The benefit of cutting oneself off from the media for a week (still ongoing) is that you aren’t at risk of being lied to, misled or having your hopes falsely raised. However, you aren’t cut off from reality and your own thoughts.
Reality says that one month into the vaccination programme and my 90-year-old mother has not been vaccinated, nor have the other residents of her home or the staff. At a blood test (or letting as I prefer to call it), my GP surgery could offer me no information on the vaccination programme as they had none.
Bubbling to the surface of my thoughts came the idea that being British, having the qualities of Britishness, was more important than any political status (I have no faith in anyone purporting to lead an English party).
But Britishness will have to wait for another day as it became evident that all the things we might have taken pride in do not measure up on the international scene or are not British at all.
Take the NHS (and thank you again for the service I have received in the last six months and the service you continue to provide for everyone against all odds). Sorry, take the NHS, a flagship of being British and we find that, out of 33 countries in an OECD* survey, we came 22nd. The survey counted the number of doctors for each one thousand of the population. Needless to say Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Lithuania and Italy all have more than four. The United Kingdom narrowly beats Slovenia. We have 2.8 doctors for every one thousand people. Doesn’t seem that significant but those top countries effectively have 30% more doctors than we do.
Then we note that, from a House of Commons report, one in seven of our NHS workers are not British, there are 170,000 of them. Some 67,000 – 5.5% of the total workforce – come from the EU.
Why, we are so good, aren’t we? British nurses will take a degree before they qualify and accumulate all the debt that goes with it, as much as £50,000 is estimated. The government have just offered to pay £5,000 of their £9,000 a year tuition fees. Nurses can expect one of the lowest returns on their investment of anyone earning a degree. Great incentive to get into debt.
In Germany, nurses train within hospitals as they used to do here, and get paid (yes, they get paid for their work on the wards) they get paid up to £1,000 a month. Enough said.
Then I looked at the other things that are quite important to my life – the water company is Canadian, the company that empties the bins is French, the electric company is French, the big investors in BT (it used to be British Telecom) are German, American, Swiss and Norwegian, the train company is Dutch, of mobile phone companies O2 is Spanish and 3 is Hong Kong owned, Shell has its headquarters in Holland, my car is nominally German but all makes use components from all over the world, Land Rover and Jaguar are subsidiaries of an Indian company. Vodafone and British Gas remain, essentially British. What can we cling to that identifies us as British?
* Another doctor survey put us at 48 in the world trailing the Bahamas, Egypt and Mongolia.