Having had family members who have had appalling and sometimes lethal experiences with Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) and personal experiences with the NHS that range from good to utterly appalling it’s fair to say that I’m not the NHS’s greatest cheerleader. For the record I have no moral, ethical or political problem with having a comprehensive healthcare service for Britons but the more I look at how the NHS is structured and managed the more I believe that there are better alternatives to the NHS model that could be used instead. We in Britain have been landed with a state run, state controlled and overly politicised healthcare system that has a ‘soviet’ flavour and which has lasted long long after the Soviet Union itself, with all it’s state control of everything including healthcare, has been confined to the history books.
The NHS is a mess and Britons just seem to accept that as just another aspect of a country itself that is a mess. Nearly everyone I talk to seems to have some sort of NHS horror story. Sometimes these horror stories are pretty mild and are about minor annoyances with the sclerotic bureaucracy of the NHS or the rude staff whilst other stories are much much worse and involve Britons being killed or medically damaged by poor NHS treatment.
The sort of problems that the NHS has and the problems that the NHS inflicts on those who use it are now so common and so widespread that even the deaths of hundreds possibly thousands of newborn babies in a hospital barely raises much of a ripple in the media. A good case in point to illustrate how common and everyday major NHS scandals have become can be seen in the goings on in Nottinghamshire. The maternity section of Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust has for years had an appalling record where staggering levels of incompetence is implicated in the deaths of hundreds and maybe even thousands of babies yet this is not big news in the mainstream media.
Part of the reason in my opinion for the lack of coverage of stories like this is because they are now all too common. NHS scandals whether they be ones involving newborn babies or older people or the NHS’s failure to properly deal with dangerous mental health patients are now so routine that they have little of the sort of shock value that make journalists sit up and take notice. When I started doing media work decades ago I was told how to assess what makes a good story that will grab the attention of readers. ‘If it bleeds it leads’ was the rather cynical but accurate assessment of what to highlight to get eyes on the page. The problem with the NHS is that there’s now so much metaphorical bleeding and so many tragedies created by NHS staff incompetence that the bleeding is no longer unusual enough to be news. NHS deaths due to NHS failures are now running at such a high rate, alleged to be about 14,000 per year, that they just commonplace occurrences now and therefore not anything so unusual that might be worth the media remarking on. I
According to Hugo Timms writing in Spiked Magazine the scandal of unnecessary and avoidable baby deaths at Nottinghamshire hospitals has got so bad that the matter has now been referred to the police. Mr Timms said:
“Nottinghamshire Police have opened a corporate-manslaughter investigation into Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) Trust, following the deaths of hundreds of babies at two local hospitals. The number of deaths included in the probe may yet reach the thousands. Police will examine whether the maternity-care programme at the Queen’s Medical Centre and the Nottingham City Hospital had been ‘grossly negligent’, and the extent to which the NUH Trust bears responsibility for these tragic fatalities.”
Just think that that paragraph from Mr Timms really means. It means that a hospital which is part of the so called ‘envy of the world’ that is the NHS has killed via incompetence so many babies over the course of just over a decade, that it became imperative that the police became involved. How many other similar scandals involving the NHS are there which have not seen police involvement but which have been quietly covered up and the victims and relatives of this NHS cruelty and incompetence just paid off? My guess based on what I’ve read about the NHS over the years and what my family and I have experienced of it is that it is probably a lot.
Mr Timms then went on to detail just some of the horrific scandals that have emerged from the NHS over the last few years. These range from the failure to ensure that a violent paranoid schizophrenic took the meds that might have prevented him from murdering three people, the tainted blood affair that saw thousands of people infected and then dying from HIV and other infections. There have also been other maternity disasters such as the one where 200 babies died because the maternity staff were obsessed by a fad for ‘natural birth’ (forgetting that ‘natural birth’ was prior to modern medicine a major factor in infant and maternal death) and of course the Tavistock scandal where confused children where medically and surgically mutilated because of a another fad that of transgenderism.
These and the many other NHS scandals should have forced those who govern us to turn their attention to the NHS and embark on a massive reformation project. Just a fraction of the deaths that the NHS has caused should have made the political classes sit up and take notice of the abject state of Britain’s dysfunctional healthcare system. It is to the great shame of our political classes that this has not happened. Instead they’ve cheered and lauded the crap healthcare system that is killing us, exhorted us to bang pots and pans for a third rate and third world standard of healthcare.
Mr Timms added:
"Yet astonishingly, our leaders don’t merely shrug at these failures – they actively venerate the institution responsible. During the Covid pandemic, Britons were instructed to bang pots from front their doors and balconies to celebrate the NHS. In 2023, on the 75th anniversary of the NHS’s founding, it was honored with sermons of gratitude and a prayer from the then health secretary at Westminster Abbey."
The average Briton can point to a whole host of evidence to show that those who rule over us also hate us. This evidence ranges from the failure to tackle the Islamic Rape Gangs to the mismanagement of the economy and the education systems but the cheering and lauding of a failed healthcare model that no other nation has directly copied must also be included in that evidence. The elites cheer on and praise a healthcare system which has created by its incompetence and complacency a massive death toll and that should tell us a whole lot of what we need to know about how our elites feel about the rest of us.
When I look at the NHS and those who support it and praise it then all I can say is we are not hating either the NHS or its cheerleaders nearly enough. Screw the NHS. It’s time to replace it with something better, something more effective and competent and something that will not kill its own customers.
Links
Original piece by Mr Timms in Spiked
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/05/nottinghams-infant-deaths-scandal-shames-the-nhs/