Brown the waster tells us not to waste

Hypocrisy is New Labour’s prime characteristic, and Gordon “Heathcliff” Brown’s injunction to us all not to waste anything is a fine example of Labour – and specifically Brownite – hypocrisy

We are, apparently, throwing away £1bn of food each year. That is indeed something to be corrected, with implications well beyond the £420 per family which a Whitehall study has alleged. It deprives others, it generates waste and it inflates the profits of the supermarkets. It is nothing, however, to what Gordon Brown has wasted.

A hit-squad of old nurses

Libby Purves, writing in the Times on Tuesday (Send in the storm-trooper nurses) suggests that dirty hospitals be visited by

“a volunteer regiment of ex-nurses trained before 1975: opinionated middle-aged women with strong memories and no fear of offending. Every hospital would be invaded by several dozen for one month. During that month all normal taboos would be suspended: there would be no interdicts on workplace bullying, harassment, job demarcation, paperwork, or protocols of line management.”

I know one or two of that generation of nurses. They are appalled to see nurses out in the street in their uniforms, never mind the visible dirt in the wards. Their fear of long-dead Matrons remains as strong as their conviction that the discipline was right and necessary.

You might think that a reforming government with a big purse and a belief in its capacity to change the world would have managed at least to clean the hospitals. The stumbling-block is that those things which are at the root of the problem are things which are simultaneously dear to Labour’s heart and susceptible to Labour’s great weakness – lack of attention to detail.

Shortening the waiting lists

There is an odd little story in the Times Business News today. Consultants hired by BAA to measure the waiting time for check-in were giving people timed slips of  paper. The idea was that they would collect them at the end and calculate the time difference. They were however, handing out the slips half-way down the queue, so that the time would always be understated by about 50%

If Nicola Horlick ran the NHS and other fantasies

I did not hear Desert Island Discs on Sunday, but the guest was Nicola Horlick who was apparently asked if she would like to get involved with the NHS in a professional capacity.

She was, I think, merely responding to Kirsty Young’s question, not announcing some long-held ambition – knowing Horlick (which I did, a little, when she was at Oxford) if she had that ambition she would be in charge of the NHS by now.

Caroline Flint – new Gauleiter for Yorkshire

Caroline Flint, the humourless harridan-cum-bimbo, Blair groupie and former Health Minister, has been appointed Gauleiter for Yorkshire and Humber. The formal title is Minister of State and Minister for Yorkshire and the Humber, but I bet she is getting herself some fetching black boots and toying with the idea of collar tabs with red facings and gold piping.

Up yours, Ms Flint

Oh Lord. Did you think I meant something vulgar? Not a bit of it. Vulgar comment about Caroline Flint would be like, well, shagging Mary Poppins’ aunt. Unseemly. None of that here, not in this post anyway.

No, I meant up your nose, where the photographer from the Times managed to get when illustrating Dominic Kennedy’s article of 27 June. The article itself sought to explain Ms Flint’s mission to reform us all by reference to the hardships of her youth. Her mother died young, of alcoholism, and she herself had to pull pints in a pub.

A&E Dilemma for Brown

Closing down half the country’s Accident & Emergency units would be an easy decision for Gordon Brown the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Whether Gordon Brown the Prime Minister will be so enthusiastic remains to be seen.