcare to help reduce the NHS backlog and waiting lists.

It was only an excerpt so I have no idea what else might have been said on the subject but it worried me that the Conservatives are creating/using the NHS crisis to surreptitiously increase NHS contracting to private healthcare. Such long waiting lists and backlogs and cancelled treatments mean many will be happy whoever provides their treatment, even if they are staunch "NHS should provide NHS treatments". Creating/having such a massive backlog will reduce objections to increased private provision.

Ian
Psamathe
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Re: Witnessing the end of the NHS

Post by Psamathe »

I'm no economist but earlier this year I listened to an economist (TV or podcast) who was saying that pay increases in the private sector are NOT inflationary as we don't pay directly for such services. e.g. give the Junior Doctors a 30% pay rise and our bills/costs as used to measure inflation don't change as treatment is free at the point of delivery. True we pay for it through taxation but as I understand it the "basket" used to calculate inflation does not include taxation so public sector pay increases are not inflationary. At least that is what this economist said and it makes sense to me (as a non-economist and I'm open to alternative arguments.

Ian
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