Dangerously Close To getting To A Point

I met that there MP of ours yesterday. I say met; I ran into her as she was leaving a social event which my daughter attended. I buttonholed her on various issues not least of which was the current situation with our adventures in the Middle East. Not worrying that the location was unsuited to an old-style political slanging-match regarding vast differences of opinion between the population and the Government – though I did acknowledge the flaws within the whip system – I ploughed on. She seemed genuinely taken aback and when I got onto the problems caused by the privatisation of various elements of the NHS which appear in some cases, to have led to deaths and upset, her burly minders were summoned from amidst the throng to indicate her displeasure at being harangued during what was after all a Church Service. I was escorted from the room to a mixture of cheers and boos.

Well I wanted all this to happen. What I actually did was smile slightly and walk on by. She did vote for the total smoking ban after all – and probably the hunting ban so she’s alright really. Hundreds of hours of intense and detailed political debate about those two are a really good use of Parliament’s time don’t you think? And why do you need to have any discussion about going to war?

But seriously folks, back to the privatisations. Two example of what I am sure the Government will put down to “teething problems” (The situation regarding dentistry is another one but I probably only mention that for a cheap political pun). The first one is the change to the system supplying oxygen to patients at home and the other is the new IT system for handling children’s vaccination records. The bottom line is that the changes to the systems are to save money. Now I am all for accountability over the finances of the NHS and I am sure you can see the foreshadowing of the old chestnut of how we can sink billions into empire-style escapades in hot and dusty places and yet hospitals seem to be funded by tombolas, but sometimes the quality of service gets hidden in a fog of structures, initiatives and action-plans. When women recently delivered of still-born babies receive requests to take the children for vaccination, there is something badly wrong. Of course, the article was in the Guardian and there maybe a talk-up of the issue for political point-scoring. It may have happened under the old system but the problem now is that it has happened under the new whizzy system which was, on the back of the fuzzy – money-saving reasons, supposed to improve the service. Sometime No-Change is very sexy indeed.

Not that being called in to get a child vaccinated means much these days. The take-up on the MMR is so low as to be worthless in our area. Many millions of words have clogged up every organ from the Star to Private Eye regarding how dangerous the Triple-Jab actually is, and I have not read most of them but both of our children have had the jab. My view is that the increase in the incidence of autism is partly down to lack of proper social interaction with children. The pathways set-up in the brain by the two-way flow of all sorts of stimuli are being modified by the significant change in how we treat kids these days. Now Bill Gates may seem to be a fluffy-cat short of being a James Bond villain, but his vaccination program is a feature so redeeming that I am able to forgive him for Visual-Source-Safe.