UK politics
Can’t have those nurses smoking; bad PR you see
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (not so NICE) wants hsopitals to ban smoking completely:
“We need to end the terrible spectacle of people on drips in hospital gowns smoking outside hospital entrances,” said Professor Mike Kelly, director of Nice’s centre for public health, which drew up the new guidance. It is a “contradiction” for the NHS, which spends £2.7bn a year treating smoking-related ilnesses, to let patients smoke and not do everything it can to wean them off their habit, he added.
It’s the smug classicism that puts the particularly rancid icing on this shit cake. There’s a place and time to get people to stop smoking and it’s not when they’re stressed out, tired and hurting in hospital. Removing smoking shelters from your hospital won’t stop people smoking, it just means that they smoke outside in the wind and rain. Sometimes there are worse problems than having people smoke, for example being a smug condscending prick who wants to take away what little pleasure people can get in hospital.
Reading this made me so angry because I’ve been there with Sandra when the VU hospital decided — over Christmas — to shut down their indoor smoking rooms because some cow took offence to them, so she had to trundle outside into the cold, in her wheelchair (or bed even) to get about the only bit of comfort she had during the two years she had to spent in hospital.
Mind you, it would get worse for the staff:
Under the proposals hospitals’ entire grounds would become non-smoking areas, smoking shelters would be banned and staff contracts would forbid them from “smoking during work hours or when recognisable as an employee, for example when in uniform or wearing identification or handling hospital business”.
This really is the enforcement of a priggish morality under the guise of health concerns, because why else would you be bothered by people smoking in uniform? NHS staff isn’t paid nearly enough to be this kind of role model.
Cameron thinks WWI makes for a great commemoration
Charlie Stross gets a mit annoyed with David Cameron wanting to turn the Great War into another feel good British kneesup like the Diamond Jubilee and tells him what the war was really like:
If you’d been 16 in 1914, then of your class at Eton probably 4-6 would have died (Eton boys ended up as officers: the death rate among junior officers was double that among the non-commissioned ranks). Another 6-8 would have been wounded—faces burned off, arms and legs and spines shattered, lungs scarred by gas until they coughed themselves to death in middle years—these are not pretty injuries, duelling scars or badges of honour: these are vile blows that turn strong young men into lifelong cripples (the sort of people who these days fail their ATOS work assessments and are denied disability payments two weeks before they die of their condition: but I digress).
Cameron is of course the modern equivalent of the people who started and profited from World War I and it’s somewhat fitting that he would think so lightly of it, considering how callous his early 20th century counterparts were about the war.
Ding-dong
Oh fabulous day! Finally, Chumbawamba can bring out their Thatcher EP.
Of course ATOS sponsors the Paralympics
So ATOS is the mercenary company that does the UK government’s dirty work, throwing disabled people off welfare, telling cancer patients on chemo that they’re fit to work, killing some 32 people a week according to some estimates. It’s also the company that sponsors the London Paralympics, which understandably got a lot of people outraged. Here we have the event that celebrates disabled people overcoming their handicaps, yadda yadda and it’s paid for by the profits of the company that does its best to kill them off? That’s bound to tick any right thinking person off.
But to be honest, it makes perfect sense. The paralympics celebrates the good disabled, the ones that inspire us and make us feel good that they may be in a wheelchair but didn’t let that stop them becoming world class athletes. Those parasitic dole scum on the other hand, who have been holding up their hand to decent hardworking tax payers, those are the evil disabled, the people struggling to live their daily lives we’d rather not see, not fit and good looking or having a photogenic handicap. The Paralympics is the other side of the coin of that media portrayal of disabled people as benefit scum unwilling to work.
On the one hand we hear day in, day out about benefit cheats, we live in a media climate in which every disabled person is a cheat and treated as such, then every four years there’s a feel good media circus where we see that if they have enough will power, disabled people can do anything. What’s missing is seeing disabled people leading day to day lives: it’s either the one percent of incredibly lucky, incredibly fit top athletes, or the much much smaller group of pretend cripples. Yet most people, temporarily able or not, are neither top athletes nor fraudsters.
It’s easy to other disabled people; has anybody ever been jealous of a guy in a wheelchair, even a gold medalist in a wheelchair? If we’re healthy and able (for the moment), we tend to just ignore or exclude those who aren’t, despite the very real possibility that we ourselves will join at some point in our lives. We want to keep our ideas about disabilities simple and clean, put every disabled person in a box labeled hero, villain or victim, rather than deal with the messy reality where the guy in the wheelchair is just another bloke.