Another voice
Mr EnnaIs's confession
Auberon Waugh
One can see it as a cruel paradox or as poetic irony, according to taste, that Mr David Ennals, Secretary of State for the Social Services, should be seriously ill in Westminster Hospital with a blood clot at the time when patients in the West Midlands were given leave to apply for orders against him requiring him to fulfil obligations laid doWn in the National Health Act 1977. A blood clot is not something one could wish in charity on anyone, although there are worse ways to go and the Westminster Hospital, as I know from many visits and many months spent there, has the prettiest, kindest and most efficient nurses imaginable, at any rate in its surgical wards. I do not suppose the hospital wing of Wormwood Scrubs will be half so agreeable.
Yet it is hard to see how Mr Ennals can escape this fate if the orders are served on him, especially if they are followed by orders on behalf of the half-million-odd citizens in the long queue — stretching in places like Bournemouth to eight years — for operations on varicose veins, piles and rheumatoid arthritis. The plain truth is that Mr Ennals can't even begin to fulfil his obligations under the Act. The judge may take a more lenient view, even as God will, if he makes a full and frank confession.
A study of two current strikes — at Great Ormond Street hospital for children, and the West London Hospital, Hammersmith— may give some idea of the problems facing this man, whose smugness seemed entirely unassailable until his own blood actually began to curdle and coagulate last week. Westminster Hospital is, of course, one of the great showpieces of the National Health Service, and a normal patient there might receive no inkling of the threat from maintenance electricians, although on my last visit one of the lifts had been out of operation for three months. It is only in the provinces and less favoured London hospitals that one notices the difference between standards now and-standards three years ago, before the Ennals policy of running down staff and refusing to employ trained nurses. Under Ennals the money has not, of course, been saved so much as re-allocated. It is quite normal now for laboratory technicians, whose skills could be mastered by a sixth-former in five lessons, to be paid more than a consultant surgeon, and I have heard cases of hospital porters, without even the doubtful qualification of a maintenance electrician, tak ing home more money than a theatre sister of twelve years' seniority. Great Ormond Street hospital, already suffering from the effects of the electricians' go-slow, called in the police after a series of thefts involving televisions, typewriters and purses. The joint shop stewards' committee demanded that a shop steward should be present during searches, and when this request was refused, accused the police of racial discrimination in that most of the workers searched were black. Now the hospital is threatened with a strike by all its ancillary workers.
It is strange how a word like ancillary can emerge from obscurity to be on everyone's lips within a period of two or three years. It derives, I imagine, from the Latin words ancilla and ancillaris, meaning respectively a female slave or maidservant and pertaining to a female slave or maidservant. From that it came to mean subservient or subordinate. From there, in illiterate usage, it came to mean auxiliary, concomitant. I have once heard it used as a noun, to mean an incidental corollary. Another person thought it might have something to do with the shoeing of horses. It could equally well mean 'thieving', 'idle'; 'ignorant' or 'overpaid', but whatever it means it is plar,tly a word which will strike terror into generations of Englishmen yet unborn. Perhaps they were ancillary workers who closed down London Airport recently in protest against police investigations into pilfering from suitcases.
But I can't help feeling that the workers of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children are being even ancillarier. People may not mind them pinching the odd television set, typewriter or purse — few families of the working class, I have been told, could manage without the taxfree perks of this sort from their places of work — but we do, surely, as a nation, feel very strongly indeed about sick children. If it could be shown that the sick children of Great Ormond Street were exclusively or even predominantly from the middle class, . that might be a different matter. Perhaps it is misleading of the hospital to talk of Sick Children rather than Ailing Kiddies, but we all know that ailing kiddies are what it is all about. On this occasion, the ancillary workers are showing a contempt for public opinion which is truly breathtaking.
But none has expressed this contempt so well as Mrs Mary Nugent, a. cleaning supervisor at the West London Hospital, Hammersmith, now on picket duty while cleaning staff stay away over a clocking-in
dispute. The story was revealed in last Saturday's Daily Mail, photographs of an
expectant father called Richard Bunn being confronted by Mrs Nugent. When told that Mrs Bunn was inside with a Bunn in the oven, Mrs Nugent was reported as reply
mg: 'Why should! apologise? I'm enjoying myself. I've certainly got no regrets for what might happen to the patients. If anyone should worry about them it's the management, not me. They are responsible for anything that may happen. I'm not worrying about the patients — it's not my concern'.
Mrs Nugent may be no more than a humble cleaning supervisor, but I have never heard the principle of workers' power so clearly expressed. The reason for the dispute is that ancillaries object to having to clock in and out of work when the professional and white collar workers don't. Management points out that professional and white collars workers can't claim overtime while the ancillaries can and do, and the evidence of the time-stamp is essential for computing overtime. When it was withdrawn for an experimental period, management was not entirely happy with some of the overtime claims received from cleaners and catering staff. Now, I suppose, I had better mit the official union point of view. Here it is, as reported from the mouth of Mr Bill Tizard, the NUPE secretary: 'We think it totally wrong that different workers in a hospital should be treated in different ways. Why should we have to clock on while those who have white collar or professional status should not? That is why we have decided to do away with clocking on completely. It is discriminatory —we should all be treated the same because, as this strike will show, we all have a vital role in the running of the hospital.'
The answer, as I never tire of pointing out, is that Mr Tizard's members need have no role in the running of a hospital at all. They don't like doing the only work they are capable of doing, and they are certainly not needed to do it. With extra medical and nursing staff their work could be done in half the time, at -half the Cost and with twice the good will. Unemployed science graduates from the universities could take over electrical and mechanical maintenance, while garbage clearance and lavatory cleaning would provide pocket money and useful experience of life for arts gradu
• ates and poets. Unskilled urban workers — what Labour calls 'our people' — have moved from being a picturesque anachronism on the social scene to being a public Menace. They certainly should not be allowed anywhere near a hospital except as patients. Personally I don't feel they should be allowed near newspaper offices, television studios, theatre, laundries, factories or any other place of human activity which their sour, avaricious natures and hatred of work can threaten. In the age of microprocessors and miniaturisation, they must be pensioned off and sent to amuse themselves as best they know how in luxurious housing estates equipped with creative playgrounds and abstract sculptures by Mr Henry Moore; with doctors, social workers and resident 'poets' from the Arts Council in attendance. They have no useful role to play in their present frame of mind.
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