Another voice
The National Health
Auberon Waugh
I followed Mr Crosland's agony from a hospital bed in another part of the country. Obviously, this is no time to institute one of those enjoyable public debates which spring up whenever Mr Foot goes to hospital to have his bottom attended to, or Mrs Castle has some minor surgical adjustment about whose nature we can only guess. The tragedy of a Foreign Secretary being struck down in his prime attended night and day by his beautiful grief-stricken wife, overshadows any mean speculation about whether the small room where the drama was enacted had been supplied by the State, or whether, in extremis, the choice had been made to enter the Labour statesman into a National Health hospital (the Radcliffe Infirmary)asa private patient. But the thought crossed my mind that Mr Crosland might have been lucky not to be struck down, as a National Health patient, in Someret.
Somerset, I should explain, is at the centre of the West Country retirement gulag archipelago. Elderly couples descend on it from every, part of the kingdom, but chiefly from the West Midlands, to build their quaint retirement bungalows (always, by local government edict, in the centre of existing villages) and devote the remainder of their lives to quiet hedonRm, and the cultivation of a meaningful relationship with their budgerigars. Sydney Smith described the village of Combe Florey, where I live and where he was rector, as 'a kind of healthy grave,' but things have got worse since his day. No sooner has the last plaster duck been pinned on the wall, no sooner is the budgerigar safely chin uping in its cage than illness strikes.
Where the womenfolk are concerned, it may come in a hundred different forms, all distressing and all to be discussed at enormous length wherever women gather together. But the men nearly always seem to be stricken in the same place, which they choose to call their waterworks. Every hospital in Somerset is crammed with retired gentlemen from the West Midlands nursing defective waterworks. The consequence of this is that anybody who falls ill in Somerset is proportionately less likely to find a hospital bed available, unless he is prepared to wait so long that old age will probably bring about an impairment of his urinary function and make him indistinguishable from the other patients.
So far as I know there is only one statutory priority among patients in the National Health Service, although there are countless discretionary ones. It is not enjoyed by Cabinet Ministers, as one might suppose, or even by important officials of NUPE or any of the Health Service unions, but by dis
abled ex-servicemen receiving treatment for the consequences of their wounds. Needless to say, this is the category into which I fall. I have a nineteen-year-old bullet hole in my back, an exit wound from a machine gun whose mechanism I imperfectly understood as a soldier in Cyprus, which lay dormant for seventeen years but started erupting from a cavity in the chest wall two years ago (It is amazing how easily one falls into the Somerset way of describing one's ailments to all and sundry.)
Last year, by a discreet brandishing of my National Health status, I achieved admittance to the chest unit of the Westminster Hospital, where much of the original surgery had been done. However, on my arrival there, [found that my surgeon had died some time ago and the unit was now largely devoted to fancy open-heart operations, which I did not particularly want. This is one of the prestige showpieces of our poor, battered National Health Service, rather like Accra Airport or, in its time, Holland Park Comprehensive. But despite the most marvellous equipment and the most beautiful, efficient nurses, the surgery didn't work and this time I decided to take my place among the elderly prostatic patients of Taunton.
It is a daunting sight to see rows and rows of old men sitting up in bed nursing their waterworks. Each has a little jar or plastic bag attached to him by a tube which he is happy to show to you and serves as a talking point, like the coffee-table book laid out in a Knightsbridge drawing room. They are a stoical, good-natured crowd, and I think detect a hidden note of elation, as if they are aware of all the people queuing up for the beds they triumphantly occupy.
It would be invidious and unjust (as well as imprudent) to hold up Taunton as an example of the collapsing Health Service, even if a comparison between Taunton and the Westminster Hospital does remind one irresistibly of the mud huts and shanty towns next door to the glittering public edifices of Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast. In fact, the operating theatre is clean and reasonably well equipped, the nurses are kindly and efficient, if over-worked, and the whole machine manages to tick over very well, despite under-staffing.
But I am reminded of the pressures on the Health Service the day after my operation, a fairly minor affair involving the removal of a piece of rib and curetting of the infected cavity behind it. Within fourteen hours of coming round from the anaesthetic, I am told that I am to be discharged. An hour later, my bed is made up for its next occupant. Three hours later, still bleeding copiously from the wound in my back but in no great distress, I am taken home and the next waterworks victim moves in.
At the Westminster Hospital, I was kept in luxury for a week after an even smaller operation but Westminster, as I say, is a showpiece. Close scrutiny of conditions' Taunton confirms my view that the National Health Service is bound to collapse before very long, however gallant the efforts now being made to keep it going. This is a development which I personally regard with some sorrow, partly because I happen to enjoy operations, partly because it is the only way I have yet discovered of reclaiming some of the prodigious sums I pay in income tax.
Why must this agreeable English institution be allowed to wither and die, and who is to blame, apart from the clownish Dr Bernard Donoughue? Once again, [tend to place the blame fair and square on the power of the trade unions, responsible, as it undoubtedly is, for the collapse of investment, of industrial competitiveness and, ultimately, of the currency and national economy. The terrifying thing about the unions is to see so much power go hand in hand with so much stupidity. Not all unionists are stupid, of course. A reasonable proportion think they wish to see the end of the capitalist system and are happy to bring it about. This attitude is less the product of stupidity than of distorted perception, an illness for which one would normally recommend a spell in bed with a bottle of nasty physic if one did not ruefully have to accept that this is just how Russia treats its non-Communists. But I don't think that many active trade unionists seriously wish to see the Health Service collapse, and the pressure they bring to preserve it—by increasing public expenditure—has all the intelligence of the pressure of bath water on a bath plug to escape. The stupidity of the unions is just bearable if we are allowed to point it out from time to time in small circulation magazines of minority appeal like the Spectator, whose readers can have a quiet chuckle to themselves. But even this may soon be forbidden. The TUC is now considering a report from its conference on the media, at which demands were made for a commission with power to monitor and censor all news and views about the trade union movement, as well as proposals for a trade union newspaper (does anybody--groan—remember the Daily Herald'?) to be financed by a levy on advertisements in all other newspapers and maga inIt is the senseless counter-productivitY of these demands which impresses me even more than their nastiness. On the face of it, the idea of a standing commission with power to redress any imbalance in news and commentary is a grotesquely comical one. But it is all part of a joke which is going to cost us the National Health Service, as well as any prospect of enjoying the 1976 burgundy harvest. Game as 1 am for a giggle in most circumstances, it is one I could happily be denied at present.
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