Nurses for Reform Blog

Yesterday morning I was on LBC’s Breakfast programme discussing how inflation and the forthcoming VAT rise will affect nurses.

I pointed out that it will, of course, be very tough for nurses over the next few years given the financial crisis, but that they will not be helped by the Royal College of Nursing and Unison bleating for more money from the government when there is none.

Nurses for Reform sees this crisis as an opportunity for nurses to lobby the government for more market oriented reforms in healthcare including the abolition of national collective pay bargaining.  In a free market in healthcare provision nurses would be empowered to be entrepreneurs finding new and innovative ways of providing high quality patient care, rather than the passive supplicants they are today at the mercy of the NHS, the Treasury and the Unions.

This is a truly appalling story, the NHS continues to starve many thousands of patients in it’s care every year.  However, what makes this worse is that it is not a new story. I have written before on the appalling state of patient nutrition in NHS hospitals.

This is what happens when nurses become managers, filling forms to enable the Secretary of State for Health look good at the dispatch box,  while patient care is left to untrained staff.

When I had an operation in the private sector a couple of years ago I met many nurses working there who had taken a pay cut by leaving the NHS and had done so because the private hospitals gave them the opportunity to concentrate on caring for patients, i.e. nursing, rather than paperwork.

With yesterday’s publication of the government’s White Paper on public health, nannyish Tories are seeking to mobilise the full machinery of ‘municipal socialism’.

I choose my words carefully. The conservative party has always had deeply authoritarian and nannyish tendencies.  Rarely trusting in personal responsibility and the freedom of individuals to chose to do the right things in such areas as personal lifestyle choices, Conservatives have always been champions of big government across so-called ‘public health’.  What makes this White Paper so worrying is the Conservative Party’s mobilisation of municipal socialism.

Properly conceived, municipal socialism as a movement dates back to the 1870’s, when politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain sought to have local government take gas and water supplies in to public ownership not to mention the politicisation such areas as parks and sanitation.  In a quest to bring tax funded services ever closer to the lives of people, municipal socialism and local government are particularly powerful tools in the hands of social engineers.

While this White Paper talks loosely about local decisions, local people, and tries to deport the gentile atmospherics of “nudging” people to do what the political class currently believe to be the right thing, the measures it contains amount to a tyrannical busy-bodies charter.

For at it’s heart the terrifying prospect it contains is the conjuncture of puritanical Tory nannyism with the bloated machinery of local municipality.  Not only will this initially carry a price tag of £4 billion but in the long-term it’s outpourings will attempt to gain a stranglehold on so many of our remaining pleasures.