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Quack Michael Moore has mad view of the NHS
The fourth estate has always had a bad name, but it seems to be getting worse. Journalism should be an honest and useful trade, and often still is. But now that journalism has more power than ever before, it seems to have become ever more disreputable. In recent years it has been brought lower and lower by kiss-and-tell betrayals, by “reality” TV, by shockumentaries and by liars, fantasists, hucksters and geeks of every kind, crowing and denouncing and emoting in a hideous new version of Bunyan’s Vanity Fair.
Outstanding among these is Michael Moore, the American documentary maker. He specialises in searing indictments, such as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine, and has, without a doubt, a genius for it. Although his films are crude, manipulative and one-sided, he is idolised by millions of Americans and Europeans, widely seen as some sort of redneck Mr Valiant-for-truth.
Nothing could be further from the truth. His latest documentary, Sicko, was released in cinemas last week. Millions of people will see it and all too many of them will be misled.
Sicko, like all Moore’s films, is about an important and emotive subject – healthcare. He contrasts the harsh and exclusive system in the US with the European ideal of universal socialised medicine, equal and free for all, and tries to demonstrate that one is wrong and the other is right. So far, so good; there are cases to be made.
Unfortunately Sicko is a dishonest film. That is not only my opinion. It is the opinion of Professor Lord Robert Winston, the consultant and advocate of the NHS. When asked on BBC Radio 4 whether he recognised the NHS as portrayed in this film, Winston replied: “No, I didn’t. Most of it was filmed at my hospital [the Hammersmith in west London], which is a very good hospital but doesn’t represent what the NHS is like.”
I didn’t recognise it either, from years of visiting NHS hospitals. Moore painted a rose-tinted vision of spotless wards, impeccable treatment, happy patients who laugh away any suggestion of waiting in casualty, and a glamorous young GP who combines his devotion to his patients with a salary of £100,000, a house worth £1m and two cars. All this, and for free.
This, along with an even rosier portrait of the French welfare system, is what Moore says the state can and should provide. You would never guess from Sicko that the NHS is in deep trouble, mired in scandal and incompetence, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.
While there are good doctors and nurses and treatments in the NHS, there is so much that is inadequate or bad that it is dishonest to represent it as the envy of the world and a perfect blueprint for national healthcare. It isn’t.
GPs’ salaries – used by Moore as evidence that a state-run system does not necessarily mean low wages – is highly controversial; their huge pay rise has coincided with a loss of home visits, a serious problem in getting GP appointments and continuing very low pay for nurses and cleaners.
At least 20 NHS trusts have even worse problems with the hospital-acquired infection clostridium difficile, not least the trust in Kent where 90 people died of C diff in a scandal reported recently.
Many hospitals are in crisis. Money shortages, bad management, excesses of bureaucrats and deadly Whitehall micromanagement mean they have to skimp on what matters most.
Overfilling the beds is dangerous to patients, in hygiene and in recovery times, but it goes on widely. Millions are wasted on expensive agency nurses because NHS nurses are abandoning the profession in droves. Only days ago, the 2007 nurse of the year publicly resigned in despair at the health service. There is a dangerous shortage of midwives since so many have left, and giving birth on the NHS can be a shocking experience.
Meanwhile thousands of young hospital doctors, under a daft new employment scheme, were sent randomly around the country, pretty much regardless of their qualifications or wishes. As foreign doctors are recruited from Third World countries, hundreds of the best-qualified British doctors have been left unemployed. Several have emigrated.
As for consultants, the men in Whitehall didn’t believe what they said about the hours they worked, beyond their duties, and issued new contracts forcing them to work less. You could hardly make it up.
None of these problems mean we should abandon the idea of a universal shared system of healthcare. It’s clear we would not want the American model, even if it isn’t quite as bad as portrayed by Moore. It’s clear our British private medical insurance provision is a rip-off. I believe we should as a society share burdens of ill health and its treatment. The only question is how best to do that and it seems to me the state-run, micromanaged NHS has failed to answer it.
By ignoring these problems, and similar ones in France’s even more generous and expensive health service, Moore is lying about the answer to that question. I wonder whether the grotesquely fat film-maker is aware of the delicious irony that in our state-run system, the government and the NHS have been having serious public discussion about the necessity of refusing to treat people who are extremely obese.
One can only wonder why Sicko is so dishonestly biased. It must be partly down to Moore’s personal vainglory; he has cast himself as a high priest of righteous indignation, the people’s prophet, and he has an almost religious following. He’s a sort of docu-evangelist, dressed like a parody of the American man of the people, with jutting jaw, infantile questions and aggressively aligned baseball cap.
However, behind the pleasures of righteous indignation for him and his audience, there is something more sinister. There’s money in indignation, big money. It is just one of the many extreme sensations that are lucrative for journalists to whip up, along with prurience, disgust and envy. Michael Moore is not Mr Valiant-for-truth. He is Mr Worldly-wiseman, laughing behind his hand at all the gawping suckers in Vanity Fair. Don’t go to his show.
The Sunday Times | Wednesday, November 28, 2007 | Comments (0)
Are men really necessary? Good question
Are men really necessary? Nagging doubts seem to be getting more vociferous, not least among men. Last week there was a great deal of fluttering among the cockerels in the hen house about the proposal to remove the requirement to consider the “need for a father” when deciding whether to offer IVF fertility treatment. This is part of ministerial efforts to make it easier for homosexual couples to have test-tube babies.
If the government is to be evenhanded, it ought to remove the requirement for IVF clinics to consider the “need for a mother” as well, since a gay male couple would not provide one, except biologically. In these confused times, the search for both logic and equality is far from consistent.
Be that as it may, all that MPs are required to do so far is vote to abandon the “need for a father” idea in IVF clinics. This has caused outrage. Angry letters were written to The Times. The Archbishop of York protested that the proposed legislation was designed to remove the father from the heart of the family; Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor said it was profoundly wrong and that Catholics should oppose it, and Iain Duncan Smith went further: it would “drive the last nail”, he said, “in the coffin of the traditional family”.
All this has coincided with a powerful portrait of a group of women living almost entirely without men, or traditional families, in considerable difficulties and managing very well. Mrs Gaskell’s novel Cranford was broadcast last weekend by the BBC to general acclaim. There is hardly a man in it and the brave lone ladies help each other. This was fiction but it does raise the same awkward question: are men necessary?
For nearly 30 years we have seen a subtle but increasing onslaught against masculinity. From the female separatism of the 1970s, when I went to feminist meetings that were open to “women and girl children only”, to the feminisation of the classroom and exams and the widespread use of the word testosterone as a term of blame and abuse, men and boys have come to understand that they are increasingly seen as hairy, smelly, lazy, disruptive, violent and generally rather a bad thing. Women regularly blame their difficulties on men and expect them to make reparation. They increasingly tolerate men only if they take on domestic chores and childcare. Meanwhile, women are beginning to feel truly independent of men, at least financially. It is hardly surprising that men increasingly feel dispensable.
However, that is no reason for seeing lesbian couples and their children as the beginning of the end of family life. Nor is it a rejection of men. Anyone who knows any lesbian parents knows they are usually keen on family life, keen to be accepted into the normal world of parenthood and to welcome men into it, too. They just don’t welcome men into their beds.
Lesbian women who go through the misery of IVF treatment to have a baby, and who make the commitment of marriage as well, are people who by definition want to start a family. They support family life and they want to be part of the ordinary family-friendly world. It may not be traditional family life, but it is closer to it than the behaviour of an irresponsible straight girl who gets pregnant the quick and easy way without thought of providing a companion to help her bring up her child and then relies on state handouts. It is those girls who are aggressively banging nails into the coffin of family life, not the tiny number of thoughtful lesbians.
No, lesbian IVF seekers do not undermine family life. What they do, innocently, and like the lone females soldiering on in Cranford, is undermine men’s idea of themselves; they contribute to a longstanding and general attrition of the power of the male. A man would have to be cocksure indeed not to feel dismayed by the increasing numbers of straight women who don’t appear to need men at all.
There are plenty of boys at the bottom of the social heap who know that no girl worth having will take them on, just as there are many nervous husbands in the middle classes who feel they may soon prove extra to their wives’ requirements. Highflying hedge-fund queens or sensible girls from sink estates: plenty of women are smart enough to work out that in some circumstances a man is a liability. Other women, straight or gay, may be more dependable in the business of getting through life. This is the anxiety that Duncan Smith is expressing.
From a time when women needed – or depended – on men too much, we have quickly reached a stage of overreaction in which all too many women imagine they need men very little. As always the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The answer to overdependency is not separatism. It is proper recognition, of men and of ourselves.
I loathe the word celebration, as it is now used, but what we need, I believe, is a celebration of men and masculinity. If feminism is running according to the usual historical rules, we will probably get one: a backlash is overdue. Men have wonderful qualities which women often lack and need. Men are much more likely than women to be of exceptionally high – and exceptionally low – intelligence; they are on average stronger, funnier and have a better three-dimensional sense and they are usually better at techy things. They are much more likely to be architects, composers, mathematicians, joke tellers and orators and are more inventive. As Camille Paglia once said, if civilisation had been left to women, we’d still be living in grass huts.
However, men are not mostly as good at bringing up small children, according to research from Bristol University published last week. Little boys brought up by stay-at-home dads are less likely to do well at school than other children and the absence of the mother may do emotional damage. Researchers warned that couples should beware of swapping traditional roles.
This is a moment for serious revaluation of men. The women at Cranford managed, despite the lack of men, and so did my mother, who was widowed with four tiny children, and others like her. But it is at great cost and a great loss – and to the children, too. What we need is the rehabilitation of real masculinity, because that is something most of us do need and like.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 25, 2007 | Comments (1)
To understand Brits, watch the rugby
Spectator sports leave me cold, especially on television. Perhaps, in my case, it is because I am one of those egomaniacs who enjoy only the things they can do themselves. I positively resent the 2012 Olympics being held in London. So at the beginning of this period of rugbymania I had been hoping to ignore it altogether.
I did manage to know nothing whatsoever about the group matches, as I am told they are called. But then my husband accepted an invitation to dinner with close friends who have a state-of-the-art television set, to watch the France v England match eight days ago. Even then I thought that I could probably take a book or read the newspaper during the game itself. But my family told me that would be the height of bad manners and I would have to see the whole thing through.
It wasn’t too much of a hardship among good friends, with good wine. But I hardly know the rules of rugby, or of football either, so it was rather mysterious at first. However, I quickly found, against my habits and my prejudices, that I was beginning to take a faint interest. I did once have a very handsome blue-eyed boyfriend who was a rugby blue, so perhaps some blasts from the past were fanning the flickers of my attention. It was thrilling to see how those enormous über-masculine young men could be so savage with each other and yet so docile with the referee.
Rugby certainly does not look as beautiful as football and the France-England game was strikingly rough and tough – as one of the commentators said later, “it was not a pretty game” – but the energy and determination of our boys – yes, our boys – was really touching. Even before it started, my heart really did pound when our side – yes, our side – sang the national anthem and I realised I really wanted them to win, although I was told the French were the much better side and ought to succeed.
Even I could see that was true. The French were faster, neater and more elegant. But the English won through dogged, unyielding courage – through what we call bottle and think of as a great national virtue.
That’s how it seemed to me and I realised I was extremely proud of them and proud of England. I had been drawn by pure social convention into something that was actually a shared national event and if it reawakened a sense of national solidarity in me, presumably that is what it is doing for every other Englishman and woman, of all descriptions, who watched it. I also felt very sorry for the French and thought for a bit of all the things I admire about France. I realised I was actually very much looking forward to the final last night.
This has all been quite confusing. Not only have I been bored, previously, by spectator sport; I have also been very suspicious of the mass mania that surrounds it, particularly football.
At the time of the football frenzy in 2002, I happened to read a newly published book called Defying Hitler, written in 1939 by Sebastian Haffner, a young German intellectual. He was, with extraordinary foresight, trying to describe the cultural history and cultural conditions that made Hitler possible, so to speak.
Apart from a cultured minority class, Haffner wrote, the Germans’ capacity for individual life and private happiness was somehow limited and underdeveloped. “The great danger of German life,” he wrote, “has always been emptiness and boredom . . . with it comes a yearning through ‘salvation’ through alcohol, superstition or, best of all, through a vast overpowering, cheap mass intoxication.” This longing for mass intoxication, he wrote, soon expressed itself in an obsession with sport that overtook Germany.
The parallels with Britain today, I thought when I read Haffner, are striking. British – and English – youth today is notoriously easily bored, easily distracted and unable to entertain itself – easy prey for the forces of mass commercial entertainment and its bogus excitements. The drunken hooliganism that surrounds England football fans is notorious around the world.
Rugby is, after all, another form of football and I have always vaguely assumed that the rabble-rousing call of one must be much the same as the other. So far from being a unifying force for national solidarity and national pride, I assumed that the national obsessions with both association football and rugby football were potentially very dangerous. The drunken hooliganism and casual violence of football fans bring to mind the marauding gangs of the brownshirts in the early Nazi period.
So I felt rather ambivalent about the waves of patriotism sweeping over me while watching a game that I can barely understand. It’s a game that is hugely more violent than football – surely it is hardly less likely than football to inspire drunken hooliganism. But so it seems. People say it’s a class matter; for historical reasons there is something essentially middle class and respectable about rugby, about the players and about the fans. There’s an odd contradiction about the way the more violent game can produce the less violent supporters and vice versa.
Whatever the reasons, it seems to me now, after watching last night, that rugby, oddly enough, is a force for national solidarity. At a time when we complain about the fissiparation of society, the tragic mistakes of multiculturalism and the breaking of the subtle ties that bind us, when there are few heroes around to unite us, there are few truly national events that draw us together, in millions, in real time, around a television set in a spirit of what one can only call patriotism.
This is not something you can teach in municipal Britishness lessons or examine in immigration tests. It’s not something that the cynical Gordon Brown can impose on us in his determination to stay in power; if anything it will strengthen us against the blandishments and manipulations of politicians. It is something spontaneous that brings us – even me and others who may be resistant at first – together with our friends and neighbours, and people of all generations, and reminds us of what we have in common.
And so long as it doesn’t draw us out into the streets, looking for a policeman to glass, it is, win or lose, a force for good.
The Sunday Times | Wednesday, November 21, 2007 | Comments (0)
Middle classes are Labour’s whipping boy
‘It’s the same the whole world over: it’s the poor what gets the blame.” In new Labour Britain, the poor still get a rough deal but it’s increasingly the middle classes what gets the blame.
Those who doubt me should have listened to “Red” Dawn Primarolo on Radio 4’s Today programme last Tuesday. She was challenged again and again about Labour’s 24-hour licensing laws. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has just produced a report on public health which points out that the policy isn’t working. Far from creating a continental cafe culture, the availability of alcohol has been disastrous.
City centres, and even market towns, are filled with young binge drinkers ululating, urinating, fornicating and throwing up. Lord Krebs, the main author of the report, describes a street in central Oxford as Vomit Alley – disgusting and dangerous.
Yet Primarolo’s only response to all this new mayhem among the young was to ignore them and to point a finger of blame instead at the middle-aged middle classes. They appear to be the only people whose behaviour alarms her; young people, she claims, are getting the government’s messages.
But as for the middle-aged middle classes – dear, oh dear. They will persist in heavy drinking and, what’s worse, in the secrecy of their own homes. That’s where the risk of “serious harm” is “dramatically increasing”, according to Primarolo. As for the Vomit Alley challenge, repeated by the interviewer, she became distinctly irritable. “Frankly,” she said in her infuriatingly bossy way, “that’s not the point.”
There are those who insist on clinging to the view – the view of the Nuffield report, in fact – that young people drinking heavily and lurching drunkenly round the streets at night, getting into trouble, wasting police time, creating no-go areas and making life miserable for everyone else, is very much the point. But Primarolo brushes them aside. All that concerns her is the one group of people that doesn’t cause trouble of this kind – older people who stay at home and may drink a little more than Primarolo might, in her scientific ignorance, think fit.
Perhaps one shouldn’t expect much of this uninspiring woman; it was Primarolo, as paymaster-general, who presided over the disastrous administration of Gordon Brown’s tax credits, to general distress among the poor. All the same, a strong protest must be made. Primarolo’s silly response is an emblem of something much more serious about contemporary politics.
Those despised, middle-aged middle classes may indeed be getting a bit squiffy, or indeed sozzled, on their sofas. They may be pickling their internal organs faster than they used to. But at least they aren’t upsetting anyone else or breaking the law. On the contrary, in their sober moments they are the backbone of the country. They are the ones who have produced this country’s wealth, pay for its welfare and uphold its laws. And in any case, what possible business can it be of the government’s to interfere in their private pleasures in their private homes?
It ought to be the default position of any civilised government in a freedom-loving country that what people do in private, so long as it harms nobody else and is within the law, is their own affair. Yet the Labour government’s default position, embodied by Primarolo, is the opposite.
Ministers seem to have not the slightest idea of what freedom is. They regard it as normal for Whitehall to have its nose in all our business, from the fridge to the rubbish bin, from the bathroom to the bedroom. So it’s consistent that Primarolo thinks that she should do something drastic about our quiet bourgeois tipples in the sedate comfort of our homes.
All this comes from a simple desire for statist control with which we have become all too familiar and something you might expect from someone who used to be Red, but now new Labour Pink, Dawn. However, underlying it is perhaps something more complex – a nasty, unthinking combination of class hatred and pleasure hatred. This strikes me as more Brownite than Blairite.
The class hatred element has to do with blaming the middle classes whenever possible, no matter how absurd that might be. This is partly due to a desire to show that they are no different from and certainly no better than anybody else when it comes to wife beating, incest, child abuse, crime and so on. This struck me forcibly when the official word went out in the 1980s that nits like clean hair. That was code for the idea that middle-class children have nits just like poorer children. In fact they prefer respectably clean little kiddies – and infestations have nothing to do with poverty and poor hygiene. It was nonsense, of course, and disinformation at that.
The same applies to alcohol abuse. Just because some middle-class middle-aged adults hit the bottle a little hard in the twilight of their productive days, they must be just like the rat-arsed young bingers who drink themselves senseless. In fact, being middle class they are rather worse.
The minister might point out that heavy drinking is not merely a personal matter; it makes people ill and will sooner or later cost the National Health Service a lot of money; that makes it of genuine public concern.
However, it is far from clear what heavy drinking is, what damage it does and to whom. Anyone following the government’s frequent pieces of advice on this (and all other health matters) must feel thoroughly confused. It emerged recently that government figures for safe weekly drinking levels for adults were plucked from the air, in default of any scientific evidence. What’s more, it is becoming ever clearer that individuals respond differently to all drugs, including alcohol, so it’s impossible for anyone, even for Pink Dawn, to say what is an acceptable level for everyone.
None of that will stop the government killjoys trying to dream up ways to stop the middle classes enjoying a tincture at home. There has always been in the Labour party a punitive puritanism. Pleasure and self-indulgence must be prevented, particularly among the middle classes and the middle aged, to punish them for their other privileges. They should know better than to want to have fun. They must be stopped and if they can’t be stopped they must at least be blamed.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 18, 2007 | Comments (0)
Let’s stop pretending all faiths are equal
Following the national news can be bad for the blood pressure. According to a press leak, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) - Labour’s favourite think tank and one which has the ear of power - is to publish a report saying Christmas should be downgraded to improve race relations.
In the interests of “evenhandedness”, the report says, and “if we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas - it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life, even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too”. Presumably that means marking them equally, because “we can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one”.
This all sounds familiar, of course. We have become used to absurd stories of British Christmases being renamed Winterval, or children’s carols being stopped for fear of offending minorities - many of them true. We all know that the Christian Tony Blair and most top politicians send “season’s greetings” instead of Christmas cards. It is unabashed, yet guilt-ridden, decadent multiculturalism.
Sure enough, Ben Rogers and Rick Muir, the authors, do indeed call on the government to launch an “urgent and upfront campaign” to promote “a multicultural understanding of Britishness”. They rehearse the old arguments: different communities should not be expected to integrate but should be allowed to maintain their own cultures and identities; immigrants should learn some English and something of British culture, “if - but only if - the settled population is willing to open up national institutions and practices to newcomers and give a more inclusive cast to national narratives and symbols”.
Meanwhile, national ceremonies, civic oaths, parliament and the monarchy must be recast in a more multi-religious or secular form. Parents should be made to attend a public state ritual of citizenship for their new babies when registering their birth; “parents, their friends and family and the state [would] agree to work in partnership to support and bring up their child”. Presumably this would include an undertaking not to celebrate Christmas “inappropriately or exclusively”.
How the heart sinks. One can imagine a municipal babyfest, under a large portrait of a grinning Gordon Brown, in which social workers stand in for aunts and godparents and the parents swear to oaths they secretly resent; I wonder what would happen to refuseniks. What I want, passionately, is for the state to keep away from my children and let me decide for my family what to do about Christmas (or indeed Eid or Sukkot or Diwali). I don’t want the state interfering with ancient customs, expunging Christmas or punging something else in its place. What I want is to escape the clutches of the multiculturalist zealots.
I was beginning to think this country had recovered from its disastrous obsession with multiculturalism. All kinds of race relations pundits have recently changed their minds about multiculturalism and come to realise that an insistence on difference weakens the ties that bind a diverse society. It isolates people and makes them less willing to cooperate with - or pay benefits for - people they perceive as aggressively other. These new revisionists have finally understood that it was dangerous for the host culture to feel belittled and exploited by multiculturalist supremacists.
Trevor Phillips, head of the new equality quango, famously said that we were sleepwalking to apartheid. Even Brown keeps trying to manipulate our shared Britishness, if only in his own political interest. However, the tired old donkey of multiculturalism refuses to lie down and die. This irrepressible ass is still alive, in the person of the IPPR, and kicking the government. The question is, why?
One of the answers must lie in confusion - in the confusion most of us seem to feel about religion, culture, human rights and respect. There are a lot of internal contradictions and confusions in that list; the liberal western point of view, as expressed by Cherie Blair in her Chatham House lecture last week, is riven with contradiction. She appeared to be making the courageous point that religion and culture should not be used as excuses for denying people - that is, women - their universal human right to equality.
I feel that just as strongly as she feels it. Religions and cultures that deny women basic equality, or exploit and abuse them, are, as far as I am concerned, a bad thing. I don’t feel the slightest obligation to respect them or to allow them to bring their practices into this country. However, the problem for Cherie Blair, not least during the visit here of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, is that in the western liberal agenda we are supposed to offer equal respect and equal rights to all cultures and all religions, and to people’s universal right to live according to them and to practise their faiths as they understand them. But you simply can’t. You can either have universal human rights, or you can have the universal human right to ignore them for cultural or religious reasons - not both.
If a culture or a religion does not share Cherie Blair’s absolute belief in universal human rights, then how can she respect it? And, for that matter, why should she expect them to respect her opposing beliefs? She spoke on Radio 4 of honouring people’s religious beliefs, when freely adopted, but why? Incidentally, as for Islam being freely adopted, a large proportion of young British Muslims think that the penalty for abandoning the faith should be death. There is not a great deal of freedom in Islam which, after all, means submission.
My point is not particularly to criticise Islam. It is rather to criticise this long-standing liberal article of faith that all religions are equal, equally deserving of respect, and believers should be equally free to practise them. In truth, nobody believes that - whether Muslim, gentile, Hindu, Jew, wiccan or heathen. Nor in terms of Christian and post-Christian British culture is it true. We have been misled culturally by trying to pretend it is true and we have damaged our society in the process. The IPPR and Christmas deniers are still being misled and are trying to mislead the rest of us. “Bah, humbug!” as Scrooge would have said.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 04, 2007 | Comments (0)
