Monday 19 September 2011

You are not a free man, you are a number.

We used to be people.

I don't think that ever applies any more.We are sometimes consumers, sometimes taxpayers, sometimes voters, but never people.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Righteous thinking of the filthy-habit-control industry.

If you read this collection of antismoking rhetoric, and this article on the application of that same rhetoric to booze, there's something that stands out.

From the smoking one:


According the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), $92 billion are lost each year from lost productivity resulting from smoking-related deaths.

From the drinking one:


Actual spending on alcohol-related problems accounts for €66 billion of this, while potential production lost due to absenteeism, unemployment and premature mortality accounts for a further €59 billion.

Note that carefully. If you smoke or drink, what your masters are most concerned about is the lost productivity if you die before they've squeezed every last bit of work out of you. The same line will be applied to the overweight, if it hasn't already.

Not your health. Not your co-workers' health. Not your happiness, certainly. Not even the smell.

We are to stay healthy so we can be used to make money to pay for those whose jobs produce nothing but harsher controls on our lives with the sole intention of keeping us alive so we can make them more money. That is their sole purpose in life: to keep us all as fit and healthy as possible so they can leech off us for longer.

The anti-smoking/drinking/fat/all the rest is not for the benefit of smokers/drinkers/chubbies. It is not for the benefit of non-smokers, non-drinkers, or thinnies. No, I'm afraid you've all been duped there. Many people now believe they will die if they so much as see a smoker, they will soon believe the same about boozers and they already believe that fat people will sit on them or make planes drop out of the sky. Why do they believe this rubbish?

They are convinced that the Righteous are working for their benefit. They are not. The Righteous work for the benefit of the Righteous and nobody else. Ever.

Consider how all these 'experts' are paid. They are paid from your taxes. If you don't hate smokers/drinkers/fat people, if you don't believe they cost the NHS money, then there is a danger of you noticing something.

You might notice how much you are paying to these 'experts' so they can tell you who to hate. You might even begin to question why you pay them so much, and why you have no choice in paying them, and why you have no means to stop paying them, no means to deselect or fire them and absolutely no control over what you pay them to do.

There is a contagion in this country but it is not smoke. Nor is it drink, salt or fat. It goes by the name of the NHS.

The NHS only exists because we all pay for it. Its constituent departments battle for their share of that money and each tries to push its agenda above those of other departments. The NHS was conceived as universal healthcare but it's not that any more. It used to be, back when we were people.

Now we are no longer people, we are economic units. The NHS does not exist to keep us alive, we exist to keep it alive. We are not supposed to do anything that might increase our chances of ever needing the healthcare we pay for, because the NHS doesn't like doing that. Instead we are all to lead sterile, monochrome lives, each fitting perfectly into the mould of the BMA's standard human, stay perfectly fit and healthy and work to provide money for an NHS that will no longer be doing anything at all.

Now, the NHS is a controlling machine rather than a repair shop. We must never use it. Antismokers and antidrinkers love to crow about 'cost to the NHS' and how smokers and drinkers should be refused treatment but that's only the beginning. Mountain climbers, sportsmen, drivers - you all chose to put yourselves in those high-risk situations. Do you really imagine you are not in line for the same hate in the future?

Annually, the NHS kills more people than smoking. Everyone pays for it. You can choose not to smoke but you cannot choose not to pay for the NHS. If you ever use it, there's a good chance of it killing you. Yet so many support it, so many demand its funding be protected from cuts and from use by people who live non-approved lives. Look again at what we pay for . Look past the frontline doctors and nurses to where the big money is spent.

Smoking cessation officers. Five-a-day coordinators. Whole departments making up figures on how much we are to be allowed to eat or drink, and deciding what we are to eat or drink. You're paying for that. Yes, you. You think there are research labs behind the scenes? There are offices where men in suits sit around inventing numbers to apply to your life. And you pay for them, but you have no influence at all on their decisions. None. You cannot sack them if you don't like paying them. You cannot ignore them because they come looking for you.

They are the real reason you get refused a bottle of wine in a supermarket because you have your child with you. Not the supermarket. They are just doing what they are told. The cause is deep in the bowels of the NHS where they have decided on the form and lifestyle of the British Standard Human and set about eliminating everyone who does not fit their ideal.

These suited monkeys are the reason the antismokers behave like modern-day Inquisitors, the reason for those videos depicting beaten-up smokers and exploding climate heretics. It's okay to beat them and blow them up because they aren't real people.

Neither are you, antismoker, antidrinker, Climatologist or fat berater. You are a useful unit at the moment but you're on the list too. You think they'll never come for your car? Really?

Don't just cut the NHS. Shut it down. Completely. With the money we save by not paying NI we can pay doctors and nurses ourselves and if we don't like their agenda, we can go elsewhere. No, the unemployed will not all be dropping dead in the streets. The NHS already gets its cut of the benefits bill because the unemployed are not exempted from NI payments. Those payments are made for them.

So all we have to do is supply the unemployed with those payments in the form of medical insurance vouchers and they can all choose for themselves which insurer to use. The choice part is the important part. Cost? Exactly the same as the current benefits system.

Overall it will cost far, far less to run this system because the privately run surgeries will not waste money on control freaks and pushy morons with their own little Puritan agendas. That only happens when income is guaranteed. Not when it has to be competed for. This new health system will not become the pompous behemoth that the NHS has become because any part that tries, dies. If we go to a doctor who starts telling us how to live, then we take our money/vouchers to another doctor.

The NHS has to go. It's the only way we can become people again.


26 comments:

John Pickworth said...

Absolutely agree.

The NHS is a monster and I cringe when I hear people speak of it as though it was some sacred treasure to be protected at all costs... well they got the last part right. It costs a bloody fortune.

Anonymous said...

I was stood behind a very elderly lady yesterday in the supermarket with everything on hold while the cashier attempted to get permission to sell her a bottle of wine.
The poor sod must have been in her 80's but just had to wait and wait with people staring.
Next my turn, no booze but two small packets of Ibuprofen and two of Paracetamol. These are 16p packets of only 16 tablets.
No, you cant buy them, you can only buy two packets in total. Its the law.
Meanwhile my local M.P. is devoting her life to putting up the price of alcohol, at the least the pensioner wont have to wait any more as she is being priced out of the market.

Twenty_Rothmans said...

Lovely discussion, and quite true.

Instead of me being able to decide when and where I receive medical attention, the NHS ensures that it is delivered when it suits them.

They resent providing the service for which I pay quite handsomely. They would rather treat people who multiply exponentially, as this justifies an increase in their budget.

The middle-class dork who seldom gets ill is a nuisance - a confounded nuisance because he has the temerity to try to schedule an appointment before or after his work.

Then gets told to stop smoking. Apparently only smokers get colds at this time of year.

Also gets the spiel for an 'over 40s checkup' - politely but firmly declined.

@Anonymous
Suggestion - always buy a couple whether you need them or not. I wouldn't put it past these bastards to make them prescription only one day.

Bill said...

I fell foul of the two packets rule a couple of years back. I said to the clearly embarrassed cashier
"But I could tour the town buying two packs of paracetamol at a time or go to Bookers and buy an outer which contains 24 packs" she replied "Yes that's true but it's the law. The Co-op cannot sell more than two packets to one person in a single purchase in case you take them all at once and kill yourself!"
Sadly I am not joking. She had had it drummed into here at some staff briefing or other.

It isn't law it's just a legal code but what I cannot figure out is why the people of Britain blithely accept such lunacy just because it comes from the state?

The Huhne for example comes out with the statement that anyone who owns a house and doesn't bother constantly travelling the murky world of utility company tariffs to seek out cheaper suppliers is lazy. So paying over the odds for gas and electricity is the householders fault.

In other countries he would have at been egged or punched or made to resign for such madness here people comment on newspaper websites. But worse still a tiny minority of folk attend a limpdumb conference and actually applaud this sort of thing!

I see the NHS as a strange mixture of brilliant and timely service, crap service, fools who cannot do the job hiding their way to retirement, safe harbour for managers who cannot manage in private companies, cash cow for big pharma but at the heart of it is one, possibly more, unnamed quango whose sole purpose is to find as many ways as possible to ensure that the people of Britain get plugged in to the racketeering at an early an age as possible.

A surgeon is needed. Shouldn't be too hard to find a good one. LI are you available for a week of NHS slashing?

Angry Exile said...

Have UK chemists started asking for ID for some OTC medicines? It's happening here in Oz. I got asked a few months back when buying something, can't remember what. I'd said that whatever it was I'd run out of wasn't any good and was there something stronger, and the pharmacist said yes but they could only sell it to me if I had a driving licence or something on me because apparently it could be used to make E and the police like to know who's buying how much.

KP said...

The missus ran up against the "two packets, it's the law" bolleaux a while back when getting in the paracetomol for her arthritic mother. So she grabbed one of the plastic conveyor belt dividers and put two of the packets on the other side. As it's then classed as a separate transaction, the till-monkey never batted an eyelid, just said "That'll be 32p please".

I don't want to live on this planet anymore....

Maddie said...

haha I fell foul of the 2 medicine rule, after swiping all my shopping the cashier came to a bottle of baby benylyn (sp) and proceeded to inform me I'd bought 2 packs of paracetamol so couldn't have that too. So I told her if I can't have baby medicine I don't want any of my shopping and started putting it back out of the trolley onto her till.... within seconds she managed to override the rule and added it to my bill.

The daft thing is paracetamol is 3 for a £1 in the £1 shop.

Anonymous said...

The point is Twenty_Rothmans,
Many thousands of people with terminal cancer amongst many other ailments use these two drugs daily along with more powerful morphine based drugs to reduce pain.
One Packet will NOT last a day.
Many of these people are bed bound or suffer from a lot of pain moving.
So many poor sods are reduced to going from chemist to supermarket to buy enough just to get through the day and night.
Just because someone some-where has decided that its dangerous to buy more. Bollocks to everyone else.

Anonymous said...

Whilst I'm still whining.
I had to pick up a powerful painkiller from a hospital pharmacy recently.
As I am the sole person who will give this medication to the person concerned I asked on receiving it if it was compatible with other drugs taken or should one of more of them be stopped.
Well that opened a huge can of worms.
The lady serving me understood the problem and said she would get the pharmacist to speak to me.
However the pharmacist refused to speak to me as I wasn't the one named on the prescription. So I was clear to walk out with the drug and administer it to someone very ill but I was not allowed to know if it would clash with possible lethal results with other medication.
Even the lady serving me was embarrassed and understood my dilemma.
BTW no doctors were available.
End result was a pitiful message passed on from the pharmacist suggesting that one of the other drugs should be stopped but outright refusal to speak to me.
This is fucking madness.

Frank said...

Well, every day I become more convinced that something is going to happen that will not benefit Govts. as we know them. What it will be, I don't know but it's surely going to happen and not too far away. You can smell it.

subrosa said...

What about stakeholders and service users? Awful terms but there are boxes for them in officialdom.

Have you been playing with your blog design or are my eyes deceiving me again?

winston said...

Most of the madness is driven by EU regulations. The guvvament bring in the regs in advance of the EU rulings so they aren't seen as caving in to the EU and showing what a useless waste of space westmonster is.
The new MOT every 2 years was hailed as a great guvvament initiative but the regs are from the EU and would have to be adopted anyway. Same with the new sell by date on food bollox

P T Barnum said...

Two packets of 12 paracetamol is sufficient to cause a long, lingering death from multiple organ failure so it's a null and void 'preventative measure' anyway.

I followed that antismoking link and have proved to my own satisfaction that antismoking causes sufferers to deploy bad grammar and punctuation. And I have a doctorate so am therefore an expert.

Humph said...

At least some get through the net ...
http://www.shieldsgazette.com/news/mine_s_a_pint_86_000_times_1_3779231

Anonymous said...

"Why do they believe this rubbish?"

Because the Righteous need a bogeyman. In days gone by it was uncivilised fuzzy wuzzies, then it was Nazis, then it was Commies, then it was smokers, drinkers, fatties and paedos. The Righteous need the great unwashed to hate something, to have a common enemy, so that the Righteous can control the great unwashed.

Read Adam Roberts's Yellow Blue Tibia and you'll see what I mean.

richard said...

I agree with your opinion on this matter. For much less than the price of NI we could buy a private insurance scheme which would (in the event of an ingrown toe-nail) have us flown to Geneva in a Learjet with nurses hand-picked for their looks as well as their medical skill. Instead my £££s per month gets me a five-hour wait in casualty along with a load of drunken scrappers/vomiters who can barely utter their own names.
"Are you allergic to anything?" says the doc - after repeating the question five or six times, we were enlightened by "Aye - fuckin' strawberries" from Mr Wounded Scalp. Having said that, I'm in bed with the devil. The missis gets a good wage, although yes, it's stolen from the tax-payer, to work for the NHS. And she does a good job. So although I hate the concept of taxation vs. a voluntary arrangement, there are good people operating (ha!) within the belly of the beast.
But it should go. No-one is accountable when there's a thousand fuck-ups a day, up to and including death by starvation and disease. And no-one gets rewarded for their individual skill or caring nature when (like my missis) they are better than others in the same grade who are useless to the point of being a menace.
The fact that NI contributions are taken without consent and are compulsory is enough to damn the system as unethical, despite the good intentions of it's founders and many of those in it's employ.

Stewart Cowan said...

Nice post, L-I. I can't wait to read your dystopic future novel, by the way.

James Higham said...

You're right on the number. I'm 007.

Anonymous said...

Dear Leg.
Can't tell the navy blue links from the black type.

David Davis said...

In the 1970s, when I was a "senior product manager" in "Beecham Proprietary Medicines Division" ( = over-the-counter mecicines and things like Night Nurse/Day Nurse (I wanted to call "Day Nurse" _BEECHAM COLDMASTER_ but I was over-ruled) the prevailing buzz in the department, run by Edward "Ed" Scott as Marketing Director, a guardian-reader, was that the "Czechoslovakian System" of pharmaceuticals for the people was "so good as everything had to be on prescrition, even aspirin" that we ought to adopt it here in the UK, and I am pushing the PAGB for this all the time" . The PAGB was the "Pharmaceutical Association of Great Britain" and included all the main drug companies.

"Ed" Scott didn't like me at all as I was a member of the Freedom Association, then called the "National Association for Freedom", the NAFF (under Gerald Hartup as organiser) which he said must mean it was the "national front". I also stupidly failed to hide the fact, sometimes went on our demonstrations, and also once wrote to the Daily Mirror to complain about hoe it badmouthed drugs firms while also taking our own advertising budget. "Ed" found a copy of my letter on the firm's photocopier (I have no idea how) and nearly fired me. But my career there was "not totally clear" after that, so I had to leave after a little time. I joined Allen brady and Marsh (advertising agents) and had a great time for four years, advising Peter Marsh about liberal polticis for his "Any Questions" broadcast appearances.

sick of change said...

crap new design and your statmeter's up the spout.

socialism: the only ideology more sterile than the health system it inspired (but not as sterile as this godawful blog-template).

Leg-iron said...

Meddling might not have been such a great idea. All kinds of things break without being noticed.

I've changed the colour of the links and reinstalled the stat counter, and I'll look into toning down the brightness next.

Leg-iron said...

I don't buy aspirins/paracetamol. If I'm taking an aspirin it means I'm in enough pain that I should already be at a doctor's. I don't like them. Whisky is the best painkiller for me.

As far as I remember, eight paracetamol pills were enough to wreck your liver if taken at once. Aspirin has been blamed for stomach ulcers, but that was in the days before Helicobacter so maybe aspirin was innocent.

Here, within a one-mile radius, there is Tesco, Morrison, Boots, Co-op, three independent chemists and that's just off the top of my head. So you could get fourteen packs in a morning and be dead by teatime.

Still, it's like 'Murder on the Orient Express' - no individual outlet can be blamed for the two packs they sold because each outlet said you couldn't have any more.

You'd be just as dead though.

I don't think I'd choose paracetamol as a way out. Slow and painful. There must be easier ways.

Anonymous said...

I am in the throes of a cancer scare. I got my referral to the specialist diagnostic centre within two weeks which I now realise was a complete bloody charade. I left medicine twenty odd years ago and believed the brochure that this was a one stop service. It was a huge space completely underutilised and overstaffed except for doctors. A very junior registrar attempted to perform an examination and biopsy without local anaesthetic that, if an accurate clinical history had been taken by the humblest medical student would have flagged me up as an unsuitable candidate. I get to see a real doctor after 6 weeks. I wake up angry every day.

Twenty_Rothmans said...

@Anonymous 0930
Yes, I know you sometimes need a little more than a day's rations. That's why I stock up when the sun's shining.

@LI
Unsure on the exact LD50 but 14g upwards of paracetamol is very unwise IIRC.

There are easier ways, but not many. You cannot argue that it's not cost-effective (at least to the end user). To the NHS. it's very expensive, especially when the idiot changes her mind and wants a new liver.

National Lampoon, many years ago, came out with the idea of a 'Murder Suicide Cooperative', where murderers could be put in touch with those wishing to check out.

Although it wasn't in the parlance then, a win-win situation.

Because _you_ don't need paracetamol, aspirin, ibuprofen or codeine, will it bother you unduly when they're withdrawn from the rest of us who do?

David Davis' account of some bastard thinking of a dream world where everything could only ever be prescribed was utterly chilling.

Leg-iron said...

20Rothmans - I would certainly be opposed to limiting anyone's access to cheap medication. I don't use it now but I am getting older, remember.

Besides, it's all part of the control apparatus I am so set against. If you let these Righteous get a toe-hold on one issue, they will never stop.

CAMRA are finding that out now, too late.

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