Great news for anyone who hates looking at human faces in supermarket queues. Because masks and social distancing are back baby! Or they will be if ‘health chiefs and scientists’ have their way. That’s according to the ever reliable Daily Mail, which warns that ministers are cooking up, or rather re heating, a scheme to ‘advise’ us to wear masks on public transport, and socially distance at any point when the NHS is ‘at risk of collapse.’
Well it has collapsed. So that’s right now then.
This has sparked the usual moaning from all sides. On one side those who like to point out that the only proven effect of mask wearing is to increase the amount of tutting you hear in Waitrose. Versus those on the other side who insist you are literally killing their kids if you’re not wearing an anthrax rated hazmat suit as you pass them, going the other way, on an escalator.
Expect the arguments about ‘protecting the NHS’ to increase in both shrillness and volume in the coming days as the pressure to ‘do something, anything, just something’ builds to popping point.
But let’s be clear what this mask nonsense is really about. It’s not about protecting the NHS, patients, or the vulnerable. It’s about protecting the people who really matter. The government, Rishi Sunak, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (yup me neither-I wanna say Rory Henderson??) , the actual boss of the NHS, Amanda Pritchard, (had to Google her) and the managers, executive directors, and the stake holder chief operating trust officers for clinical delivery and inclusion who are supposed to be in charge of running, (or will that spellcheck to ‘ruining’), the health service.
Because this is another example of the oft tried wheeze of shifting the blame, for the appalling state of the NHS, from the government which runs it, to the people who use it.
You know the drill.
‘We know the NHS is falling apart. But don’t blame us guv. Blame the people who didn’t follow the rules, didn’t wear their masks, didn’t social distance. It’s all their fault.’
We’ve been here before. The NHS is collapsing because the greedy guts obesity crisis is swallowing up all the resources they say, somehow forgetting that fat people pay their taxes too.
Or remember when the ‘you want an American system that kills poor people’ gang were suddenly signing up to a ‘two tier health service’ if it meant denying treatment to those nasty ‘anti-vaxxers’ who were supposedly hastening NHS Apocalypse by not taking their ‘jabs’ like they were told.
Like a 91 year old broken hipped nana waiting 27 hours in the rain for an ambulance. The NHS is on its last legs. There is no doubt about it. Some of you claim that is because it hasn’t been given enough money. Others will say it’s not the resources, but the fundamental nature of the centralised system which is to blame. There is merit in both arguments.
But I know who is not at fault. The people who use it. There is no such thing as ‘the wrong kind of patient.’ The NHS was set up to serve everyone. Not just the thin people. Not just the sensible people who always wear a helmet when they ride their Brompton. It was also, set up to treat overconfident skateboarders who knock their teeth out trying to impress a girl on a passing bus. To bring succour to hen night mums who break their head leapfrogging a bollard outside Wetherspoons. And certainly not just to treat the ‘good’ people who mask up, are and shut up when they are told. It’s universal healthcare. That’s the point of it.
Us patients didn’t break the NHS with our inconvenient cancers, coughs, chest infections, drunken accidents and knee replacements. They did. And you won’t double break it now, if you refuse to succumb to another round of finger wagging and face shaming.
So don’t let them try and shift the blame. They would love nothing better than for us to stop pointing the finger of blame at them, and start pointing it at each other instead. So don’t let them get away with it. Again.
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Thanks for taking the time to read this article, I very much appreciate it. Do you agree that the NHS is trying to blame its patients for many of its failures? I’ll reply in kind to any good faith comments, so why not tell me what you think?
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Your quality of writing is a pleasure to read. Better than 95% of broadsheet journalists (I do believe Rod Liddle needs to up his game as you come up the rail behind him). Good natured rationality, combined with a natural flare for words and a “makes it look easy” writing style that just flows off the page. Always successfully holding back from letting it deteriorate into a rant. All tied up with a nicely weighted moral point about the NHS being for everybody, not just the nice people.