I think most of us have some knowledge of the workings of the UK NHS will take some time to absorb the shock announcement yesterday that NHS England (the management 'arm' of the NHS) is being completely abolished or rather some of its functions absorbed into the Department of Health and Social Care. A change of this magnitude would take tens of thousands of words to analyse properly which is not the function of this blog but I am just going to comment upon some of the language, or rather the words, used by politicians and picked up/amplified by the commentators and the media at large. Somewhere in my academic career, and it may even have been a chance comment in one of the lectures I attended in my university days, I was appraised of the fact that certain words are invested with a cultural meaning quite apart from the technical sense in which they can be used and broadly speaking, we can make a distinction between 'hooray' words (which make us feel good and we use approvingly) and 'boo' words (where we wish to convey disapproval) So, in the political sphere, 'democracy' is always an 'hoorah' word and is sometimes appropriated to find a place in the title of the country such as 'People's Democratic Republic of Yemen'. On the other hand, 'fascism' is always a 'boo' word designed to evoke negative feelings as, in the UK, is the word 'bureaucracy' or 'bureaucratic' Now returning to yesterday's announcement about the abolition of NHS England, there were two words that constantly featured on the lips of the politicians. One, of course, was the word 'bureaucratic' which is always used pejoratively (but interestingly enough, in the political science in Spain where we have many contacts the word is used freely, and often, in a purely technical sense to mean the impartial administration of rules by properly appointed officials rather than the arbitrariness of an authoritarian dictator) The other word which was used so freely was 'duplication' often preceded by the adjective 'unnecessary' and this is an evident 'boo' word. But in modern organisations, heavily if not completely reliant upon their computer systems, there is always a 'backup' system or, even better, a 'disaster recovery' plan. But what is a backup system if it is not a duplication of computer records but you never hear the words 'We must get rid of our backup system because it is a duplication' which, of course, it is. So, this word 'duplication' was bandied about yesterday because it is a classic 'boo' word and was used to evoke negative feelings to help justify the NHS reorganisation - evidently the public is so gratified to know that 'unnecessary' or 'wasteful' duplication is now being abolished by ministerial decree. We had the amazing spectacle yesterday of the Tory party, including past Ministers of Health, applauding the actions of the Labour government and you know you must be onto a winner when even the 'Daily Mail' has a headline warmly approving of your actions, which is what we saw. Hardly anybody is asking the really hard question of how a huge and complex beast like the NHS is to be appropriately managed and one does get the feeling that various coordinating and sensible rationalisation of data flows are going to be jettisoned in the months ahead.
Yesterday morning, I had been asked if I could act as the assistant to only care worker to which I readily agreed as I get on very well this particular worker who I know very well and with whom I have often shared a task before - the only downside was the morning call was a 7.00am alarm call which meant an alarm call at 5.00am in the morning. But all went well, and we got Meg up and breakfasted, after which I popped out for a newspaper and then started viewing a Michael Portillo travelogue programme on Portugal (Channel 5) which focused on the city of Braga and looked fantastic. I had previously experimented with the 'Pale Moon' browser which seemed pretty good except that it would not clear the text from my Word Counter app which it should. So I downloaded an alternative and very secure browser by the name of 'Brave' and this imported all of my settings from Microsoft 'Edge' and seems to work like a dream. We lunched on some mackerel which I heated up in the rather novel way of immersing it in a pan of boiling water as the packaging states it could be eaten either hot or cold and I supplemented this with some potato and some sliced runner beans. After lunch, we treated ourself to the 'Question Time' which was first broadcast the evening before and we save for Friday afternoons. I was enjoying this apart from the discussions on the NHS when it was quite evident that members of the audience had no idea what they were talking about, only having their own experience being treated by a clinician in a hospital session. My enjoyment was interrupted, though, by something which is not rare these days of me falling asleep with a cup of coffee in my hand which promptly ends up on the floor. The solution is lashings of cold water, followed by equally copious sheets of kitchen paper and finally finished off with a steel hot water jug which I rinse out with boiling water and then use as a smoothing iron to absorb the excess moisture. But at least we have the rugby to look forward to during the weekend as the Six Nations rugby competition runs out to its conclusion.
As we might have anticipated, the Ukraine conflict is going to take quite a lot of time to resolve. Putin has announced that he is 'broadly in favour' of the ceasefire proposals but has laid down a series of conditions that means it is now up the USA to respond. This is classic playing for time tactics which it is evident that the Russians will deploy as they are making slow but sure military progress and it is in their long term interests to gain or regain as much of their territory as is feasible before a ceasefire comes into effect. If Trump is indeed the skilful negotiator that he claims to be, then no doubt he will be able to fix the problem 'within a day' by deploying his much vaunted skills written about (or should I say ghost written about) in his now infamous book 'The Art of the Deal'.
© Mike Hart [2025]