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.

Putting Patricia Hewitt out of her misery

For the most part, failed politicians should be allowed to limp miserably off into the shadows. Some are obviously personally dislikable – Gordon Brown, Peter Hain and Caroline Flint come to mind – but for the most part, the strongest emotion one can drum up when they fall is contempt.

Patricia Hewitt, on the other hand, should be pursued down Whitehall by an angry mob throwing things. We forgive incompetence to some extent and blame Blair who appointed her more than Hewitt herself that she was not up to the job. We accept that the NHS is an intractable problem. We might believe that her accent – like a 1950s charwoman who wears her mistresses’ cast-off clothes and adopts her manner of speaking as well – was beyond her control.

Gordon Brown Weather

It has rained almost continuously since Tony Blair announced the date for his departure and Gordon Brown’s succession was ensured. An augury, I think, for what we can expect now that this unpleasant man is Prime Minister.

In the days of the late Queen Victoria, fine weather was called “Queen’s Weather” because (according to the 1894 edition of Brewer’s Phrase and Fable) the sun usually shone when Her Majesty appeared in public. It seems wholly apt that the misanthrope Brown should bring down storms, floods and just perpetual greyness on us.

Searching for Ministers’ body parts

Regular readers will know that there is someone out there who makes regular searches for the name of the nagging Health Minister, Caroline Flint, plus some word suggestive of anatomy or mutual pleasure. I discovered this by accident after referring in passing to the wretched woman’s teeth, only to find that someone actually wanted to find such a reference.

To pander (in the literary sense) to this person, I have written a post replete with such terms, and the result Caroline Flint – an object of someone’s desires? now comes at or near the top of Google searches for her name plus breast, bottom, cock or whatever (the article itself, I hasten to say, has no hint of prurience in it; it just so happens that most such words have secondary and perfectly decent meanings).

Tony Blair lied here 1997 – 2007

The Peter Brookes cartoon in yesterday’s Times shows a blue plaque outside No 10 Downing Street

 

Anthony
Charles Lynton
BLAIR
Lied here
1997- 2007

 

It would have been inconceivable in 1997 that a political cartoonist would have said this so baldly about a serving prime minister. It is the role of a cartoonist to say the unsayable but they do not (or at least, good ones like Brookes in heavy-weight newspapers do not) pillory a public figure in this way without being reasonably sure that the cartoon will resonate with at least a large minority of the readership.

Smoking Snoopers

Three apparently unconnected stories caught my eye in a single week recently.

• The Government has handed £29.5 million to local authorities to hire and train staff to catch people who smoke in pubs and other public places once the smoking ban comes into force.
• Police will no longer attend at the scene of a burglary unless the burglar is still on the premises
• Boys in South London are shooting each other in large numbers, apparently to enforce the “respect” they feel they deserve but do not get.

We see here a pretty clear statement of the Blair Government’s priorities, and a snapshot of the society it has created. We do not, apparently, have the money for proper policing, but we can fund an army of council snoopers to pry on smokers. Perhaps worse, there is no shortage of volunteers for the job. What does it say about our society that there are people keen to take the job of prying on people like this?