There’s been much talk of an NHS crisis in recent months, and you can understand why. Waiting times are up across the board – as the charts below indicate.
There are more than seven million people waiting for hospital treatment. The proportion of cancer patients waiting less than 62 days for treatment after a GP referral is less than 55%. The ambulance response time for category 2 calls exceeded 1 hour 30 minutes last December. And the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours in A&E is over 30,000 – compared to zero just a few years ago.
This is despite the fact that staff numbers have been rising consistently for the past decade. Compared to 2010, there are now 17% more nurses and almost 40% more doctors working in the NHS.
Interestingly, mortality itself has not risen. We can see this by plotting the monthly age-standardised mortality rate in England as a percentage of the pre-pandemic average – that is, the average from 2015–2019.
Since the summer of 2021, the line has been pretty much flat. Mortality in England is neither worsening nor improving. The ASMR in the first five months of the year was about the same as in 2017 – which is higher than in 2014 but lower than in 2015. (If mortality were improving, the line would be trending downwards.)
This is both good news and bad. It’s good news because it means that rising waiting times and declining patient satisfaction aren’t yet translating into higher death rates. It’s bad news because it means we’ve made essentially no progress in lowering death rates for the last decade.
British living standards tell a similar story. Real GDP per capita in 2021 was barely higher than in 2007 – just before the Great Recession. So Britons are living no longer than they were in 2014 and are no richer than they were in 2007.
In the grand sweep of history, 10–15 years of stagnation isn’t particularly remarkable. But it is the longest period of stagnation since the Second World War. And one political party has been in power for most of it. While I doubt that Labour would have done a better job, the Conservatives have little to be proud of.
With death rates and living standards stagnating, the NHS in crisis and net migration running at over 600,000, you could almost say they’re doing a lousy job in Government. So as little faith as I have in Labour, I’m not surprised they’re ahead in the polls. “You’ve never had it so good”, Harold MacMillan told voters in 1957. “You’ve never had it so mediocre,” Rishi Sunak might tell them today.
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The Conservative Party should be prosecuted under the Trades Descriptions Act. They aren’t “conservative” in any way – authoritarian, centre-left, Blairite, big state, high tax, high borrowing, unlimited immigration, and dead-set on covering the landscape with solar panels and windmills.
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing to differentiate the LibLabCon political blob on any substantial issue.
It has conserved itself, by way of undergoing political metamorphosis while retaining an old name. Quite skilled at changing the definition and hoping that no-one will notice the difference. They are not alone, of course. Many organisations retain the original name and advertise themselves in a way that tends to rely on their long term reputation, but change as things develop over time.
The Conservatives, as were, no longer exist.
I watched Andrew Bridgen’s 10 min Bill request yesterday, aiming to protect infants from graphic pornography and homosexual grooming in school. I also saw a few days before Bridgen’s questions regarding the UK sliding into the EU Defence Force.
From the Tory benches? Total disdain and scorn.
It really is time to start again, don’t give your vote to this shower.
An excellent piece by Michael Senger on the theatrical masterpiece of bullshittery that is the Covid Inquiry;
”Earlier today, former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who advocated and led the use of terror messaging to drive support for and compliance with lockdown measures throughout 2020, choked back tears as he told the Government’s official COVID Inquiry that he is ‘profoundly sorry’ for each and every COVID death and hopes lockdowns will be ‘much earlier’ and ‘more stringent’ during the next pandemic.
One need not have a background in law enforcement to recognize that these are the words of an entirely unrepentant sociopath. Hancock’s testimony seemed to confirm sceptic’s worst fears that the COVID Inquiry is being used as a pretext to institutionalise lockdowns, and it marked an astonishing new low for the COVID Inquiry, which so far has revealed little of value and assiduously avoided asking officials why they found the horrific decision to copy China’s lockdown policy remotely appropriate—though the officials have openly admitted lockdown wasn’t part of any western country’s pandemic plan and have pondered whether any country would have done it had it not been for China.
For the UK Government to stack the official COVID Inquiry with the members of an obvious disinformation group is deeply insulting to the public’s intelligence, and an unsettling glimpse into the lengths the Government has gone to manipulate the perception of public opinion since the response to COVID began. The public did not ask them to put all these members of ‘Independent SAGE’ on the Inquiry, nor can this decision be written off as a mistake. Rather, it reveals that many Members of Parliament are deliberately working to manipulate public perceptions to prevent the question of whether the UK should have imposed a lockdown from ever being asked—and it begs the troubling question of just how many of these MPs are not mere incompetents, but rather knowing accomplices to the crime. To be frank, it evidences just how vast the communist conspiracy which may have given birth to western lockdowns may in fact be.”
https://www.michaelpsenger.com/p/uk-covid-inquiry-reveals-just-how
A good find Mogs. Senger is right of course.
Thanks.
It is true that the reduction in death rates as measured by ASMR has levelled off since about 2011.
Prior to that (barring minor things like WWII) we had almost continuous reductions since the time series began in 1922 – just after the last sudden population change caused by removing the new Republic of Ireland from British figures.
Note the fantastic improvement in mortality after the inception of the NHS in 1947. There isn’t any; it remains on trend. The quality of available medical treatment didn’t change; we just paid for it differently. Just for the record I think it was a Good Thing.
Also note the little blip in the above chart for 2020… that’s what all the recent fuss was about.
Just for fun I extrapolated the long term trend into the future… by 2067 there would be zero deaths. Think about it. Dystopia.
Clearly, the long term trend has to level off at some point. It seems to have levelled off at around 1,000 per 100,000 people, or 1% of the population per year.
It’s not just the UK where things are levelling off either…
Note that the UK’s ASMR is consistently lower than the other countries’. As this is all-cause mortality I think it’s a justifiable comparison.
Barring extreme technological developments (think brains in jars as in Young Frankenstein) I reckon the world has reached the limits in delaying deaths.
Thanks for this. Spot the “deadly pandemic”.
I’ve seen BBC articles where they say it was the largest percentage increase since… (whenever, I can’t be bothered to look it up). Thing is it was bound to be a mathematically large percentage increase as it followed our lowest mortality rate ever in 2019.
Malinformation I think the likes of Marianna Spring call it. Truth, but intended to mislead.
Indeed
Typical of the deliberate omission of context designed to frighten
https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-planned-financial-tsunami-has-just-begun/5784217
Dramatic rises in inflation expected before the year end and which will be used as the excuse for Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Obviously debt defaults will explode and businesses will go bankrupt as anticipated.
Grim.
Hux I urge you to watch this lecture by Dr Daniel Estulin which he gave to our meeting yesterday, it explains so much of what is happening in the economy, has been happening for decades & why the current system will never bring the growth that we’ve been used to.
It will add to your knowledge & join up a number of dots within your knowledge.
It was really useful.
https://rumble.com/user/cbkovess
You could almost say they’re doing a lousy job in Government!!!!?
Just how destructive, treacherous, anti-democratic, bullying, incompetent, hypocritical, lying and venal do they have to get to be branded as completely and utterly useless?
Socialized Medical System perform poorly. It’s the same everywhere and always has been. The problem is there is no accountability. Who would design a health system where the health insurer is the same group as the health deliverer? It’s fundamentally flawed. The government should stick to being the insurer and allow free enterprise to deliver the healthcare. This transformation is taking place now out of desperation in several countries with universal health care.
“Interestingly, mortality has not risen…”
Interestingly, the ONS and a survey commissioned by the Times is showing it is running nearly 20% above the five-year average.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/why-we-must-continue-to-question-the-mortality-statistics
Let’s pretend everything is ok with the jabs Mr Carl. Perhaps people either can’t face reality or simply don’t want to know why their loved ones are no longer with us. Even the petition to get the Government to investigate couldn’t achieve the necessary 100k signatures:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/628188
And this is why in a nutshell: