Why the British Empire was a very good thing

Bruce 29 March 2016 9 Edit This

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It is utterly sickening that two of the greatest ever writers of English literature, William Somerset Maugham and Joseph Rudyard Kipling have become non persons, cast into oblivion by the politically correct left. Not because they promoted Empire, but because they wrote about it. We now have had several generations who have been denied the incredible insight into the human condition, the great adventures, the fantastic characters, the sounds and smells of exotic places that both these amazing authors created. But you can’t keep a great man down, Kipling rightly won the Nobel Prize for literature and every year If is voted to be the nation’s favourite poem. The ignorant left must be seething.

The left’s view of Empire is that it was just pure exploitation and suppression. This is a complete lie. The British Empire did more to advance civilisation than any other force in history. Let’s look at some of what was achieved:

• Peace. Pax Brittanica. We came to lands were warfare had been the way of life for millennia, India and Africa. And we stopped it. We made the world into the most peaceful place it had ever been, far more peaceful than it is today.
• Rule of Law. Most places we arrived had no rule of law. Might was right. We put in the British legal system which gave the vast majority of people far more human rights than they had ever had before.
• Trade. The left spout that Empire was exploitative and merely extracted the wealth of other nations. This is a lie. Empire was all about trade, creating markets for British goods around the world whilst creating markets for global goods in Britain. And huge trade between all the different parts of Empire. This massively advanced the economy of the whole world.
• Infrastructure. We established and maintained the world’s shipping routes, road systems everywhere we went, and railways including the world’s biggest system, in India. Our plumbing was famous and on the Mediterranean islands we ran, Cyprus, Malta, Rhodes, Corfu, Menorca etc it is safe to drink the tap water!
• Education. In many nations we brought literacy for the first time and created widespread educational reform. When we found intellectual superstars we often brought them back to Britain to receive the world’s best education. Look up Srinivasa Ramanujan.
• The English language. The world’s language upon which so much of man’s development has been built. English is the language of trade, the language of science, the language of entertainment.
• A middle class. Not only businessmen and traders, Empire created a global middle class of doctors, dentists, lawyers, journalists and all the other professions necessary for an advanced civilisation.
• Technology. The industrial revolution happened in Britain, we invented and developed most of the technology that makes the modern world possible. And we exported much of this out to the Empire. From printing presses to steel works. Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) was established by Dorabji Tata, India in 1907.
• Sport. The world’s sports, from soccer, through golf to tennis are the British sports. Empire achieved this.
• Slavery. The British led the world in trying to get rid of this. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 made the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 made slavery totally illegal. Between 1808 and 1860, the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.

When Empire ended it was often not replaced by liberal democracy, instead a venal, avaricious ruling class took over and treated whole countries as personal fiefdoms. Very many countries went backwards and lots of people in the world would have preferred to have the Empire back. And for those who think that democracy is the great panacea, just remember the immense harm it has caused (click here to open article).

So far from something to be ashamed of, the British Empire was one of mankind’s greatest ever achievements. It created the modern world that we all live in and everyone owes it a huge debt for the huge advance in civilisation that it brought. The left are very wrong about this, just as they are wrong about most things.

Some truths about Panama Some truths about Panama

Just now the virtue signalling lefty press and the social media SJWs are indulging in an orgy of hypocrisy. They are disguising their bitter envy of people who are more successful than themselves in their histrionic reporting of tax haven use. All perspective has been lost and they are conflating illegal with legal practices so as to prevaricate and equivocate. It is just a massive lefty attempt to troll the public into hating those who achieve. The tax havens are being painted as the villains, whereas the real villains are the Western governments with their vindictive taxes and prodigious waste of the revenues raised from us.

It is a fact that taxes in Britain are excessive and punitive (Estonia, inside the EU, has a top income tax rate of 20%, so their economy is booming). The exchequer would gather more tax at lower rates, due to the Laffer Curve, but in this country much of the population have been brainwashed into thinking that taxes are punishment for success, which is why the rates are utterly immoral. Why should half of the money that people work for be extorted by the government? Every person has a moral duty to minimise the tax they pay, tax avoidance is perfectly legal. Show me a lefty who pays more tax than they need to. And every company has a legal requirement to minimise the tax they pay. It is called fiduciary duty. Money is far better being used in the productive part of the economy than being misused by the dead hand of government.

A lot of people don’t seem to realise that, net of benefits, only the rich pay tax. Someone on £20,00 pays just £1,800 in 2016/7 income tax (and receives far more than this in benefits), someone on £120,000 (in other words 5 times as much) pays £41,200 (in other words nearly 23 times as much), this is just theft and has zero moral justification. Because of this every successful person who can do so votes with their feet and moves to a place where the state is not so greedy and nasty. Singapore, Monaco, Malta, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Dubai, Gibraltar, the Caribbean. These places are full of high earning Brits whose education has been paid for by British taxpayers and who now choose to generate their wealth in fairer and better run places.

Successful people who have created wealth have very good reason to keep it outside the UK when there is always the possibility of a Labour government. The extremist socialist shadow Chancellor,  John McDonnell, want to introduce a wealth tax. To extort from people money that they have already paid tax on (often twice, income tax and VAT). He wants to steal from a family’s total assets, which would include everything including property, furnishing, cars, shares, family heirlooms and savings. When France tried this they extorted $2.6 billion a year but more than $125 billion left the country in capital flight.

It is not just the rich who avoid tax. Most taxpayers do it. Building a pension pot, contributions are tax free. Nearly everyone in Britain with a job does this. Saving money in an ISA. Tax free saving is tax avoidance. Half of all British adults do this. Buying duty free goods. The clue is in the name. Most people who travel do this. Paying cash to avoid VAT. Window cleaner, car wash, minicab etc. We all do it. It is called the black economy. It is worth £150 billion. There is a totally untaxed “illegal” recreational drug industry that turns over about £10 billion a year. And finally the huge number of people who are happy to smoke smuggled tobacco, costing the government at least £2 billion a year in lost revenue.

And the virtue signalling hypocritical lefties also avoid tax. The BBC had more than 400 staff, of whom 148 were news and current affairs presenters, who used private service companies instead of paying PAYE, so as to minimise what they paid to the government in taxes. The Guardian was originally set up as a trust so as to escape inheritance tax. It then changed its status in 2008 so as to pay no tax on a £307 million capital gain and it now uses a corporate structure based in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands. How these people have the gall to criticise others who do what they themselves do is beyond reasonable behavior.

It is not just the lefty media who dissemble and dissimulate, their politicians are at it too. Labour royalty, such as the Benn and Miliband families used artificial tax avoidance methods to avoid paying large sums of inheritance tax, despite being extremist socialists. The BBC and Guardian should be adding this to their debate about tax avoidance.

One of the most amazing examples of lefty gross hypocrisy was the 2001 sale by Gordon Brown of  147 freehold properties and 454 leasehold properties belonging to HM Revenue and Customs to Mapeley, a tax haven company based in the Cayman Islands.  The National Audit Office (NAO) says that the deal was designed to avoid paying hundreds of millions of pounds of tax (it was also an appallingly bad deal commercially for the government). So how the Labour Party can now complain about offshore tax havens is utterly incredible, they were one of the main users of them in this deal. Also notice, once again, that your lefty press aren’t telling you this.

Margaret Hodge (Labour)  is considered to be by far the richest MP due to her stake in Stemcor, the steel-trading business set up by Hans Oppenheimer, her father. Yet these shares were held offshore, in a tax haven, via The Link Steel Foundation in Liechtenstein.

Ken Livingstone is a well known leftie and between 2000 and 2008 he was Mayor of London. In 2012  it was revealed that he was putting his earnings through a private service company, Silveta Ltd, paying corporation tax at 20 or 21 per cent instead of income tax at up to 50 per cent. The company was jointly owned with his wife, Emma, which allowed him to split his income with her, even though it was all earned by him, thus using her allowances and status as a basic-rate taxpayer and avoiding further tax. He also paid her from company funds as his assistant. Silveta’s 2011 accounts showed an annual turnover of £238,646. Utterly amazing hypocrisy.

Cherie Blair, wife of the ex Prime Minister, set up a private equity fund. And, surprise of surprises, it is based in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands. It’s purpose, to provide private healthcare in the UK, part of the privatisation of the NHS.

The lefty press are not just gross hypocrites over tax evasion, they also effectively lie by mixing illegal with legal activities when reporting, sometimes in the same sentence, so the public are conditioned into thinking that people who have only acted wisely are in fact criminals. So, for instance, whilst the Brink’s MAT money laundering was criminal, David Cameron’s father acted sensibly and legally. The lefty media are deliberately not making these distinctions. And the biggest story, which the press are giving minimum coverage to, is the corruption of world leaders, who steal the wealth of entire countries, harming many millions of people. Which once again proves how stupid our government is in giving so much of our tax money away in aid. We are simple fueling corruption.

And finally everyone has lost sight of why we pay tax. The lefty press treat tax as if it is a good thing in itself. It isn’t, it is a necessary evil. The government should be there only to provide services that we can’t provide for ourselves in the free market. Which means mainly national defence and law and order. But instead, in order to control us, the government takes on running our lives as much as it possibly can. But they have to tax us like crazy to do this (or run out of money, as socialists always do). And everything that the government does it does badly. Everything costs vastly more than it needs to. Far more people are employed, at the taxpayer’s expense, than are necessary. There is no concern or need to look after the customer, who is the taxpayer. Waste and inefficiency are accepted because there is no reason not to. And vast sums are thrown away on black hole vanity projects such as HS2, two huge aircraft carriers and the Millenium Dome. We could halve the tax we pay and still have more government than we need. A very good reason for sensible people to use tax havens.

Ken Livingstone is right

Ken Livingstone is obnoxious, the sort of nasty champagne socialist who has caused immense damage to Great Britain. But this is no good reason to suspend him from the Labour Party. His suspension is for “racism”. So let’s take a look at what he said. A full transcript is in the Independent (you can read it by clicking here) and here is the key extract:

“I’ve been in the Labour party for 47 years; I’ve never heard anyone say anything antisemitic. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the state of Israel and its abuse of Palestinians but I’ve never heard anyone say anything antisemitic. It’s completely over the top but it’s not antisemitism. Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”

And this is true. Hitler’s Nazi government had an agreement with the Zionists to ship German Jews to Israel, it was called the Haavara Agreement (click here to see the Wiki about it) and operated between 1933 and 1939, transporting approximately 60,000 Jews (proof can be found by clicking here).

So what is going on? To understand all this we have to know what racism really is, because the term is massively abused by politicians and the media. Oxford Dictionaries say it is: “Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.” With a second definition: “The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races”. So this perfectly describes the white supremacists in America who believe that black people are genetically inferior. Or Hitler believing that German Aryans were a super race. It certainly in no way can be applied to what Ken Livingstone said. So what is going on?

1) Many people in the Labour Party object very strongly to having Jeremy Corbyn as their leader and are plotting like crazy to get rid of him. Corbyn and Livingstone are good friends so attacking Livingstone is an excellent proxy for attacking Corbyn. So it was no surprise when all the usual suspects within Labour rapidly came out vociferously against Livingstone in an orchestrated manner. Corbyn defused this by suspending Livingstone, because he knows that a reinstatement is inevitable. It is also worth looking at who theLabour Friends of Israel are.

2) Labour is the party of Islam in Britain (you can read my article explaining this by clicking here) and Livingstone was speaking in support of Naz Shah, a Muslim Labour MP who was vociferous about Israeli genocide (look the word up in a dictionary) of the Palestinians.

3) The British establishment is owned by the Zionists. They own the Conservative Party (you can read my article explaining this by clicking here). They own or control many newspapers. And many Zionists are in key positions at the BBC. All these Zionists descended on Livingstone like a ton of bricks because he is against the suppression of the Palestinians by a racist, fascist, apartheid Israeli state.

4) We have lots of elections coming up. The Welsh and Scottish Assemblies, Crime Commissioners, London Mayor and a huge swathe of local elections. The Conservatives want to do well in these and Labour don’t want to be obliterated (except for London Mayor, London is a Muslim city now for electoral purposes). This is one reason why the Conservatives jumped on Livingstone so quickly and why Corbyn suspended him so quickly. They both think this story could influence voting intentions.

5) The Zionists in Britain hate all criticism of the pariah Israeli state, so they are trying to have all criticism of Israel classed as being racism. This is ridiculous and is an attempt to take away our rights to free speech. Their first big move in this direction is their demand that anti Zionism be regarded as being the same as anti Semitism. Utterly absurd. There are many Jews who are not Zionists and there are many Zionists (mainly in USA) who are not Jews. Zionism is an evil fascist political movement and has many very good reasons to be criticised. It is worth noting here that Zionism is genuinely racist and meets the definition at the top of the article. Zionism is described by Theodor Herzl’s  book Der Judenstaat, which sought to steal a Jewish homeland from the Palestinians purely on the basis of race. In fact there are many ways that Zionism can be accurately compared with Nazism (click here for a list).

It will be interesting to see which way this goes, it could be a brief squall in a teacup or it could completely redefine the British attitude towards Israel. Certainly very many people on all sides of the argument can be criticised over these events. But Ken is not one of them.

Why do lefties tell lies about Baroness Thatcher, our greatest Prime Minister?

It is utterly amazing how often Labour politicians, lefties on the social media and the leftie media, such as the BBC, tell utter, complete, outrageous fabrications about Margaret Thatcher. The reason for this is not just because she beat them, which she did. It is because she proved that their dogma, the very ideas that underpin their actions, are morally bankrupt and always fail, causing great harm to everyone. The left have no answer to this, because there isn’t one, so instead their only debate has been personal abuse against Margaret Thatcher. This abuse proves how intellectually bankrupt the left are.

Let’s take a look at some of the lies.

Allowing General Pinochet to live in England for 2 years whilst he had medical treatment, which the left use to try and accuse Thatcher of fascism. Pinochet was protected by several amnesty laws in Chile and happily returned of his own volition in 2000. And it was Pinochet who had brought democracy back to Chile with the 1988 referendum and the 1989 election. But the real reason why Thatcher did not act against Pinochet was that he was a friend of Great Britain and we owed him a lot. During the Falklands War he had moved a powerful Chilean air defence radar south and then fed all the Argentine airforce information directly to our task force. Not only that, he allowed Chilean bases to be used by the RAF and the SAS. Thatcher was loyal, something the left don’t understand.

The left always blame Thatcher for the demise of the coal industry, but most damage was done by an intransigent trade union who refused to allow investment to increase productivity. And far more coal mines were closed by Labour Prime Ministers. Coal was in terminal decline because of the move to North Sea gas and nuclear power, because imported coal was far cheaper, because our economy was moving away from heavy industries and because domestic coal use collapsed. The coal miners’ strikes during Thatcher’s premiership were seeking to bring down a democratically elected government, as they had achieved against Ted Heath. But the British people supported Margaret Thatcher against the miners, they knew that she was right.

The left hate that Margaret Thatcher de-nationalised many industries. Jeremy Corbyn is, unbelievably, threatening re-nationalisation. The fact is that the government is utterly useless at providing goods and services, so the less they do the better. Nationalised industries don’t have to look after customers, so they don’t. Nationalised industries don’t have to be efficient and make profits, so they don’t. Britain’s nationalised industries were utterly abysmal, execrable. Everybody in Britain suffered because they were so bad at what they did and because they cost the taxpayer so much in subsidies. Privatisation was one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest triumphs and was so successful that it was widely copied around the world. Our phones, rail service, energy supplies, car manufacturing and so much more are now vastly better than they would otherwise have been.

Another leftie lie is that Margaret Thatcher harmed the trade unions and thus harmed their members. It must be remembered that Thatcher came to power immediately after the Winter of Discontent when just about every public service went on strike, dead bodies were not buried, hospitals were closed to patients, mountains of garbage piled up in the streets, 29,474,000 working days were lost directly and many more indirectly. We were known as the Sick Man of Europe. The trade unions were out of control and the voters wanted this fixing. Margaret Thatcher did this gradually and carefully, over several years, with 5 major Acts of Parliament. And she mainly did it by giving MORE power to trade union members, for instance by introducing secret ballots. This made the union leadership far more moderate and vastly reduced industrial action, to everyone’s benefit.

The left hate it that Margaret Thatcher reduced the rate of income tax for high earners. They completely ignore the fact that because of the Laffer Curve these lower rates resulted in the more successful workers paying a higher percentage of the income tax total. The top 10% of earners went from paying paying 35% of the Government’s total income tax receipts to 48% of the total. So Thatcher took more money from the successful than Labour had done. And when Blair and Brown came to power they kept the lower top rate of tax for 13 years, because they knew that it generated the most revenue.

The left say that Margaret Thatcher created mass unemployment, but the reality is that this was caused by nationalisation and by getting rid of it. The nationalised industries had been used by Labour as job creation shams, with incredibly high levels of overmanning and with most people working in them actually being unnecessary, just parasites on the taxpayer. When these industries were exposed to competition it shook out most of the people who shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Unemployment rose from Labour’s one and a half million to more than three million. But Thatcher’s rapid economic growth in the private sector created many jobs, getting this down to 2 million by the end of her premiership. So unemployment rose by a net half a million during these 11 years as British industry became a lot more efficient and a lot more productive, whilst tax payers were no longer subsidising sham jobs. It is worth noting that Gordon Brown’s 2008 recession increased unemployment back to more than two and a half million.

Not enforcing sanctions against South Africa. The left use this to make out that Margaret Thatcher was somehow a racist. This is a complete lie and furthermore it was Margaret Thatcher who ended apartheid, she was an egalitarian who hatred vested interests, such as those the whites had in South Africa. She sent Robin Renwick, now Baron Renwick of Clifton, to South Africa as Ambassador with a crack diplomatic team. They negotiated and managed the transition to multiracial democracy, including bringing ANC members to England for training at the Civil Service Staff College, so they would be able to take over and run the country. You can read all about this in Renwick’s book: “Fighting with Allies, A Journey with Margaret Thatcher”, which is essential reading for anyone trying to get to the truth about Thatcher’s premiership.

Another leftie lie is them saying that Margaret Thatcher was unpopular. In fact she won three General Elections with big majorities because she was so popular and so well liked and respected. It was (and still is) the left who were very unpopular. In 1979 James Callaghan was the losing lefty. In 1983 it was Michael Foot and in 1987 Neil Kinnock who were unpopular with the electorate and who were rejected by the people of Britain. It was only when Tony Blair came along, who copied many of Thatcher’s policies, that Labour became electable.

The left say that Margaret Thatcher destroyed British Manufacturing, this is a bare faced lie. Manufacturing output increase by 7.5% during her time in power. The overall economy expanded even faster than this as Britain adapted to becoming more of a service economy. Shipbuilding, steel and coal were the major industries that shrank, because they couldn’t compete on world markets after years of socialism and trade union intransigence had made them incredibly inefficient. But the real damage to manufacturing in Britain, as you can see in the graph above. was done by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as they failed to keep Britain competitive and relied on the City of London to pay for everything.

The left are nasty people, they are usually vindictive and personally abusive because, quite simply, they have no valid political argument. So they were especially vile and noxious over the death of Margaret Thatcher, amongst their claims was the absence of Thatcher’s family at her death in 2013. Thatcher had been suffering strokes since 2002 and it was one of these that killed her, so it would be difficult for the family to be there. However Thatcher’s incredible popularity with her friends and family could be seen at her 80th birthday party, which was attended by 650 guests, including the Queen. No Labour leader ever has been so popular in their old age.

Lefties lie that Thatcher committed a war crime when she sank the Belgrano. They seem ignorant of the fact that the 200 mile exclusion zone was a warning to neutral shipping and had nothing to do with the conduct of hostilities against Argentina. They had started the war by invading the Falkland Islands. The Belgrano was an immediate threat to the British task force, so was sunk, presumably the left would have preferred it to be left in action to sink British ships. Argentine navy offices have said that the sinking was legitimate and justified.

Yet another lie is that Margaret Thatcher cut public services. She didn’t, she actually increased public spending by 17.6%, a substantial rise. But she was so successful economically that the total % of GDP in the parasitic public sector fell from 45.1% to 39.4%, with a corresponding increase in the productive private sector. So she rebalanced the economy to make it more successful whilst still looking after public services.

Lefties always try to invoke class warfare. Yet Thatcher came from a humble background and her success was achieved on her own merit, something that anyone in Britain can emulate with aptitude and hard work. She definitely did not look after “Tory Toffs” as the left claim. In fact the opposite is true, Thatcher hated all vested interests and acted against all of them (she would hate the current Zionist takeover of the Conservative party). So her reforms of the financial sector got rid of many monopolies and the “old boy’s network” and replaced it with free market competition. And her privatisations brought share ownership to everyone. Remember Tell Sid. The opposite of looking after Tory Toffs.

As you can see you cannot trust anything that the left say. You have almost certainly heard most of these lies, you may even have believed some of them. But now you know the truth. And you know never to trust anything that the left say.

For further reading expanding on the above article, click on the highlighted text to open up the new content.

What have trade unions done for Great Britain?

Our problem with steel.

The two greatest economists of the last century.

Why the public sector is so execrably awful.

Britain’s greatest ever Prime Minister.

Capitalism is morally superior to socialism.

Socialism explained.

Why capitalism is utterly fantastic.

Why the NHS is crap

ed for updates on this topic.

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It is amazing how so many people treat the NHS as if it is some religion to be worshiped, rather than the 3rd world quality consumer service that it is. They fail to realise that other developed countries also have health services, and nearly all of them do it better. The NHS is not the envy of the world, very far from it.

It is very important to understand that the NHS is composed of two completely different things. Firstly it is a compulsory insurance scheme. Everyone pays in, whether they use the service or not. And the service is available to everyone equally, no matter how much or how little they have contributed. All this is good, but why does the state do it? We could just as easily pass legislation to privatise this so that proper insurance companies do the job, as they do in some other countries.

The second element of the NHS is the provision of medical service. In our system this is free at the point of use, instead of paying then claiming. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages. From a users point of view it doesn’t matter whether the provider is the state or private enterprise. For instance all GPs have always been private, they were never nationalised.

So where does the NHS sit in the international rankings. The most thorough and respected research is the Euro Health Consumer Index (you can see their 2014 report by clicking here) the UK came 14th in Europe in 2015 and has never made the top 10 “mainly due to poor accessibility (together with Poland and Sweden the worst among European healthcare systems) and an autocratic top-down management culture”.

The World Health Organisation produced the World Health Report back in 2000 (click here) which had the UK in 18th in the world. Obviously the developing world countries will have become a lot better since, whereas the NHS was trashed by a Labour government (click for article).

There is a report by the Commonwealth Fund in 2014 which put the NHS first! (Click here to see it). But the Commonwealth Fund is an American left wing lobbying organisation who want to bring the NHS to America, so, for instance, they gave high scores for accessibility and free at the point of use. (Click here to see a total demolition of their methodology). However the Commonwealth Fund couldn’t hide the fact that the NHS kills a lot of its patients, coming 10th out of eleven countries on this score.

Bloomberg produce an annual ranking of health services byefficiency taking the crude measures of cost against life expectancy (click to see). This has the NHS at 17th. Despite the NHS telling us what wonderful value for money they are.

The OECD produce Health care systems: efficiency and policy settings (click here). The UK is Group 6, defined  as: “Mostly public insurance. Health care is mainly provided by a heavily regulated public system, with strict gate-keeping, little decentralisation and a tight spending limit imposed via the budget process.” Within this group the ratings are: High DEA Score: Norway, Italy. Above Average: Poland. Average: New Zealand. Below Average: UK. Low: Hungary, Ireland. So even amongst like systems the NHS performs badly.  The OECD’s analysis of the NHS: “The quantity and quality of health care services (in the UK) remain lower than the OECD average while compensation levels are higher. Reinforcing competitive pressures on providers could help mitigate price pressures, e.g. by increasing user choice further and reforming compensation systems.” Not good.

There is a website called QualityWatch which has internationally comparative graphs for a whole range of medical metrics (click here). These show up just how badly the NHS performs in many areas.

So it’s not looking good for the NHS. What are its problems?:

1. Government ownership and control. Everything that the state does it does badly. State organisations do not have to look after their customers, so they don’t. They don’t have to be efficient and make a profit, so they don’t. Compare that with the free market where an organisation has to be efficient and has to look after its customers, otherwise it goes bust. So it is hardly surprising that the world’s best health services are largely privately run. They can still provide universal care free at the point of use. They are just much better at it.
2. Immense monolithic organisation. The NHS is the world’s 5th biggest organisation with 1.7 million employees, up from 1.5 million in 2010, as the Conservatives have thrown money at it. The US Department of Defence, Chinese Army, Walmart and McDonalds are the only bigger organisations on the planet. This makes it pretty unmanagable. When the NHS was first formed the Conservatives were going to implement a far better structure had they won the 1945 election (learn about it here). But Labour won and imposed a centralised Marxist structure so as to increase their control over people.
3. Waiting lists. The flow of customers and the availability of service are obviously in balance, otherwise the lists would get longer. So the existence of lists is purely, 100% bad management. Other health services don’t have them, or only have a minimal wait. People’s condition get worse whilst they are waiting, some of them die, many are in severe discomfort. This is Marxism at work, the organisation comes first and dictates to the masses. There is no beginning of a concept of customer service.
4. Poor diagnostics. If you are pregnant then you are OK, but for many other conditions the NHS just will not find it, or will give up after trying a bit. The cynical might say that they don’t have to pay to treat things that they haven’t found. The result is a culture where instead of treating conditions they treat symptoms. Proof of the poor diagnostics is the immense regional variation, which can be seen in the NHS’s own Atlas of Variation (click here to see it). Why do commissioners in one locality commission over four times the number of audiology assessments per head of population than commissioners in another?
5. Medical incompetence. The NHS spends nearly a quarter of its budget not on healthcare but on compensation for negligence and on lawyers handling claims against it. £26.1bn out of £113bn. (Click here for article). This is one of the very worst performances of any health service in the world.
6. Attitude. Because it is a Marxist organisation, because there is no market competition and because it is free at the point of use the NHS behaves as if everything they do for you is a favour, a result of their generosity. But in reality you have paid for the service, you are a customer and you should be treated like one. They work for you, but you would never think so.
7. Inefficiency. Some people in the NHS work genuinely hard, but spend any time in any NHS institution and you will see a lot of tea and gossip culture and a lot of people doing non jobs with incredibly low levels of productivity. This is because the trade unions rule the roost, because of inept management and because there is no compunction to look after customers.
8. Excess “management”. Except they aren’t really management, they are administrators, counting the metaphorical paperclips. And a huge amount of the NHS budget is wasted on them. The number of NHS managers in England rose by 37 % between 1997 and 2010, they consume more than 15% of the NHS budget, a high figure by international comparison (click). And remember they don’t have to make a profit or look after customers, they just have to spend money.
9. Lack of patient choice. You are the customer, you have paid for the service, yet the NHS dictates to you in a way that you would not tolerate from any other provider of services. Eye care and dentistry have been semi privatised, mostly even taken out of the state insurance element. And look how vastly superior the customer care and choice is. When they have to compete for your custom they suddenly become a whole lot better.
10. Health care rationing. Your GP decides whether you can see a consultant, the consultant decides whether you will be properly investigated and then if you will be treated. The pushy middle class win out by browbeating till they get what they want. The NHS uses the cheapest drugs possible and only upgrade you to something better if that doesn’t work. Without rationing we would not be able to run the NHS as it currently is. So we don’t treat all those who need it or to give everyone the best treatment.
11. Abuse of the system by patients, partly because it is “free”. When I was young a woman we knew was stuffing her pillows with prescription cotton wool. Two thirds of people attending hospital A&E should not be there (click). More than a million A&E admissions each year (up to 35% of the total) are alcohol related. The NHS does tattoo removal, breast enhancement, fertility treatment and homeopathy. It shouldn’t. People not turning up for appointments costs nearly £1Bn per annum. Most NHS patients are there because of self inflicted conditions; obesity, smoking, bad diet, alcohol and drug abuse. By 2011 25% of our population was obese which causes a wide range of medical conditions, from diabetes (10% of NHS spending), through heart disease to varicose veins and joint failure. Yet the whole monolith does not systematically try to fix this, they are too busy trying to treat symptoms.

And so it goes on. The NHS is fundamentally, structurally broken, it looks after its patients badly compared with other, similar, services in other countries. The main problem is its state run, monolithic, Marxist structure. It needs to be broken down into large numbers of independent, competing providers giving true customer care, choice and quality of provision. Until that happens it will always be crap.