speed cameras everywhere

thugs out of control in most cities

who the fuck voted for these wankers?

hope u r all happy

i didnt vote for speed cameras or thugs

That's what I was going to say.

The NHS is not crap, it just cannot, and will never ever be able to, cope as well as a very expensive privately run for-profit health care service.

We pay a modest sum each week/month and get treated "free" whenever we need it.
There's nothing crap about that.

I'm emigrating soon and I'm shitting myself about healthcare. I just hope I don't get sick for the next 30 odd years.

The speed camera thing? Good idea gone completely wrong. Road safety elbowed out by revenue colection.
There's nothing more sobering and valuable, from a road safety perspective, than having to sit in the back of a police car being lectured to and blowing up a breathalyser bag.
I don't know about anybody else but the whole experience slows me down everywhere and I find myself, especially if I've recently heard the words, "we'll let this one go this time sir but please try to take it easy in future", feeling all warm and fuzzy towards the police for goodness sake!

Getting flashed by a camera just makes me go faster in the places where I know no cameras exist.

Finally, I didn't vote for thugs or cameras but I did vote for Tony Blair (twice) and feel betrayal in a way that I cannot begin to describe. He's made me more cynical than I could ever have imagined becoming and he's made me leave the Labour Party after almost 30 years.

having been caught by speed cameras twice last year i hate the bloddy things but speed does kill and i am more concious of my speed now so i suppose they are no bad thing ... really On both occasions i should have known better but now i am trying to avoid a third time i get cross when it is difficult to work out just what bloddy speed zone you are in and it is unfair that you can get 'done' by the same camera half a dozen times before the first summons is sent


schools tend to reflect the society around them but bussing poor kids to schools in rich areas will piss off middle class parents who are paying mega mortgages so it probably won't happen. (or has it happened already.. i must keep up)


as for the nhs.

my husband and my mum have both had cataract operations this year. I don't know how they do it at our local hospital but the service is bloddy fantastic! The doctor did complain that because they had reached their targets already, for the year, Alberr could have a long wait for his second op but that threat didn't materialise and he now has two lovely new eyes. I took my mum for her check up on friday. I dropped her off outside the eye department just before her appointment was due and by the time i parked the car and went to find her she had already been seen!



does this make me feel warm and fuzzy towards tony


nope but i am pleased that we still have an NHS.

At present the NHS cannot cope with the sheer amount of people who want/need to use it.Its being streched to its limits,as a result standards of staff and care, are dropping.Anyone who chooses to not burden it by going private are welcolme too.The only trouble is that the private sector take experienced staff away from the NHS.

There is a lot thats crap about it. The standard of service is not good enough at present.The ethos of a totally free health service,payed for through national insurance contributions, is a right and just way for a country to look affter its population and must remain,but the current way that it is implemented must be improved on.

Just save the money up you would have paid in contributions towards the NHS in Britain and use it for private health care.Its a double edged sword.You'll find private care in the US much better than standard NHS treatment,but will you have to have saved enough to cover the medical costs by the time you need to use the service? Alternatively join one of the excellent health insurance schemes in the US.Pay the same into one of those ,as you currently do into the national insurane scheme and you'll won't have to many worries.


Yes, but you do condome social policies that neuter powers of the police, law, and courts, with directly breeds an eviroment in which 'thugs' control our streets.

So, do you reckon the 90 days custody without charge rule could replace ASBOs, KLF? Perhaps the MPs would change their minds if you put it to them as thoughtfully as you have here... What a spiffing idea!

trouble with private health insurance, it's alright all the time you are healthy enough to work to pay for it

actually it isn't all right but that's another story.



klf, that last post of your was total crap.

An example of the many ways the KLF talks out of his ass:

Just save the money up you would have paid in contributions towards the NHS in Britain and use it for private health care.Its a double edged sword.You'll find private care in the US much better than standard NHS treatment,but will you have to have saved enough to cover the medical costs by the time you need to use the service? Alternatively join one of the excellent health insurance schemes in the US. Pay the same into one of those ,as you currently do into the national insurane scheme and you'll won't have to many worries.


Stupid, ignorant, uninformed. We have 60 million people in the United States with NO HEALTH INSURANCE. Who cannot afford to pay into the wildly overpriced/insanely inefficient private health plans? Few can afford to buy into a health plan on their own. Even with employers paying into it, it's very expensive, you still have to wait (less doctors every day). As a work benefit, it gets a little worse all the time, you get less coverage each cycle and employers don't want to contribute any more and nothing gets cheaper. Martyn is right, people here are terrified of getting ill. Never mind catastrophic illness, a good bout of the flu can break the bank. Did I mention the flu? Because it's more lucrative for the pharmaceutical comanies to sell you the flu medicine (Tamiflu) than the vaccine, we are in the middle of flu season with a massive shortage of vaccine. Catastrophic illness? We have one of the worst cancer survival rates in the world, because many people cannot afford proper care. Cuba has a better infant mortality rate than the United States.

You have no idea how bad things will get if you lose your national health care. Health insurance SCHEME is the right word, it's a scheme to take our money and give us nothing.

Until you wrote this you were sounding slightly misguided yet sane.

The standard and quality of service provided under the state funded NHS to which those in work make a contribution is excellent. Compare and contrast what we have to that available in Turkmenistan for instance.

Following on from what Beryl said, my mother too has recently had the second of her cataracts treated. She's nearly 80. In times past the operations would not even have been contemplated because her age would have been seen as a reason to withhold the necessary funding. As technology advances so more conditions become treatable. Thus, just as you point out, more people want/need to avail themselves of the service.

More money is put in to provide the services and research throws up more improvements in technique and procedure.
Right now Blair is seeking a way to end the cycle, pull the plug or draw a line, whatever you want to call it. A true socialist would be seeking ways in which to divert the BILLIONS being spent on war and a new nuclear arsenal into improving the NHS.
Some bloke wrote a line about that in a song once, I think.


I do not condone policies which neuter the ability of the police to do their job. I totally disagree with policies which place into the hands of unelected people the power to imprsion without trial or charge members of the public ie Me.
I've noticed a gradual breakdown in the social structure of the UK in which there is almost nothing of which anybody is ashamed of doing. "Law abiding" people regulary get shit faced and have to be carried home after a session but since the police are unwilling to employ existing laws designed to counter such anti social behaviour the problem is unlikely to deminish. The introduction of still more laws will do little or nothing to discourage those who already flout the laws we have nor will the police be any more inclined than they already are to get involved.
Thugs controling the streets? That must be in another country.

I hate to contribute any attention to this kind of nonsense thread, but I have to say, people in the UK are regularly shocked when I explain that no, there is no safety net if you don't have health insurance in the UK, and yes, people go without the care they need all the time. They become homeless due to medical bills. And so on.

Where only moments before they may have been moaning about the NHS being crap, soon they are saying "maybe we don't have it so bad...."

I've been both a patient and employee in the US system and in the NHS. One fo the few things I hate to leave behind in Britain is the NHS. Yes, it drives me mad sometimes, it's far from perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have in the US. Actually, that may be the understatement of my lifetime.

Martyn, where you emigrating to? Good luck...

Re "The NHS is not crap, it just cannot, and will never ever be able to, cope as well as a very expensive privately run for-profit health care service."

I don't actually think the funding is the major problem, as far as I can see the UK is spending ever higher percentages of GDP on its health industry, and certainly up there with many other Western Nations, and yet the service the end punters get is crap, I really don't think its lack of cash going in

Rather I think it's the way its run, the way it's centrally organised, process change is being forced from the top down by multi billion pound failing projects, and the agents of change are not satisfactory, the only impact end customers get into the change process is the terribly ineffective complaints process. What the NHS needs is not people at the top trying to impose improvements from the top down, but rather the ability of the end consumers to directly and simply take their custom elsewhere. If the end consumers could take their custom to their favourite choice of location, time of waiting and appointment, and service level, you can be sure natural selection would take over and force change. The worst hospitals would shut, the better ones would get more patients, you would be able to see consultants in more patient friendly hours, your appointments wouldn't go missing in the post.

It is this end consumer power that forces all the other industries in the country to keep on their toes that is missing from the NHS. They think they are something better and they know better than the customers, well they don't and they are not.

For 99.9 % of elective stuff the power should be with the customer to take his health spend where he wants.

None of this means loosing the "free at point of need" ethos.

The NHS is a national disgrace, and all the corrupt statistics in the world cannot hide the fact that hospitals are dirty, guilty of massive waits, and wasteful of resources.

Drive standards up by giving the punters buying power.

Punters changing how they spend is a far faster and more powerful force for change than trying to manage the NHS top down.

Re "speed does kill" no it doesn't, and the masses of money spent of this propaganda are massive wastes of public funds too. Crap driving kills, and frankly bad road design kills more people than the majority doing 40 in a 30 speed limit where safe to do so will ever do. The engineers who have in the last few years designed some of the terribly dangerous unsafe road junctions and features should be in court. Don't just blame the drivers. Suggest you have a look around abd.org.uk

Speed cameras are a diversion of where road safety messages should be aimed. Most pedestrian deaths have drunk pedestrians, a campaign highlighting how dangerous roads are for pedestrians when the pedestrian has been drinking is long overdue. As is a better more coordinated set of road signs, road markings and signs could be much simpler and more intuitive, having to read 50 millions signs in the space of 10 feet is no way to produce good road safety.

Thugs are everywhere, I think this is in part because we have lost a lot of the sense. We should not let someone out on bail after they have just kicked the shit out of someone. It would be cheaper to bring back station masters to many unmanned stations than continue with ever more cameras etc.

Stop all this naby pamby community service crap, cut their benefits, keep them locked up, and take the kids off the parents. Social cohesion is going to break down because we are very close to the law abiding majority fighting back, they are currently squeezed into a corner with nowhere to go.

In the old days the local adult males would feel justified in intervening to stop some young thugs fighting, nowadays you are more likely to end up being arrested than they thugs if you do this.

And yes Blair and his mates and their social engineering are to blame.

If you are born in a bad council estate you are now completely fucked, in the old days you at least having a small chance of finding a good teacher or two, scraping into university (with a grant), and escaping. Nowadays you are just fucked.

Re "The standard and quality of service provided under the state funded NHS to which those in work make a contribution is excellent" no IT IS NOT. Goodness gracious me you really should get out more and see the terrible service people are routinely subjected to, the cynical way the lists are manipulated. This is a joke.

Re "Thugs controling the streets? That must be in another country." nope its large parts of the UK I am afraid. Currently I am in a city centre flat, and the city is full of yobs, and the few coppers have no chance of keeping order tonight, I know I've seen better than any documentary out of the window the last few weeks.

Please everyone try and improve the world a little!

You meant US didn't you dearest?



Tinman, Maria and I are going to live in her home town in the NW United States of America. There are at least half a dozen things I could name that are a national disgrace in the UK but our health service, depsite the way it's been buggered about with and very nearly dismantled by the Thatch, is not one of them.

Every now and again the press will get hold of a story about somebody who, for a whole bunch of reasons, has ended up being treated appallingly by an individual, or a department, or by the whole NHS system, but that doesn't mean that the system, the idea and the way it operates in 2005 is entirely crap. It really isn't
In the last three years my dad has had his life saved by the NHS, twice!, my mother has had her sight restored and my partner, with a lifetimes experience of the US system can find little to complain about at all.
All hospitals are not dirty either. I suppose a lot of them might be cleaner if the work was done by properly paid employees of the NHS instead of the slaves owned by private cleaning contractors.
There was good deal of crap talked last year during the MRSA thing. Something to do with staff not washing their hands or wearing gloves. My Dad was in intensive care around that time and when we visited there were notices on the doors asking people to use the alcohol gel hand wash stuff on entering and before leaving the ward.
It became clear after just a couple of days that it wasn't the staff who were jeopardising the lives of the patients, it was the friends and family members who almost without exception read the notices and decided that it "Doesn't apply to me"!


And this, unless I'm getting completely the wrong end of the stick, is bonkers...



How long would the waiting list be for a particular procedure if everybody in the country decided they all wanted it done at one place where some government published list pronounced that it had the best results in the the UK?



Fine, but it may well mean that waiting lists in certain areas grow to ridiculous lengths at which point some agency would have to be created to sort out the mess and people would be directed to places at which their treatment would be carried out. Which is what happens now only without a mess and without an extra agency.

Re your points about speed, road design, cameras. Agree.

According to Solihull council the illegal parking of cars, ie: Cars parked on or near to bends and junctions or even opposite each other, normally regarded as dangerous and worthy of interest from the boys in blue, should be regarded as a kind of unofficial traffic calming measure. This was an explanation given in response to a council employees complaint on the in-house web site about illegal parking on certain roads in and around Solihull.

Also This organisation recently described motorcyclists as child killers. They didn't distinguish between one type of biker or another, we're all child killers and that's that. They also call us motorbikers. Probably because the person who put the site together can't spell cyclist. It's BIKER or Motorcyclist you twonk! Who the fuck says Motorbiker?

I digress.



Usually drunk I expect. This will of course change when the pubs are open for even longer. But the yobs wouldn't be causing trouble if the police were to arrest them and put them through the courts. Whatever happened to drunk and disorderly?
These days it seems like the police will allow pretty much anything so long as it doesn't get too nasty and doesn't go on too long.
Fall out of the pub, swear at a few passers-by, puke in the street, get a cab, you're done. You're out of the way. Out of sight out of mind, no paper work to fill in blah di blah di blah. Only next weekend the same things going to happen. Nice.

I think I'm just getting old.
It's a sort of late onset morality rearing its head.
Very odd.

yes it does.

You are more likely to kill a pedestrian driving at 40mph than 30mph.

Specifically, if you hit a pedestrian while driving at 20 mph, the pedestrian has a 95% chance of survival.

If you hit an adult pedestrian while driving at 30mph, the survival chance is 80%. But if you hit a pedestrian while driving at 40mph, the pedestrian's chances of dying rises to 90%. (this lowers to 80% for a child).

The law of physics dictate that the higher the speed at impact, the more energy must be rapidly absorbed by hard metal, soft flesh and brittle bone.

however speed cameras are probably a tax raising cop out and they certainly aren't the sole answer to safer roads.

i read an article the other day that said there is a theory that the reason more women are being prosecuted is because in the'olden days' they used to chat up the policeman and get let off

I know what you're saying Beryl and your stats are undoubtedly correct. But, and there is certainly a degree of hair splitting here but I feel the argumant has some merit, it is not speed that kills, it is the inappropriate use of speed by irresponsible, inconsiderate people that does.

I can only back up my argument by pointing out that every weekend around the world thousands of people speed on motorcycles and in cars for sporting and entertianment purposes. It is very rare that these people are killed. However, occasionally they make a mistake or something unforseen occurs which results in a crash and then, due to the very high speeds at which they are travelling, there is a high probability that they might be killed.

Driving at 40 mph in a car on a housing estate or along a high street is patently stupid especially if it's done at 3:30 in the afternoon. Getting prosecuted for doing 80 on a motorway at three thirty in the morning is silly too.

At least with a police patrol vehicle being operated by experienced traffic cops you have a reasonable chance of discussing the matter and possibly avoiding the loss of tlicence and livelihood. A speed camera is such a blunt instrument and on this at least the police and I are in agreement.

Back on the subject of healthcare: I mentioned Turkmenistan earlier.
Take a look at these articles. Then thank your lucky stars that you live in the UK or even the USA!

Inside Turkmenistan

Grim reality of Turkmen healthcare.

Of course Turkmenistan isn't unique in this respect. You could easily go on to list dozens of countries in which healthcare is appalling. It's just such a bizarre anomalous example in 21st century europe. But each time we have to wait more than half an hour to be seen by a doctor or each time we baulk at the cost of a prescription we should think about how it might be were we to live there.

I'm going to let you into a secret

It does not cost anymore to run a health industry with short waits than it does one with long lists, if both systems actually treat people

Long waits in the NHS are just a way of avoiding treating a percentage of the patients alltogether, many leave the country (foreign students etc), many give up waiting and go private, many die before ever getting the treatment they deserve

The long waits (often twice or three time the official published waiting times) are just a mechanism for avoiding treating as many people as possible

All I can say Martyn is that most of the people I know are being let down badly by the NHS, old gent dying of prostrate cancer - no treatment, young girl with trigger finger needs a minor op been put off treatment repeatedly, young male potential skin cancer forced to go priate after prolonged wait, referrals are now been made to nurses or physios so there is a wait before the wait for consultant or treatment, many ops being carried out by partially qualified folk who would never be allowed to practise on their own in another western country or private hospital here

It is a FUCKING disgrace

sounds like we may agree on the speed nonsense, I am afriad concentrating the road safety spend on "speed kills" messages has been counter productive, has not had any impact on casulties, and ignores the real major causes of accidents (if you look at the real science)

Schools still crap too, cannot see why any decent teacher would want to take a job in an inner city or council estate school nowadays, they have no support at all

Please stop defending an appauling NHS, get out there and have a look, see for yourself how crap it is

re "How long would the waiting list be for a particular procedure if everybody in the country decided they all wanted it done at one place where some government published list pronounced that it had the best results in the the UK?

Fine, but it may well mean that waiting lists in certain areas grow to ridiculous lengths at which point some agency would have to be created to sort out the mess and people would be directed to places at which their treatment would be carried out. Which is what happens now only without a mess and without an extra agency.
"

Dont agree, mostly free market forces will act to put treatment in place if they are rewarded with cheque for doing so, occassionally it will fail, you may have a run on telly tubby toys one christmas or similar, but on the whole giving the customer the power to spend his money where he wants forces the providers to react to the preferences of the customers

speed, like drink driving, is just one aspect of road safety. it may not be the major killer but it still matters! speed cameras may be a pain in the arse and possibly counter productive but speeding is still wrong!

i just don't want speeding to be seen as a victimless crime. that's all. I am worried that the campaigns by the daily mail et Al will make that seem so, and make people think it is ok as long as they are not being photographed!

speaking as we find with the NHS we are very happy but i am very worried about dentistry!

Yes but the heavy spend on the "speed kills" message is killing people because the money could be better spent on campaigns that actually targetted the real causes of death and injury much better

Speeding as a crime, well if we had the limits imposed by qualified advanced drivers, rather than useless politicians I may agree, politicians should set the framework and leave the detail to advanced drivers

Road engineers and their consultancy companies are manipulaing the public sector and using it to generate work for road thinning schemes etc, it is just another bandwagon

Many speed limits imposed in the last few years are unrealistically low, as would be confirmed by any qualified impartial bystander

I actually know one police force appealed against a 70 limit being dropped to 40, they lost, but they were right it was and is complete nonsense, I am afraid senior coppers now just tow the politically correct line

And driving is an art not a science, speed but a small part of the picture

And the planners, engineers, and politicians really should take the flak for the poor casualty figures

Indeed forcing new estates to be built with minimal provision for cars is counter productive too, bollocks will people all get the bus, they should plan for the way people ARE not the fantsy land they want people to be

Tinman, after a v bad experience with the nhs, lets just say uneccesary major surgery (guess im the minorty there ) i screamed and shouted about the nhs to anyone who would listen, and even to some who didnt want to.
The more people defended the nhs the more angry i got. How the feck could people defend it after what had happened to me. I couldnt understand y people felt compelled to defend this huge institution against little me.
Time has passed now and my head is clearer. The nhs is indeed a good service and in this country,( although i realise everyones experience of healthcare is subjective) ,people do get far better care than in lots of other countries.
I guess sometimes its easy to disregard that that if youve had a bad experience.
Thats not sacrastic btw, tis just saying I get where youre coming from.

unfortunatley mate sometimes you just cant change things. you just have to change how you deal with them.

Yes. If the limit is a mandatory 30 and you're doing 60 you're breaking the law and if caught have no excuse.

But I agree with Tinman that the Speed Kills slogan is misleading and emotive and doesn't help reduce casualties or fatalities.

Any more than the assertion by BRAKE that Motorcyclists are killers.

They've been backtracking on this since MCN kicked up a fuss but at the time of making this inflamatory statement they were completely unable to produce a single shred of evidnce to back up the claim. It was in a press release to kick off a campaign against speeding and to reduce the number of deaths of children and cyclists. It was made to attract attention and it worked. Motorcyclists have always been seen as some kind of reckless band of outlaws. Branding them killers is grist to the mill for those with deep rooted prejudices. But it does nothing to protect children walking to school nor does it help address the problem of bikers who insist on riding like twats in stupid places.

well said, pink.

how to kill a thread - by shay

ill get me coat.

it has a happy ending - im going to uganda innit.

A little over a year ago, I had to have some blood tested -- forget why, NHS doctor thought it was a good idea. Getting the results back took 2 1/2 weeks.

Last week I took my cat to the local vet for an upset tummy. They took some blood and sent it off to the lab. We got the results back two days later.


So… Well. At least the animals of Britain get prompt, efficient test results.

but was the treatment for the cat free at point of thingy

Speeding? just like Beryl I've been caught twice and just like her my own fault, really the camera's are a joke, but I did know the rules.

Thugs? Well Labour has record numbers of those jailed & record numbers of cops and Asbo's well done Labour, the tories cut the number of police.

NHS? both my boys are going to hospital regularly and I am impressed that the NHS has so much time for my kids and we are getting a new hospital. The NHS was underfunded under the tories.

Schools? My boys school has a new building and has good teachers and results, would like more money spent on special needs but the mainstream seems to be working well in Havering. The tories don't care about state schools, Labour does.

Nope. Cost £70 quid.

But so what? Our bloodtests aren't free on the NHS. Just because we don't pay for them when we go to the doctor doesn't mean we're not paying for them. The NHS is not free. That is an illusion and a sort of political pacifier used to keep us from complaining, but take a look at your payslips and you'll see the real story. We pay through our taxes.

Because we pay, regardless of when we pay or how we pay, we have the right to demand that our bloodtests be processed as quickly as an animals is.

End of story.

The real question is, why can't a system in which our money is paid to hospitals and labs via the government be as efficient as a system in which our money is paid to hsopitals and labs via a private health insurance company?

This essentially personifies the way I see most British people respond when asked about the NHS -- pathetically grateful if they're not treated badly. Can you imagine somebody with private healthcare saying, 'Gosh, I'm amazed the hospital had so much time to treat me. They even sutured me up after the surgery! I'll be forever grateful to them for not giving me MRSA.'?

I can't.

Why isn't the NHS better? Why does Britain have a per-person cancer death rate vastly higher than that in the US or France? Why do British people have to die for their healthcare? Why are so many afraid to criticise it? Why is it a taboo subject? Why can patients in Scotland get the latest cancer treatment but those in England cannot? Why do we allow a system in which healthcare is rationed? If it were happening in another nation we'd be screaming bloody murder about it. Yet we sit passively by and click our tongues as another woman says she was denied life-saving medication because her local NHS unit decided it wasn't worth the money to save her life. At least, we console ourselves, it's free.

Freedom's just another word for nothin' less to lose. Nothin' ain't worth nothin', but it's free.

Not just grateful I can see the improvements in the last eight years.

Dentists? 1,000 extra dentists than the Tories provided.

You must surely admit, Mitch, that that's cold comfort to the children of the women with breast cancer currently being denied life-saving medicine because of the price? Surely you're willing to admit there are some fairly serious problems within the NHS, even with the improvements of the last eight years.

Surely you can see that?

Glad to see that you recognise its actually improved, The NHS is such a huge institution that things will go wrong and people turn to it when somethings wrong, such as cancer etc so its not suprising that there are individual sad tales (both my Dad and Nan died in NHS hospitals but their treatment was good and careing) thats understandable.

I have a friend (cancer sufferer) who is still alive thanks to the NHS despite he tells me his treatment costing £250,000 a year. He is a big fan of the NHS and the Labour values that underpin it.

In the same way that bullets do not kill, only the inappropriate use of bullets ?

Sorry to be picky here - and I have no clear view about this particular issue - but the analogy doesn't really hold water (FWIW, I'm pro-gun control). Bullets don't always kill, inappropriate or otherwise. Sometimes they 'just' injure or maime.

I know what you're driving at, though. No pun intended.

At the cost of dentistry effectively being removed from the NHS and put into the private sector. When the new contract for dentists comes in next year many dentists will cease offering free treatment to e.g. children and OAPs because they would have to offer that service to everyone.

"In two years time, anyone who wants to will be able to see an NHS dentist by contacting NHS direct" Tony Blair, Labour Party Conference Sept 1999" Hah!

Of the thousands of extra dentists promised, how many have actually turned up ? Not counting students and those from overseas that turned out not to be qualified etc, like those naughty Labour spinners try to do ?

" We will recruit 1000 new dentists by October 2005 to help ease the problems of NHS dentistry." Rosie Winterton health minister Jan 2005 (At the start of September 2005 450 have been recruited) Hah! and hah.

actually 1,100 in a single year.

Sez who?

Mitch, you might want to articulate your points a little more fully. If you can find the time in between writing Tony Blair's press releases…

To expand on the point(s) about the new NHS Dentists contract:

The new contract will lead to many dentists ceasing to offer free treatment on the NHS. This is not necessarily a bad thing. (* Ducks *). This resonates with some of Mata's points - the current NHS dentistry service is woefully underfunded and the new contract will lock in the underfunding. However, the service provided on the NHS really seems to be targetted at those who neglect their teeth for years and then need lots of remedial treatment to put them right. What I believe most dentists would prefer is that there is a properly funded system providing basic treatments for those that need them (filling, extractions, denture & preventative service for children).

Unfortunately the government is not prepared to provide this proper funding and through its introduction of the new contract is trying to pretend they are providing a service when in fact they are not. Dentists are giving up NHS practice quicker than the governemt can recruit them.

The government can therefore carry on pretending they are providing a comprehensive service that will provide complex treatment to anyone that wants it at low or no cost, and any failure to provide it is down to the nasty greedy dentists. Meanwhile, NHS dentistry will become largely a thing of the past.

Rather than actually listening to health professionals the government is wasting the large amount of cash it says is available and the massive opportunity to actually make a difference. Their focus on waiting lists and other targets blinds them to the actual requirements of the health services and ourselves (patients, not customers)

Coming soon to a dentist near you...

NB: I am not a dentist but I know someone who is!

Yes the NHS is wonderful, and Labour have done so much to improve it

What a lot of bollocks

It is a political nightmare

Policy changes like quicksand


Oh yes she can have the expensive drug because its in the press this week

We will just leave the patient groups that shout much less loudly to die (prostrate cancer etc)

Sham absolute sham

I really dont believe anyone towing the government line has been in an inner city hospital or school recently

The NHS costs me personally a bloody fortune, and my extended family could do a lot better by self insuring ourselves, take all the costly bureaucratic nonsence out of the loop for one thing

And all the people who dont like the private sector may like to remember I would quite possibly be dead if I had not had the money to pay for private treatment, the NHS was quite good at finding reasons not to treat me for extended periods, I could well have gone bankrupt funding my own treatment in this country, this despite massive input into the NHS coffers, I dont see why the NHS should not be refunding me the costs of treatment they couldnt step up to the mark an deliver

Schools are falling to bits in areas I know, oh sorry they are in safe seats - nobody to influence there then

If you think speed kills presumably you think everyone should drive around at 0 mph?

are they NHS and can they squeeze me on their list

no just at spped that is appropriate for the road conditions.

my problem with the the whole speed thing is you get the same penalty if you are driving 5 miles or 30 miles over the limit.

they are now offering people the chance to do a speed kills workshop instead of taking the points.

Yes and no.

People who want to own and potentially use a gun by pointing at another human being are not quite right in the head in my opinion. Unless they are a member of the armed services and are on active duty. And even then...never mind.

Waving a loaded gun around, just having one out and about in public is dangerous and stupid and irresponsible.
But a huge number of us use motor vehicles daily and for the most part have been trained in their use and operation and for the most part follow the rules set out in the highway code. Therefore actually going out in public in a car or on a bike is not in and of itself irresponsible and dangerous. But driving at high speed in a crowded high street with lots of people about is.

i bleeding ate it when youre sticking to the speed in a restricted area and some arse wipe behind keeps beeping and revving their engine.
it happened to me this morning so i got out of peggy and the bloke actually locked his door.
and im only a little dwarf

three times in a week for me, same camera. Dual carriageway that is, as it turns out, a 30 mph road. I always thought it was 40 - I was doing 34, 37 and 37 respectively. As you may know, you only get two cracks of the whip in your first two years of driving, so I had my licence revoked. I am in the middle of my ban and had to re-apply for my provisional licence, re-take my theory test, and take my practical next week. Plus, the points stay on my licence for two years, so one more unwitting violation in the next two years and I can look forward to the automatic 6 month ban. The fact that this has jeopardised my career and made it impossible to to transport my child to school apparently matters not a whit. Nor does the fact that I was not actually driving dangerously or putting pedestrians at risk - the road is part of the inner ring road in Leicester and does not particularly attract pedestrians.

This has cost me almost £200 quid in fines, plus the cost of my licence, the tests, all the train fares (it currently costs me £13 per day to get to work, not to mention the three hour round-trip commute)...I reckon I'm out of pocket by at least £400.

All three offences happened within a week, and the first notice didn't drop through the letterbox till all the offences had been committed. So I had no opportunity to modify my driving. If cameras are meant to act as a deterrent, how does that work, then?

Has it made me more aware of speed limits? Oh yeah. I had about 6/8 weeks of driving after the notices came through, but before my licence was actually revoked. In that time I was totally paranoid. I was obsessively checking speed limits all the time. This has not had a positive impact on my driving safety - in fact, it has made me less focused on other hazards on the road as I constantly check what the speed limit is, whether it's changed, etc. It's a distraction from being able to pay attention to the constantly changing traffic.

I don't approve of speeding or wholesale disregard of limits that are clearly in place for a good reason. But the punishments for even the most minor infringements are so completely draconian at the moment that they actually take perfectly sensible and law-abiding drivers, criminalise them, and turn them against a government which purports to be acting in everyone's interest.

I can.

I was in America recently and spent a fair bit of time with my grandmother, who was dying. She paid her medical insurance all her life, yet when she died we were in the process of getting a social worker to act as her advocate when dealing with her insurance company, to argue that it wasn't a matter of luxury - she really NEEDED home carers, and a hospital bed downstairs, so that she could be cared for properly and not develop very nasty secondary medical conditions - not to mention the simple issue of her being as comfortable as possible which, at 96 years old, she bloody well deserved. She could no longer get upstairs and was incontinent, but her insurance company would've happily seen her stuck in the same reclining chair 24 hours a day, virtually impossible to clean or to move and developing bedsores and god only knows what else.

That's private healthcare. It's profit-driven, and anything you get from them, even the most essential care, is grudging at best.

well if u want to be emotive about it let me reming me the NHS gives care very grudenly indeed

if you ever get it

at least u have some buying power with an insurance company, and you can damage their reputation in the market, and in some small way contribite to others going elsewhere

with the nhs u are stuck with crap service if u ever get treatment at all

that's rubbish, I'm afraid. Check out the American HMO system - t's mini-monopolies. No choice, just crap care, like it or lump it.

I'm not being deliberately emotive, I'm simply sharing my very recent experience of the great privatised healthcare system. Anyone who thinks they'd get a better deal if the UK went private is deluding themselves.

I have just about the best health care program in the United States (UAW based, only elected officials - WHO GET FREE HEALTH CARE FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES - get better). For blood tests that would determine whether or not I need heart surgery, not frivolous hypochondriac testing mind you, 4 weeks wait time for results, $350 out of my pocket. And I'm getting off easy.

My asthma medication would cost me approx. $280 for an Advair disc. I couldn't afford my emergency inhaler, I'd have to go on crap OTC stuff.

For the second year in a row, there isn't enough vaccination for americans. I found a doctor who had a sign on his window saying he had it, I pulled over, ran in and got one. He's out now, and my girlfriend with a two year old can't get it for her or for her son. The pharmaceutical industry (with their poster boy Bill Frist as speaker of the friggin House) has determined they will make more money selling Tamiflu than vaccination.

Oh yeah, you really want private health care.

(I don't need heart surgery. )

Having worked in the UK Health Service on and off for many (many) years and moaned about it from both a worker and a punter's point of view, I have now jumped ship in NZ and now I appreciate just how fantastic the NHS is as a concept.

My first ever day in work was an NHS strike day. I was a 19 yr old girl (with a job? in the 80s? in Sheffield? never?) and a hulking great Brighouse Miner sat on the bonnet of my clapped out mini and shouted "scab" at me! I squeaked back that it was my first day at work and I had to go in before I could join the Union! Maybe if the powers that be had listened to COHSE then and to others many times since, the NHS wouldn't be in the state it is in. They woz warned!

With friends working in hospitals all over the world I hear heartbreaking stories of patients coming in to A&E feigning asthma attacks just to get inhalers free for their friends and family. They can't afford to visit the GP or buy the drugs.

Without even starting on speed cameras .. may I suggest that the money currently being pumped into the UK Defence Budget (which the UK now appears to share with Mr Bush) should be diverted elsewhere? Wouldn't this help the NHS get back on their feet (or at least back on their knees - at the moment they're prostrate on the floor) and avoid the need for the police to boost their coffers with ridiculous speeding fines for people driving at 5 mph over the limit. And what about the fire service maybe there would be a little money left over for them? Please!

End of rant! Honest!

Tinman -

I think you, and this surprises me greatly, are being way too pollyanna-ish in this statement.

no vacine in uk either this year

nhs is not going to improve by spending more money on it, its already fairly clear they are amazingly good at finding ways to waste money, search on "granger" and "nhs it" for a start, many billions of quid on nhs IT largely being wasted

surprized you dont think NZ health service is better in practise, when I was out there I found it a million percent better than anything in the NHS

LET THE RANTING BEGIN...

Speeding In 23 years I've done a lot of driving on a lot of different roads and having seen some of carnage and being involved in some very near misses I've developed a view that speeding is as socially unacceptable as drink driving. To cite one example; a friend of a friend was pushing one of her children in a buggy along a narrow pavement in one of my local villages when the wing mirror of a car travelling at somewhere between 35 and 40 mph clipped her shattering her elbow. The driver (who she'd recognised as one of her neighbours) didn't stop and later claimed that this was because she didn't realise she had been in a collision. Despite causing GBH (or at least ABH) by dangerous driving her only punishment was a fine and a few points for the speeding she admitted.



I have to say I struggle to sympathise with someone who has been caught speeding three times in one week on the same stretch of road. It's not so many years ago that someone using the above reasoning with a ban for drink driving would have perhaps received a sympathetic hearing from his or her peers but thankfully times have changed. It might sound a bit harsh but if you don't know the rules of the road you're driving on then perhaps you shouldn't be on it.

Speed Cameras Having said all that I think Speed Cameras are widely misused to generate revenue and in some places are downright dangerous. I regularly drive on a stretch of the A1 between Jct. 10 and the Black Cat round a bout where there are numerous varying speed restrictions and an abundance of cameras. I stick in the slow lane and watch with trepidation the game of Russian roulette that goes on beside me as tailgating cars coming off the A1(M) at 70mph break heavily at the speed signs or cameras. I've seen a few bumps and scrapes but thankfully nothing horrible yet.

Not like the other day on the foggy M1 but that's a speeding story to gruesome to tell.