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.

Not Blears, surely?

I have just watched David Dimbleby parade the six candidates for the post of deputy leader of the Labour party. Distressing to me though it is to have to say this, I think I would vote for Hazel Blears if I had a vote.

She seems the only one willing to accept – and articulate the thought – that New Labour might have made the odd mistake along the line. Admittedly, she expressed this largely in terms of messages not properly communicated rather than actual failures, but what she said, and perhaps more importantly, the way she said it, seemed to imply a genuine wish to do better.

Alan Johnson hits at state teachers

There is less to this Alan Johnson bloke than meets the eye. Following his clumsy attack on Margaret Hodge by labelling her brave attempt to open up discussion on immigration as “an echo of BNP policy”, he has now launched into private schools – or, at least, that was apparently the intention. What he did instead was to denigrate state school teachers.

Supporting Hodge and Blears??!

I have no time at all for Margaret Hodge and share the common view of Hazel Blears. Conversely, Alan Johnson seems almost likeable, sensible and level-headed.

So what does one think when Hodge makes a sensible, non-political statement about immigration, Blears supports her, and Johnson leaps up to attack her.