Featured Image: Boris on Twitter in Full Flow After Discharge From St Thomas’s Hospital 12th April 2020
Here’s a thing now Boris is out of danger: let’s make the NHS smaller, local and accountable to the diverse communities that bring so much history, knowledge and experience to Britain. Let’s get rid of over powerful individuals like ‘Food Baron Justin Time’ in the NHS and his wealthy compadres that ask all of us to volunteer while they steal the market in food provision with a chilling chemistry that moves somewhere beyond food and is mainly thrown away (would they eat it or wish it upon their family, parents or even second cousins?)-No!
Boris got nourished while he was in hospital: health, spiritually, socially. And he got well again. So should we all whoever and wherever we are. Our attributes are far greater than those currently ascribed to us in healthcare settings. Boris is more than a mere PM even though he and we have been socialised to believe in status as a goal. The truth is that as a society we haven’t been treating everyone equally for much too long, hence the sudden importance and prevalence of ‘unseen/uncharted/underlying conditions’ in the COVID 19 period.
At the moment before we ‘know’ the people who are patients or who want to work in the NHS we teach the language of compliance and austerity to justify ways of operating and working with and for the many in society that are unacceptable. We teach that before we reach out, trust and learn from the moment, in ‘real time’ that they must first accept that the range of their knowledge, history, experience that they bring must be curtailed. The priority is ‘manage expectations’ in a culture of austerity and there are brownie points, awards and honours in our society for good self, environment and people management. But really this is about protecting those who are profiting from the markets in and around the NHS and we need to move on from this.
What we need to do is to make peace with diversity: move on from the notion that our economy is a mass thing that needs to be controlled by the kind of military reconstruction methods used after the second world war and start to give credit and recognition to the knowledge, history and experience coming to us, every day, in every way from the hundreds of different nationalities in our communities and health services.
What we’ve done though is allowed too many people to be improperly screened, charted and communicated with in the health service because it’s too expensive and too overtly politically radical. We’ve integrated ‘depersonalisation’ instead of a myriad future so that everyone going onto a dementia ward, doctors, nurses, food operatives, cleaners, porters, families and volunteers have been pre-prepared, pre-trained to read the signs of social de-capacity and de-enfranchisement as an individual or even genetic trait: it’s hopeless to help those you can’t help rather than build capacity and hope wherever you go which is what and where health lives.
Taking away capacity, possibility, potential or the chance that things might just turn out for the better away from people and learn to be moral arbiters of who ‘deserves’ care and who just doesn’t. Really all this is doing from generation to generation is to perpetuate ‘austerity profits’ for Justin and the crew, a privilege that is just as underprivileged as the underprivilege we all see/read about and experience: to be locked in a silo of privilege or underprivilege makes us all less well.
Britain needs to see everyone having access to hope and a future, not an environment where some people have been turned into ‘hopeless cases’, not hospital wards where people described as red 3, green 1, blue 2 are served Food Baron Justin’s (properly labelled but actually heat blasted plastic covered chemical) concoction that becomes part of a process that determines lives, from ‘communities’ so they don’t get above themselves and ask for smaller, or different or more…..
Let’s make the kitchens and the environment of every hospital after Corona beautiful, welcoming and rich in the potential of who we are as a country. Let’s stop de capacitating the many so the few can exploit the morality that ‘we should volunteer’ (and have no expectation of reward, except the dystopic reward that you’ve observed what happens in the NHS but you’re supposed to keep mum because ‘careless talk costs lives’). Why should we be thinking that volunteering should create the capacity that ‘Justin’ and his ‘smart’ friends have asset stripped to some island like the Caymans?
Britain is great but not because it makes the workers and patients in it invisible, Britain is great because we should be pulling in the vast treasure of the many nationalities who work and live here, as doctors, nurses, ordelies not to turn them into some weird kind of ‘Brit hybrid’ that can pass a citizenship test that most British citizens (including Boris, Dominic and Priti, Rishi would fail, as would I) but to recognise how their knowledge, culture, history and experience should be given credit: here I go with some figures.
Imagine how if we were able to read the stories of everyone here and create a new kind of currency, a new kind of value that could transform the local, the hospital into a place of civilised 21st century care for everyone here: just WOW! (Source House of Commons Library): https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7783/
Afghan 133
Albanian 110
Algerian 93
American 1288 (How is this ethnically broken down? Why is this expressed nationally?
Australian 2132 (How is this ethnically broken down?)
Austrian 345
Bangladeshi 684
Barbadian 114
Belgian 403
Brazilian 423
Bulgarian 1090
Burmese 365
British 1,021,257 (How is this ethnically broken down? Why is this expressed as a ‘monoculture?’
Bruneian 57
Cameroonian 284
Canadian 919
Central African Rep 77
Chinese 839
Colombian 123
Congolese 178
Congolese 735
Croatian 271
Czech 721
Cypriot 424
Danish 391
Dutch 1785
Egyptian 1608
Eritrean 172
Estonian 177
Ethiopian 107
French 1664
Fijian 57
Filipino 18,584
Finnish 394
Gambian 234
Gambian 1,090
German 2427
Ghanaian 2570
Greek 3194
Grenadian 63
Guyanese 158
Hong Kong 114
Hungarian 1305
Indian 21,207
Indonesian 64
Iranian 331
Iraq 333
Irish 13,320
Israeli 60
Italian 6396
Ivorian 53
Jamaican 1884
Japanese 264
Japanese 1,288
Jordanian 177
Korean 61
Kenyan 742
Latvian 535
Lebanese 59
Libyan 162
Lithuanian 1344
Malawian 232
Malaysian 2298
Maltese 342
Mauritianan 240
Mauritanian 1,278
Mexican 63
Moroccan 64
Motswana 54
Norwegian 270
Nigerian 6770
Nigerian 839
Niger(ien) 183
Nepalese 1760
New Zealander 663
Pakistani 3975
Peruvian 51
Polish 9272
Portuguese 7178
Romanian 4451
Russian 175
Rwandan 48
Saint Lucian 103
Serbian 81
Sierra Leonean 519
Singaporean 402
Slovak 859
Slovenian 158
Somali 264
South African 1663
Spanish 5899
Sri Lankan 1329
Sudanese 598
Swedish 735
Swiss 169
Syrian 165
Tanzanian 148
Thai 313
Trinidadian 613
Tunisian 48
Turkish 198
Turkish 859
Ugandan 516
Ukrainian180
Ukrainian 742
Venezuelan 55
Zambian 466
Zimbabwean 4049
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