Dennis Benson

The monsoons are back. We codgers are a generous bunch, and we would dearly love to export a zillion gallons of our accumulated rainwater to the south east where daily prayers for some of the wet stuff go unanswered and water rationing looms. Unto him that hath shall be given seems to be the edict up there, and we are sick of it!

But we weren’t always slaves to chickens, and we well travelled codgers sometimes find ourselves in the position of knowing more than the investigative journalists of which we hear so much these days. Many of this morning’s papers carry a story surrounding an unnamed senior cinician who has been summoned to appear at a disciplinary hearing to be conducted by his Primary Care Trust in Cumbria. His offence was to be one of 22 doctors who signed a letter to the media criticising Andrew Lansley’s health and social care bill.

We can confirm that the doctor in question is Professor John Ashton, the county medical officer for Cumbria. Some of us know him, all of us know of him. He is an excellent clinician with an impeccable record of dedicated service to the NHS which he has long served with distinction. He is known by everyone as a man of great integrity. I am sure the same is true of the other signatories. All they have done is to say what almost every other clinician in the land is saying.

Purely by chance I read the latest from the Leveson enquiry this morning. Trevor Kavanagh, the associate editor of the Sun, is reported as having said; “Freedom of speech is a hard-won, centuries-old legal principle which did not arrive in the last shower with the Human Rights Act. It is, by its nature, in the public interest”. And he is right, isn’t he? Yet right now the Department of Health is engaged in a sinister war of intimidation.

Yesterday the Guardian revealed evidence of the manipulation of waiting lists statistics, which threw immediate doubt on government claims that NHS waiting lists are not extending. The information sounded very convincing but was provided to Polly Toynbee by a ‘whistleblower’ who works in a hospital appointments office. In parliament the opposition predictably raised this and ministers ridiculed the idea of believing anonymous sources. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that lists are being fiddled on the instruction of the D of H, and whistleblowers are tracked down and fired.

It is of course less easy to do that to doctors, and the likelihood is that Professor Ashton will land merely a reprimand. There is a reasonable chance that he and his colleagues will refuse to accept even that. They certainly should do, for asked who they trust the vast majority of electors will put doctors at the top of the list at the foot of which rests Andrew Lansley.

Sinister may strike you as an over-the-top headline for all this. But it isn’t, for if politicians are to be allowed to take away freedom of speech from anyone opposed to their views it is a very sinister development indeed.

So what has brought about this sudden acceleration in gagging? The Prime Minister has decided to stake his reputation on NHS reform, and when that happens the NHS is forced into becoming more brutal and bullying and to bury bad news. Cameron is about to repeat Blair’s mistake and could well precipitate a full uprising by the only profession that still dares to speak the truth. 

                            OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

WHAT PEOPLE SAID ABOUT HUMANITY;   “I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure”…..Boscoe Pertwee    “The most dangerous thing in the world is to leap a chasm in two jumps”…..David Lloyd George    “No man in the world has more courage than the one who can stop after eating one peanut”…….Channing Pollock    “You don’t have to swim faster than the shark, just faster than the guy next to you”……Peter Benchley    “Ask him the time and he’ll tell you how the watch was made”……Jane Wyman     “People in a temper often say  a lot of silly things that they really mean”…..Penelope Gilliat    “The meek shall inherit the earth. Serves them right”….Denis Leary

                            OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

We dumped yet more gravel on the hen-run areas in an attempt to avoid the need to begin ark-building. We sometimes wonder what archeologists will make of it all when, in a zillion years hence, they attempt to fathom out what people did back in the dark ages of the 21st century. At least they will know that we used false dentures, Albert having misled his top set during one of his many falls during the January mini-ice age.

But one suspects that their fellow academics, the historians, will have more fun in analysing the endless governmental cock-ups. There will be plenty to choose from, my current favourite is the one involving our hugely expensive border control system which seems to only check incoming people at times when there are no queues. Presumably the terrorists make a point of arriving at peak hours!

It would be easy to blame Theresa May for the latest fiasco, easy but unfair. Under our bizaare method of government, Prime Ministers are obliged to select the people that run our vast departments of state from around 300 or so MPs. Deduct one hundred that are too old, another hundred who are too loopy, and he or she has the unenviable task of appointing to what are massive management tasks about half of what is left.

The result is that people such as our Theresa, who would look far more comfortable as a Marks and Sparks sales manager, or John Reid, a boxing promoter if ever there was one, find themselves in charge of the Home Office. When Reid took over he panicked at the revelation that walking in loaded with DIY bomb kits was rather easy, and he declared the whole set up as unfit for purpose. To deal with this he created The UK Border Agency (UKBA).

Several home secretaries later, May also had good reason to panic. On her watch the Agency has lost all track of 124,000 asylum and migration applicants,  500,000 passengers on Eurostar have been nodded through, secure ID checks have been suspended 482 times and Ports have relaxed rules on 14,812 occasions. Cue the inevitable arguments about who is to blame, cue the decision to scrap the organisation and to create two in its place. In the absence of an experienced chief excecutive these too will fail but the chances are that by then Theresa will have been reshuffled, and someone else can make more sweeping changes. 

Frankly until the UK adopts the practice, often followed in the United States, of appointing apolitical professional top managers with ministers merely holding them to account, this type of mayhem will continue. Almost everywhere one looks there are similar debacles and Andrew Lansley is a perfect example. If he had set out to make a mess of the NHS he couldn’t have done a better job. In an attempt to bring order to chaos, Cameron then calls a conference from which he excludes all the critics and fails to even mention the issue that has 56 per cent of the over-65s population demanding that the bill be dropped. His own party’s standing has fallen dramatically in the polls and no fewer than 67 per cent of Lib Dem voters demand a halt, not that whelk stall Clegg will listen to them.

Had Lansley merely stated the political objective and left the planning to an experienced NHS executive none of this mess would have occurred. And there would have been no need for all the chaotic arguments about a bill that even Lansley’s right-hand man has described as unintelligible. And there would have been integrity. The political brief would have stated the aim as privatisation and only when, and if, political agreement was obtained would the planners get to work.

During my years as a business leader or NHS chairman I met many ministers carrying various political labels. I can honesty say that I cannot recall one who struck me as being much above whelk stall ability. Several were politically astute, but mixing the two is a recipe for ruin. In theory they all relied on civil sertvants for advice, but they too lack any business experience and for good measure rotate every two years.

I wonder if BetFred will take a bet on the date of the next border agency reorganisation! There is money to be made!

                            OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

THINGS PEOPLE SAID ABOUT BOOKS;   “A man came to my door and said, ‘I’d like to read your meter’. I said, ‘Whatever happened to classics?’ “……..Emo Philips   “Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again”…..Samuel Johnson     “I have hundreds of books but no bookcase. Nobody woud lend me a bookcase”……Henny Youngman    “Literature is  mostly about having sex and not much about having babies. Life is the other way round”……David Lodge    “I’ve just been reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it”…..Steven Wright     “Never judge a book by its movie”…..J W Eagan     “I do a lot of reading about serial killers, mostly ‘How To’ books”….Roseanne    “To write a diary every day is like retiurning to one’s own vomit”……Enoch Powell

                        OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 

Regular readers will know that we allotment codgers have developed a paranoia about Andrew Lansley and his plans to privatise the NHS. But, to quote the old adage, just because you are paranoid it doesn’t follow that someone isn’t out to get you. Anyway, when we first learned that David Cameron had decided to become involved we were more than somewhat relieved. Surely he would recognise just what a political banana skin this project is, surely he would realise that once the great British public grasps the significance of NHS hospitals being encouraged to increase their private beds up to 49% all hell will be heading his way. Sadly, it seems not. Instead we are to have a dose of slanted PR, Cameron style.

What do the British Medical Association, the Royal College of GPs, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Radiologists, the Royal College of Pathologists, the Royal College of Physiotherapists, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists all have in common? Two things. They have all come out opposing the NHS Bill, and they have all been omitted from the conference being held today by the Prime Minister in Downing Street.

Amazingly the Downing Street spin-doctors yesterday explained that those chosen to attend the summit had been selected on the basis that there was little point in inviting those that opposed the Bill. Ye Gods!  In other words Cameron intends to wheel out the group of GPs named by this blog some months ago as an elite group of regular diners and prospective honours recipients. There are now an impressive 50 of them, not so impressive when viewed against the total number of around 35,000, almost all of which have voted against.

He will also wheel on the Surgeons, the only Royal College in support of Lansley. That was predictable. At present surgeons can only allocate hours to private practice once they have fulfilled their obligation to the NHS. Once 49% of NHS hospital beds are occupied by private patients they can make their fortunes in normal hours. Their NHS waiting times will increase by almost 50%, a figure being quoted by medical insurance companies who are now funding an unprecedented number of full-page daily ads in the national press.

Incredibly the government has dismissed the protests of all of the medical bodies as ‘self interest’. This is not only offensive to the professional bodies, it also does a grave disservice to the general public. The people did not vote for these changes, and a petition launched just three days ago attracted 100,000 signatures within hours.

Writing in the Lancet last week, Prof Allyson Pollock, professor of public health at Barts and the London School of Medicine, together with two leading lawyers, concluded that under the Lansley proposals patients will end up paying for treatments at present provided by the NHS. They argue that the bill will introduce a “mixed financing system and abolish the model of tax-financed universal health care on which the NHS is based”.

Yes the Downing Street gathering of cronys will, by this evening, tell us that the Bill is the best thing since sliced bread. The truth is printed in this morning’s Daily Telegraph where Max Pemberton asks: “Can the government really keep telling us they’re listening while driving the knife deeper and deeper into the heart of the NHS?”.

                             OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

WHAT PEOPLE SAID ABOUT THE THEATRE:   “I go to the theatre to be entertained. I don’t want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction. I can get all that at home”….Peter Cook     “Very few people go to the doctor when they have a cold. They go to the theatre instead”…..James Agate    “What is my play about? It is about to make me very rich”……Tom Stoppard    “Nudity on stage is disgusting. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience”…..Shelley Winters     “Shakespeare is fantastic. And to think he only wrote it all with a feather!” …….Sam Goldwyn    “Opening night; the night before the play is ready to open”……George Jean Nathan    “I come from a long line of actors. It’s called the dole queue.”……Alan Davies

                      OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO         

Sunday morning is the traditional time for a good deal of soccer chatter on the allotments. Today the weather seemed a perfect analogy for our big-time clubs. A glance at the sunlit bue sky suggested that all is well, but the invisible wind had a cruel cutting edge to it. Translated into football all appears well as the mega-stars strut their stuff, but out of sight of the adoring fans financial lunacy is doing its worst.

In the past week Glasgow Rangers have passed into the hands of administrators and Portsmouth have returned to the brink of extinction. At least a dozen other clubs are teetering on the edge as managers rotate and pocket ever-increasing packets of cash. There are many things wrong with the once beautiful game but one towers above all others. Clubs have lost all sense of what is a sensible wage bill. In an attempt to keep pace with the ludicrous wages paid by oil-rich Arabs and Russian tycoons even the lower order Premiership clubs are paying millions per year to even the most modest performers. When I read recently that a player regarded an offer of £100,000 per week as an insult, I finally realised that the whole set-up has lost its senses.

Today some newspapers report that Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager has been told that he must begin to pay ‘realistic’ wages. Stars that he nurtured and developed can go elsewhere and pocket £160,000 each week, he is offering a ‘miserly’ £75,000. Can you imagine any other job that would offer anything remotely near that? Nor can I, not even the ultimate symbol of perverted greed, the bankers, manage that.

Unless the Football Association and its European counterparts finds a way of setting a maximum wage, dozens of clubs will go to the wall. Of course those such as Manchester City and Chelsea would baulk at such a move but how will they survive if they have no opponents capable of providing competitive matches. And for how long would Sky continue to pour money in to non-spectacles that have no attraction for viewers?

And the disease of extravagence is permeating down. Whilst the non-Premiership clubs cannot countenance wages in the millions they are still getting caught up in the pay-more-than-you-can-afford frenzy. Even in non-league circles ambitious clubs are paying players far more than gate-money can ever cover. Already loyal supporters are finding the strain of constant fund-raising too much, and this season alone has seen over a dozen household names lock their gates for the last time.

Someone has to call a halt to the madness before it is too late. Given a maximum wage of, say, one million pounds per year there would still be scope for the handful of mega-rich owners to flaunt their affluence. Others would pay less so little would change from the spectator’s viewpoint. And where else would the soccer stars earn such money?

The only logical agent for such a revolutionary approach is the Football Association. But the omens are not good. It has just announced a new England strip to replace the existing one that has only featured in eight matches. It is priced at £70 and is a blatent attempt to screw more money out of parents. And remember that it was the selfsame Association that appointed Capello at a salary of £6 million. In contrast, at the time of lifting the 2010 Workd Cup, Vincent del Bosque was being paid £1.5 milion as was Germany’s Joachim Low.

Suddenly the FA has a golden opportunity to set a new standard. There are many existing managers who would jump at the chance of managing at international level, and tempting though it may be to give someone like Harry Redknapp the millions he demands, the temptation should be resisted. Were it to make a firm stand on this, many clubs would be encouraged to come to their senses.

In the final analysis footballers are entertainers, and their rewards should refect their ability to draw punters through the turnstyles. If a West End play did not attract sufficient money through the ticket office it would be ‘pulled’.

Where I grew up one could see folk emerge from their front doors on Saturday afternoon en-route for the local football ground. There were big stars then such as Matthews, Lawton and Finney. They were all on the maximum wage which represented  more that those that watched them could earn. But not obscenely so. And no clubs went to the wall. 

Of course the idea of a maximum wage would be debated and scorned by many fans. But will they enjoy the alternative? Probaby not, for if the present crazy indulgence goes on dozens of the teams they watch now will be no more within a matter of years.

                               OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

WHAT PEOPLE SAID ABOUT DIETS;    “If her bum was a bungalow, she’d never get a mortgage on it”……Victoria Wood      “Is she fat? her favourite food is seconds”…..Joan Rivers     “When my mother-in-law hangs out her bra on the line to dry, we lose an hour of daylight”…..Les Dawson    “I asked the sales girl is she had anything to make me look thinner. She said ‘How about a week in Ethiopia?’ “…..Roseanne     “Pavarotti is very difficult to pass at the net with or without a racket”…..Peter Ustinov    ” ”I know there’s a thin person inside me trying to get out’  ‘Just one dear?’ “……Edina Monsoon and Gran, Absolutely Fabulous    “You know why fish are so thin?  They eat fish”……Jerry Seinfeld

                      OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
o

To quote Arkwright, it’s been a funny old day – so far. On our first visit to the allotments it was raining cats and dogs and it was all hands to the gravel spreading. When we returned at lunchtime the sun was out and a force zillion westerly sent Albert’s new cap on its way to join the old one. But my old pal was in an unusually benign mood. He had just read that his hero Big Eric Pickles has taken immediate action to nullify the triumph of the Secular Society, which had obtained a court order banning council prayers in Bideford. Despite the fact that Eric could swallow Albert whole and still seek afters, the wee fellow dotes on him.

But the focus of today’s gossip was on the arrival amongst us of God, or His Holiness Rupert Murdoch as Cameron and Blair like to describe him. And we are told that his visit to the Sun newspaper offices has boosted morale. Given that his new Management and Standards Committee is working flat out to hand over the journalists to Inspector Knacker, that probably wasn’t difficult, but the Digger delivered a promise that all those suspended can return to work. That delighted the staff, but has probably left Knacker somewhat confused.

But the big announcement was that, just as all the cynics had predicted when he closed the News of the Screws, Murdoch is planning to introduce a Sunday version of the Sun. Never mind the parents of Millie Dowler or the countless other families whose privacy was invaded, never mind all the payments to police officers, never mind the dubious explanations given to parliament, never mind Ms Brooks and all the other directors who knew nothing, the Murdoch Sunday wil be back in time for the Olympics advertising boost.

It has to be said that not all former empoyees of News International are over the moon. Those arrested at the News of the World are not to be treated on a basis of innocent until proved guilty. Typical is the former chief reporter Neville Thurlback who tweeted “Is this just a PR stunt and NOTW men don’t matter as the paper is defunct”. Shame on you Neville, your former boss has the best character references that money and membership of Mr Cameron’s Witney set can buy.

What is certain is that the politicians will watch the circulation figures of the NOTW Mark2 with great interest. If it flops they will maintain their recent air of distance from all things Murdoch. But if it takes off, expect to see that motor cavalcade arriving at the back door of 10 Downing Street. The fact that Sun readers obediently follow its advice on how to vote tells us something about them, but the fact remains that the Digger at full throttle has the power to make or break governments.

Statistics suggest that the majority of Sun readers are men. We understand that because until we decided to ban News Corp papers from our little circle, several of our members who favour long macs were to be seen studying whatever learned detail was provided on page three. But solidarity rules here, and we are resolved never to let the output of people who have taken journalism into the gutter to cross our wonkey gates again.

We have formed the CATS society, and you are welcome to join. Must have an acronym in this PR age. Ours stands for Codgers Against The Sun!

                            OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

WHAT PEOPLE SAID ABOUT THE MIND;    “Wee Willie Winkie ran through the town, upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown. And you think I’m nuts?”….. Tommy Cooper     “One out of four is mentally unbaanced. Think of your three best friends. If they seem okay then you’re the one”…..Slappy White      “The neurotic buids castles in the air, the psychotic thinks he ives in them, the psychoanalyst colects the rent from both”…..Jerome Lawrence    “Most people with low self-esteem have earned it”…….George Carlin     “I went to my doctor and he told me I had acute paranoia. I said, excuse me, but I’m here to be examined not admired”…..Gracie Allen   ” How to tell if you are paranoid; if you can’t think of anything that’s not your fault, you’ve got it”……Robert Hutchins    “Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most”…..Mark Twain    “Being in therapy is great. I spend an hour just talking about myself. It’s kinda like being a guy on a date”……Caroline Rhea

                         OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO