Hi Ray Further reading of the inside pages Sunday papers reveals that the hitherto Oh-so-leisurely Department of Health which has caused scores of thousands of premature deaths over several years because of incompetent centralised management and inordinately long waiting lists in our hospitals and which has never -- ever -- had a medically qualified chief civil servant as is its head (Permanent Secretary) in over 50 years of the NHS, is finally understanding the degree of public anger that is now rising like a flood tide.
It is called panic. The Sunday paper are telling me that the hitherto Oh-so-leisurely Department of Health is now in serious negotiations for scores of thousands of operations (heart by-pass, cataracts, hip and knee replacements, etc, etc) to be done in hospitals in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, Malta and perhaps even more countries in the next two or three years. Tony Blair is really keen to make sure that the Labour Party will be elected next time. The next panic will be the hasty privatisation of our State Education system because this can't continue for more than another two or three years without an almost complete absence of permanent teaching staff in something like half of all our secondary schools. (One school reported two days ago that one of its primary classes had had 14 different agency teachers in the last 12 months.) And Tony Blair is really keen to make sure that the Labour Party will be elected next time. The next panic will be the railways. But here, the civil service, which is trying to make something operationally sensible out of Railtrack, do not yet know what to do. When they do, then they'll do it in a panic because here is a public scandal which is climbing at an almost verticl rate. (The solution is staring the civil servants in the face, of course, but they haven't had the nous to realise it so far, after all the high-faluting messing about of the last few years. It is, quite simply, to scrap Railtrack and hand the maintenance of railtrack back to the operating companies -- the only bodies which actually deal with the customer.) Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ “Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.” John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
