Sunday, January 18, 2009
The capacity to destroy
When tasked with anything constructive, the EU is displaying a consistent and predictable propensity towards failure. Its positive contribution to the wellbeing of mankind is precisely nil. When it comes to destruction, however, its capacity is unlimited and unparalleled.
An example of this malign capability comes in The Sunday Telegraph today, which headlines a story, "New EU working laws will be disaster for NHS". This is the Working Time Directive and we have already pointed out the effect this will have on the retained fire service. This is much worse.
According to one of Britain's top surgeons, the changes required by the directive to hospital working hours - coming into force this summer – will be "disastrous" for patient care and result in "major service failure".
This is John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons. He makes no bones about it (to coin a phrase). The new rules are "an impending disaster" which will "devastate" medical training because no surgeon will be able to work a shift long enough to gain proper experience.
The multiple handovers of staff needed to comply with the rules will mean that patients do not see the same doctor for more than a few hours. There could be "dangerous" lapses in patient care, especially at night. "With nobody able to work more than 48 hours a week from August, the effects on patient care in the NHS are potentially disastrous," Mr Black says.
He goes on, retailing a litany of woes which all point to the fact that going to hospital will be that much more dangerous than it is already. People are going to die, unnecessarily, sometimes horribly. And the EU will be to blame.
Black is meeting Alan Johnson, the health secretary, in February to propose a "speciality opt-out" and an upper limit on surgeons' hours of 65 to 70 hours a week. "I have no doubt we will be told that it is impossible to alter or bypass the European law. I do not believe this," he says. "All manner of EC law must have been bent or ignored in nationalising a bank in 24 hours. The government can do it if it has the political will."
But what is terrifying is the Orwellian response from Department of Health. Instead of acknowledging a very serious problem, it offers the anodyne statement that, "A few hospitals have implemented the maximum 48 hour week across all rotas. We are monitoring the situation as some smaller specialities and isolated hospitals may find meeting the deadline more challenging."
Never must it be admitted that the EU is tearing our nation apart, much less that it is going to kill people. No, the bureaucrats merely "monitor the situation" and, in due course will find nothing wrong at all – as the rapidly-filling cemeteries offer mute witness to their lies.
COMMENT THREADJust in case you have not seen this
Hamas has already announced that it will not honour the cease-fire but then when did they honour those they had actually signed?"Its leaders are in hiding," Olmert said of Hamas. "Many of its members have been killed. The factories in which its missiles were manufactured have been destroyed. The smuggling routes, through dozens of tunnels, have been bombed. The Hamas's capabilities for conveying weapons within the Gaza Strip have been damaged."
Many things will have to be sorted out. Has Hamas's capabilities been really eroded? How soon will they be able to rebuild them with the help of the inevitable foreign aid, especially from the UN and the EU? Will the Israelis come to an agreement with Egypt and manage to stop the smuggling of arms? Or will the whole process start again in the near future?
COMMENT THREADSaturday, January 17, 2009
Catching up
It is a good thing from my point of view that the boss is always ready to blog and, therefore, there is a flow of high-level information and analysis on EUReferendum whether I have time or (more recently) inclination to take part in the process.
There are numerous postings I need to do. In particular, I have not written about last Sunday's Rally for Peace in Trafalgar Square, which I attended and found very moving. I shall do so. A long piece on Russia is in the works. There are more things going on there than just the gas dispute though that is of some importance. But the boss has covered that, so I need not worry.
And so on, and so on. Above all, I need to make a decision whether to continue with the BrugesGroupBlog and, should I decide against doing so, what route to take as our work evolves.
In the meantime, I have managed to acquire a copy of one of Oriana Fallaci's last books, "The Rage and the Pride" and read it in more or less one sitting. We have written about Signora Fallaci before, in particular when her death was announced. She was a remarkably courageous journalist and the book (185 pages that include a lengthy introduction) is very well worth reading, despite its somewhat operatic style.
Signora Fallaci calls for the West to stand up and defend its truths and values and for Italy, the country she seems to have had a passionate love-hate relationship to live up to its history. I rather think that the second is happening, anyway. Pace Signora Fallaci, Italy's history was always a bit of a mess but as Harry Lime pointed out in "The Third Man", that mess often produced genius. What it did not produce is politicians or other members of the elite one could respect.
As for fighting for the West's real values, we are all in favour of that on this blog. But we are also in favour of defining them and, one could argue, that is what we do a good deal of the time.
One more thing until the boss blogs again. In response to the cartoon I posted a couple of days ago, one of our readers (to whom we are duly grateful) has done a bit of research. He has traced it back to Real Clear Politics and another blog, hitherto unknown to me, The Elder of Ziyon. It would appear that the cartoon was around during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, but was clearly created before that summer.
There is a reference to the cartoon in an article James Lewis wrote on American Thinker, a few days after the London transport bombs. Mostly the piece attacks the inflexible and unreasonable secular religion of the hard left. Well worth reading in itself.
What, you might ask, of the picture above. How does that fit in with anything at all in this posting? It's an illustration from one of the best twentieth century novels, Mikhail Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita". Behemoth, the Devil's attendant cat (whom the Devil finds impossible to control - a familiar idea to all cat-slaves), casually removes people's heads during a performance on the Moscow stage.
There are two novels that can explain the modern world adequately. One is "Master and Margarita" and the other is Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed" or, as it is sometimes known, "The Devils".
Sunday, 18 January 2009
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