Before I came to bed last night, I read my emails and was delighted to see that Worcestershire County Council had replied in detail to the points that I raised with them concerning the circumstances of the missed direct debit payment that the County Council were trying to reclaim seven months after the event. The letter contained a full and unreserved apology and agreed with the points made in my letter of where procedures had gone awry. The very welcome news was that although I had made one payment of one sixth of the missing direct debit, under the circumstances they were going to cancel the remaining five months of repayment. The sums involved are not large but are welcome given that I am trying to keep my finances under tight control at the moment. Given the conciliatory tone of the letter, I immediately sent off a reply thanking them for their prompt action to remedy an evident mistake and, at the same time, also sent off letters of thanks to the district and the county councillors who had intervened on my behalf. This is how things are supposed to work, of course, but I wonder how often there is actually a favourable outcome. I suppose the moral of this story is always to complain but politely and in a tone that reflects sorrow rather than anger to get the redress that is needed.
We have awoken this morning to the Trump imposed tariff barriers to be applied to steel and aluminium products on a universal basis and the EU is reacting with the anticipated tit-for-tat retaliatory sanctions. Here in the UK the government have decided (wisely) not to take immediate retaliatory action as the overall trade balance of the UK and the USA is in an approximate balance and the UK is hopeful of concluding a rapid renegotiation of a trade agreement with the USA. This is probably quite sensible but it is calculated that tariffs like this will have a 2%-3% impact over about five years, assuming no further tariffs are erected, of course. The Trump approach in these matters is to raise a tariff, hope for a change in policy in the country to whom it is applied and then to remove the increased tariff if the country complies. But there is quite a hot trade war between USA and Canada at the moment, not helped by the fact that Trump keeps repeating his claim that Canada should become the 51st state of the USA (which is never going to happen, of course) The world's attention, of course, is how Trump is going to play Putin in the ceasefire proposals for the Ukraine. Having a military advantage, the Russians are bound to play for time, and I expect that Putin will get the better of Trump and not the other way around.
The young Asian carer came around whilst I went off to do my weekly shopping at Aldi. This week, I tried to make into a 'light' week and thought hard about the items that I actually need for the next week instead of 'like to have' So I got home in plenty of time to get the shopping unpacked and to view the mid-day news. But dramatic news broke in the middle of the morning that the whole of NHS England - the administrative arm of the NHS- is to be scrapped with the sacking of 13,000 staff (which might have included my own son were it not for the fact that he is himself retiring in about three weeks time) NHS England was set up by Andrew Lansley, a Conservative minister, the idea being that there should be an 'arms length' body which was to manage the NHS so that politicians could not interfere. This sounds laudable but in practice the NHS is huge and takes a fair amount of management (but far less than would be the case of a privatised health system such as in the USA where the bureaucracy associated with the insurance companies) is huge. The justification for this centralisation is to 'avoid unnecessary duplication' and to 'bring back democratic control' but it does imply that politicians can now be so much more interventionist over issues close to their hearts such as waiting times. The frustration of politicians can be understood up to a point as trying to effect change in the NHS is rather like steering a massive oil tanker. It is said older oil tankers can take more than two miles to stop. The biggest tanker in the world, the Knock Nevis, weighs 564,763 tonnes, can carry 4m barrels of oil and takes three miles to stop. You could lay the Eiffel Tower down on the deck and still have room for Nelson’s Column, and it is so unwieldy that it is now laid up in Dubai. Ships like the Knock Nevis date from the 1970s and their technology is as crude as their cargo. So an order can be issued but it seems to take an eternity to put into effect Now the effect of the reforms is to remove all of the personnel from the ship and to attempt to steer and sail it with the attention of a few senior officers on the bridge (or, in other words, the Department of Health!) So, I can perceive that the costs of reorganisation could be huge (redundancy payments) and the inefficiencies tremendous (as the centre cannot know everything) so we may end up min a worse situation than before. The Integrated Care Boards' and the Hospital Trusts have just been told to cut their costs by 50% which sounds as though the American anti-hero, Elon Musk, has suddenly taken over. One doubts whether a change of this magnitude has been sufficiently thought through but it does mean that if the NHS goes 'belly up' in 2-3 years time i.e. just before the next election, then it is the politicians who have to carry the can as they have no one else to blame but themselves. There is also ma wider agenda at play here which is to radically reduce the cost of the state in a whole variety of functions because, put crudely, we have run out of money and to not want to tax more or to borrow.
© Mike Hart [2025]