As a lifelong supporter of public service broadcasting in general and of the BBC in particular, I am finding it increasingly difficult to justify my loyalty given the corporation’s declining level of news output. It was Brexit that really made me question what the BBC was all about, as it allowed free rein to the liars of Vote Leave and Leave EU, without questioning either the narrative nor the motives of those concerned. People say that if the BBC is attracting the ire of both left and right, well, it must be doing something right (I suppose I should say ‘correct’ rather than right), but the right has nothing to fear from the tame and docile corporation which has tilted a long way to the right in recent times.
Today, we learn that a record number of people are off work due to chronic illness. The current figure is an astonishing 2.58 million people, a figure that has risen by 449,000 since the start of the pandemic in January 2020. Between April and June of this year, some 26,000 people joined the list. The BBC Radio 4 breakfast programme Today reported these figures completely without context, allowing the usual suspects to chime-in with inevitable jibes about lazy benefit claimants and – yes, you guessed it – calling for A CRACKDOWN (my capitals). But the context is, or should be, clear to even the most lowly journalist and it’s largely twofold.
Firstly, we are living, or at least we hope we are, in the post-Covid world, post in the sense that hopefully less people are dying of it than there were during the height of the pandemic, but people are still catching it and, in some cases, getting very ill. Then, there’s so-called Long Covid, about which we so far no little, other than to say it has affected many thousands of people. Indeed, science hasn’t yet come up with answers to how Covid, which in one form or another is never going to go away, will be regarded in the years ahead. So, that’s one part of it. Then there’s the NHS.
There are now a record 7.6 million people on NHS waiting lists, many of whom will be getting iller and sadly closer to death. Some will be unable to work because of physical conditions requiring action, including surgery. Add to the pile woefully inefficient local health centres, like mine, and woefully underfunded hospital facilities and you have a prescription for disaster, not just regarding people’s health but the economic good of the country. I doubt that everyone on an NHS waiting list is keen to stay on it in order to avoid work, particularly since social security benefits are so miserly. They’d much rather be treated. Wouldn’t you? But the BBC’s prime radio news programme allowed the humble listener to make up her or his mind. This isn’t impartiality; it’s incompetence. Or is it?
Now let’s look at some evidence of how the NHS has fallen since the Conservatives were elected to power in 2010:
It was ranked the fairest, most efficient and cost-effective healthcare system in the world and had its highest-ever public approval rating. Today, it’s falling apart. Lack of integration, lack of funding and far too much political interference and uncoordinated private intervention. For some reason, none of this was addressed on today’s Today.
There’s a clear message here. If you want a healthy workforce and a healthy society, you need a healthy NHS. Today we have none of these things and that’s why we need journalists, particularly those who work in public service broadcasting to do their jobs.
Since Brexit, our country has suffered acute labour shortages in numerous areas. You would have thought, would you not, that one way of filling vacancies might just be to treat the sick so they are actually physically capable of working which many of the 7.6 million will not be. Invest in people’s health in order to invest in the economy. It’s not exactly rocket science, is it? The trouble is, this lot want everything on the cheap and when it comes to health that doesn’t work. Not that Sunak and co care when they have to do is announce another meaningless CRACKDOWN which will do nothing but look good on the front page of the Daily Mail.
