Beatle jusitce is different

September 20^th – If you were due to go into hospital for an operation on, say, your lower bowel and, just as you’re about to go under, after the pre-med, you were greeted at the doors of the operating theatre by a bloke in a boiler suit scrubbing his hands with a dishcloth who says;

I’m the chap that does the hospital heating. Know nothing about theatre procedure but I deal with pipes all day so, where’s the diff? I’ll be operating on you today, have a good one.

what would your reaction be?

Dunno ’bout you but if I’m gonna have someone rummaging around in the coils of my bowel I’d want someone knows the difference between a heart and a bladder and a more than passing grasp of the importance of good hygiene practice. That’s probably my biggest beef with people in government, as you know by now; that one where some bod who’s got two A-levels from Eton and a double first in classics from Cambridge can be put in charge of transport; a person who’s never been on a bus in their life and only ever travels first class on the railways…and then someone books the tickets for that. The old adage trotted out about how you don’t need insider knowledge in order to be a good manager? That’s bollocks that is. It’s just a phrase they fill airtime with to save other embarrassing questions being asked; the pitiful state of what was once our beacon of civilisation, the National Health Service, is a case in point.

What we once had was a self-governing, self-managing system, not perfect, not always smoothly operated but at least run by those who had to work in it. One of the early signs that things were awry was when private and public became confused, when the private establishments were allowed to use the public facilities as long as they paid for the time and staff; you’ll remember my rantings about how it only takes one shithead to ruin what is otherwise a peaceful or useful endeavour? A handful of consultant surgeons started to pop in the odd private operation onto the public list, pay nothing for the theatre time, staffing and equipment usage and reap the full profit for themselves ’cos, when you’re only earning 80+k per year from your day-job and picking up private consultancy work at £250 per hour…well, you need those few extra pennies, don’t y’; bless. Then the government started the whole tick-box/targets culture  and the PFI thing, going for outside suppliers (their mates, just check the register of knobs from the House of Lords who work for the pharmacy companies) going for the cheapest drugs, equipment, waste disposal, going for unqualified cleaners and ancillary staff and cutting frontline staff whilst putting in place managers who knew all about systems but fuck-all about medicine and all the time, as the health service spiralled and nose-dived into chaos, successive governments and ministers tinkered and faffed about with the damage that had been done from the last session of tinkering and faffing, spreading confusion and waste like a pig-slurry spreader on a windy day all the time knowing that this fucking up was deliberate so’s they could say;

Look at the state of the NHS! This is why it needs to go PRIVATE!

…and then on into the South Staffs debacle we ended up with last year…

Care Homes (there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one) have suffered the same fate. Hiving out the care of the elderly who became too ill or their symptoms too complicated to be catered for at home, to private companies (their mates) was just a recipe for disaster. And it’s no good saying;

It’s not all of these Care Homes, just the odd 10 per cent who get it wrong.

Well, that’s as maybe but to the person it happens to? It’s 100 per cent. And if I hear another person say;

Lessons have been learnt…?

Well, in both the above cases the systems are being run by folk who’ll never have to use them, not them or their own; private health care for them, pal.

Well, all of that guff leads on to my belief that, if there was someone sitting in judgement on me in a court of law, I’d be really grateful in almost every case, if two things were in place.

1) The jury was actually made up 12 unbiased fellow citizens who made their mind up on the merits of the case and

2) that the judge actually knew what the various components of the case were.

I’d rather not have the equivalent of the law-court’s boiler-man decide whether I was going to hang or not, if that’s OK with you…although, in the case of Queen versus Mr. McCartney it may have been useful to have an idiot on-board. On this day in 1972, Mr. McCartney was fined £100 for growing cannabis on his farm in Scotland. The interesting thing is that, by his own admittance, the judge had never seen a cannabis plant before the trial…that’s as in, not ever. Leaving aside the possible cultural and social gap that revelation throws up, which is as wide and as deep as the Great Blue Hole of Belize, he could’ve, in honesty, have been looking at flat-leaved parsley for all he knew then Mr McCartney could ‘ave said;

Here, judgey, take a taste. Now you tell me what’s that? Go well wi’ fish, eh, an’ they want to make it illegal?

You just have to play with that scenario in the other many other organisations that have an impact on our lives, like the management of health and education, defence and transport, utilities and the law, to question the sense contained in a phrase we use often in theatre;

Them as design it never have to tour it…