A critical analysis of the British National Health Service (NHS)

By Stanley Collymore

To anyone who’s honestly familiar with authentic historical accounts, is in full possession of a functioning brain in his or her head and competently knows how to use it, and what’s more, isn’t disingenuously hoodwinked by, but conversely rather resoundingly and contemptuously rejects the farcical and concertedly employed revisionist historical interpretation so asininely, fraudulently and self-servingly engaged in by mostly white, and mainly so, western professed historians, and specifically in this rather disreputable regard British historical revisionists and purportedly elite “historians”, the only two things of indisputable societal benefit and overall human significance that England independently and centuries later as part of a composite and self-evidently dysfunctional union of sorts, and laughably officially designated as the United Kingdom produced are Magna Carta and the British National Health Service (NHS). All else concerning Britain are smoke and mirrors or else the mirage-like self-delusions principally of a hard-core element of white Britons spread across all sections and classes of British society, and too dim-witted, and egotistical with it by far, to perceive much less so ever acknowledge their abysmally conceited, intellectual ignorance and wide-ranging stupidity.

A situation that contemporary British society – absolutely blissfully though in true distillation discernibly wretchedly shares with its transatlantic and poodle-master Rogue State USA – has effectively in all but name rendered Magna Carta dead and should in reality both fittingly and honourably bestow on it its last rites; while in the case of the National Health Service, despite the sterling efforts, stalwartly dedicated and assiduous endeavours of numerous and authentic professionals in all requisite fields of work throughout its organization is nevertheless rather bewilderingly being catapulted – with the ardent and mendacious support of corporate Rogue State USA and the latter’s instantly bought, paid for and easily manipulated British political and corporate equivalent sycophants -  into the same dismal abyss as Magna Carta.

Hardly surprising therefore that intentionally forced into a state of utter disillusionment which painfully and regrettably, obviously, they find themselves thrown into, there are so many exceedingly talented, well-trained and remarkable NHS employees of all professions and statuses that would in any reasonably competent organization other than an ineffectual British NHS be markedly considered and accordingly treated as the invaluable personnel that they self-evidently are, who are distinctly disenchanted with what they’re being subjected to now leaving the NHS to either pursue their professional careers elsewhere or else are taking early retirement from a health service  which they can no longer conscionably or professionally countenance. And who can honestly blame them? Particularly so when the British health service and the parlous state of their individual professions within it needn’t be as they have consistently been for such a long time and despondently still are; and, moreover, with no convincing signs even on an already dismal horizon that matter will optimistically change for the better.

And all this against a discernible backdrop of stark irony, as money to satisfactorily rectify the supposed monetary deficiency of the British NHS need not and shouldn’t be a problem, since the United Kingdom, dependent on which economic survey one gives credence to and firmly accepts, is either the fifth or the ninth largest economy in the world, and if those that have responsibility for it and officially run it truthfully wanted Britain to have a top-notch NHS that honestly ministers to the necessary needs of both NHS patients and the professionals alike who treat them, then the former could easily ensure that such a laudable situation was successfully realized.

But the blunt truth is that either for dogmatic and obtuse political reasons or, more commonly so, graspingly avaricious, self-interested and mendacious ones British politicians, and whatever malfeasance in public office, pervasively crooked and treacherously incumbent UK regime is in power; their transatlantic Rogue State USA puppet masters, greedy corporate entities on both sides of the Atlantic, together with considerable numbers of idiotic, short-sighted, easily manipulated, Brexit-type little Englanders and ludicrously so in the 21^st Century cap-doffing and widespread, class-infused, white home-grown Brits don’t want this to occur, and, in reality, are very much adverse to any substantial spending on the British NHS and would, in fact, much prefer that it was completely privatized and run on the lines of a profit and dividends basis like  any other, in their sick mind-set “successful” business enterprise, where the rich get richer and the poor and disadvantaged are massively marginalized.

To put things in their proper perspective as far as the British NHS is concerned I’ll cite two exemplary examples of what I mean and how Britain could likewise, if the powers that be and their dim-witted, cap-doffing and characteristically social class manipulated sycophants and camp followers actually wanted meaningful and permanent constructive change within the said British NHS to be a positive reality.

Barbados, my cherished ancestral homeland, has a fantastic and exceedingly beneficially run NHS and overall health care system. And while it’s absolutely true, and I emphasize this fact at every opportunity that I’m afforded to, that Barbados and specifically Barbadian money not only kick-started the English Industrial Revolution and successfully transformed England from the stolid European backwater state that it was into the global empire it subsequently became, that Bajan money was never repaid and it’s highly unlikely that it ever will be. A similar state of affairs that likewise unresolvedly, to this very day, prevails across the entire former English/British Empire.

So England and Britain certainly have massive amounts of capital, most of it either spuriously cheated from or else brutally purloined from its unwilling and former empire colonial subjects, and a situation, despite the thankful and official, at least, departure of that empire, leaves more than a residue of the identical, still perpetrated and pertinacious mind-set that is nevertheless intentionally deeply ingrained, unchanged and ruthlessly pursued across the entirety of British society by substantial numbers of its white inhabitants of all social statuses.

Therefore, if Barbados and contemporary Sweden who individually don’t have the plundering mind-set of Britain, can laudably and resolutely resort to relying on their own natural resources as well as their lawful and moral ingenuity to garner the wealth requisite to provide an all-inclusive, comprehensive National Health Service and Health Care System that absolutely and competently cater respectively for all of their respective citizens and local residents from the cradle to the grave and, moreover, do so most splendidly from their own legitimately acquired resources, why does Britain – whose massively hoarded  and unquestionably stolen wealth is exponentially and collectively greater than that of Barbados and Sweden combined – find it so extremely difficult to properly finance its own NHS?

Bearing in mind that the individual NHS that both Barbados and Sweden operate were initially adopted from the British model but have since then, in light years fashion, been meticulously and fully adapted to meet the genuine needs of their respective patients or clients. And crucially accounts, amongst a plethora of other inspirational and laudable factors, for why Barbados has and continuously provides on an admirable and routine basis so many healthy and enlivening centenarians – the greatest number in the entire world per population – and where the country’s average lifespan is so phenomenal; and quite literally puts countries like Britain and other white, racist and arrogant, so-called developed nations to shame!

Long before the now commonplace adopted and universally term used term “gap-year” was ever coined let alone came into general parlance and systematically used by many students in the UK, I embarked on it, quite literally. How did this happen? In Barbados where my excellent and formative education was carried out it has always been in the past, and still is a sensible and intelligent practice of the schools and resident educational authorities there that the natural academic and gifted abilities of students per se ought never to be determined or circumscribed solely by age. In other words the general starting point at which initial admittance into schools and significantly afterwards at which all examinations were allowed to be taken in respect of any student’s transference from junior or elementary school to a secondary one; and when at the latter, examinations that would inevitably assist those exceptionally brilliant and thoroughly gifted students into tertiary educational institutions like universities and thereafter allow them to embark on postgraduate studies, were themselves undertaken.

Accordingly, I started my official elementary school career at the age of four years old – the normal start year was five – and took my 11+ (eleven plus in age that is) examination to the designated higher Grammar School level of education when I was nine years old.  A full two years before the usual starting point of 11 years of age after which I was enrolled at my own as well as my family’s preferred choice of grammar school.

Significantly, too, there was an enshrined practice at my grammar school that when accepted there if a student got an overall pass mark of 90% at the end of the obligatory end of year exams to academically and realistically determine which class he or she would therefore enter in the following school year that student would automatically skip what in standard circumstances would be the next higher class and instead be allocated to the one above it. In brief if they were in let’s say Form 1 and attained that much relished 90% written grade level in their overall year exams there, they thus skipped what would otherwise have been Form2 and automatically went into Form 3. And if they were brilliant enough to successfully achieve the identical result in Form 3 they also automatically skipped what would otherwise have been Form 4 and went into Form 5 where they instantly commenced preparations there for their Oxford and Cambridge GCE “O” and “A” levels – ordinary and advanced for the uninitiated – examinations, with achievement in these providing the necessary and automatic gateway to tertiary study – namely university and postgraduate studies at the appropriate institutions of their choice – and their attendant academic qualifications.

In my specific case I not only academically skipped Forms 2 and 4 at my grammar school but completed my Oxford and Cambridge GCE “O” and “A” level examinations and acquired certificates at an age much earlier in Barbados – and I wasn’t by any means alone in this or uniquely a beneficiary of this practice – than I would ever have been able to do anywhere in the United Kingdom, if the racist educational practices there had even bothered to recognize my innate abilities in the first place – and where “promotion” throughout most British schools is really all about age and has bugger all to do with natural skills or, God forbid, inherent ability; and accounts for the piss-poor and deplorable academic state of British schools generally and the UK’s state run ones in particular.

Properly and effectively through my assiduously engaged in work at school and by means of the highly inspirational and scholarly tuition that I was thoroughly and encouragingly afforded by my respective teachers and now purposely well-equipped with many more than he requisite qualifications needed to get into any university of my preference, study English, Education and Dramatic Arts, which were among my principal great loves, and then subsequently embark on whatever academic and career pursuits  I’d given considerable thought to  and had decided to rationally engage in, there was first, however, the essential matter of specifically determining when all this should actually start.

Detailed career counselling at my grammar school and the astute and evidently knowledgeable, as well, input in this regard fruitfully and intelligently delivered by my stupendously brilliant, enormously and multifacetedly-skilled English, Classics, Geography and accomplished Music teacher, Mr. Kenneth G. Doughlin who was also the Deputy Headmaster of the 1785 established Alleyne Grammar School that I attended, coupled too with compatible and motivating guidance from family members and other community mentors of mine with my overall best interests at heart, it was consensually agreed: a conclusion that I unreservedly and shrewdly agreed to, that for anyone indisputably committed to engaging in tertiary studies and expressly so wishing to enter the field of education and especially become an academic as I was aspiring to do, then it was a most sensible idea and a discernibly sagacious step to first get some first-hand experience of the general world of work and the time-honoured interactions of people within the workplace rather than essentially leaving the academic environment of school, simply going directly into the secluded one of university and afterwards appearing in the conventional workplace without any knowledge, whatsoever, of what really went on there or of the people who formed it.

The opportunity to suitably provide the latter was provided by the British NHS which I joined, instantly commenced my training as a nurse and simultaneously worked as one.  My specific field of nursing however centred principally on psychiatric nursing because I not only wanted to explore and familiarize myself with the general practices of the workplace and my everyday personal and professional interactions with my work colleagues and those in charge of running the system but specifically too and interestingly so from my personal perspective the patients that I would be dealing with, helping to treat and hopefully make better.

Judiciously I had selected and opted to go to one of England’s largest and oldest psychiatric hospitals in the North Riding of Yorkshire and approximately two and a half miles outside the city of York itself, and as I directly discovered the overall location and extensive picturesque setting that I found there markedly coupled with the general ambience, administrative attributes and professional philosophy of the place were all noticeably outstanding. And so I was amply provided with the opportunity, scope and the total encouragement there to satisfy my personal curiosity as well as professionally explore the myriad parameters pertaining to the plethora of diversified patients at this psychiatric hospital.

Persons raging from the mild to the chronically depressed, ingrained schizophrenics, those distinctly and recalcitrantly imbued with recurrent and deeply troubling anti-social disorders; delusional sociopaths, women plagued with severe post-natal depression, hardnosed and both, medically and legally indefinitely sectioned under the several appropriate requirements of the Health Service Act and, accordingly, diagnosed as extensively and highly dangerous pieces of work, hard-core psychopaths. But most elucidatory for me, in all of this and as a young Black male was the utterly disturbing sight of what was rather evidently apparent to me of the long term and continuous, institutionalized presence at that hospital of a number of middle-aged and even discernibly elderly white women who’d been calculatedly, subjectively and with a distinct racist motivation as the core elements of these decidedly warped and condescending decisions that were callously made against them, incarcerated at this specific mental hospital, and others like it across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, at the discriminatory behest of UK courts and local authorities alike.

And what was the appalling crime or any cogent mental deficiency to be found in the individual personality of any or all of these corresponding women? None actually. Except that every one of them as willing and freely acceding to and, moreover, well over the legal age for consensual sexual intercourse specifically in these cases in Britain, or any other allegedly civilized country come to that, had individually and totally reciprocally formed lovingly sexual and meaningfully emotional relationships with Black men, some of whom they’d either devotedly married or else as an unmarried couple had voluntarily chosen to physically live with; but in the case of all of these women they’d voluntarily, enthusiastically and consensually had children with them. An avowed state of affairs which didn’t please racist elements within the communities where these mixed-race couples lived, the local authorities and even the magisterial and judicial branches of the British legal system.

All this was conspiratorially, quite dishonestly and markedly cruelly allowed to happen on the part of these respective state agencies surreptitiously working in tandem with each other, and which were distinctive and clear-cut cases of malfeasance in public office by them, because the white women concerned had in the sick perceptions of their racist and intransigent detractors grossly offended the latter’s considered racial code of ethics, totally superior, white master race and perceived supremacist sensitivities by physically and openly associating, as well as being sexually intimate with Black men who they then either married, willingly lived with and, most inexcusably of all, consensually had children by. Thus provoking an even more intolerable state of affairs, with its underlying and understandable white social outrage, by these affected white women resolutely refusing to terminate their irresponsible and offensive relationships with these brute inferior and lascivious nigger males and, in the process of not doing so, clearly choosing to determinedly as well immorally keep and personally between themselves bring up their ill-conceived half-breed piccaninnies and, from a white societal perspective, unwarranted and unwanted half-caste brats.

Consequently, and for the overall good of the majority white communities, these sorts of inane relationships not only frowned upon by all normal, genuine and rightfully concerned white men and women but were, in effect also, a provocative insult to and a monstrously insidious cancer in the body politic of the United Kingdom had to be methodically excised or otherwise deterred at all costs by being remorselessly destroyed from continuing where they’d already taken place. And that is precisely what these British public agencies and state appointed authorities firmly set out to do.

Harassing and imprisoning Black men on trumped up charges was pretty straightforward for these white and exclusively Caucasian-run UK authorities; after all they had loads of practice in the colonies in this regard. Penalising white women, even those whom they regarded as being beyond the pale was a wholly different matter. Since, after all, they were still white. So a wholly new method of dealing with them had to be devised; and that’s when these British authorities came up with the nakedly scurrilous idea of having them mentally sectioned as being a massive menace to society occasioned through their immoral conduct as was racially perceived by those who were fraudulently and malevolently attacking them, as well as a danger to themselves and the children they’d conceived – and who in reality these duplicitous buggers didn’t give a toss about – and as a consequence had to be protected for their own physical and mental safety. And which, of course, meant simply one thing – legally and mentally sectioning these women long term, and invariably for the rest of their lives, to involuntarily reside in lunatic asylums, where inescapably, and both physically and emotionally cut off from the rest of the outside world they inescapably, as was always intended by those who heartlessly dispatched them there, became completely institutionalized. While the children they gave birth to, having compulsorily been taken from them, were shunted out uncaringly to various homes for unwanted children.

An enforced but utterly shameful blackspot on the British NHS, the completely unwarranted “mental” but in essence physical incarceration of these white women, and a state of affairs that had routinely occurred long before I joined the NHS, I must honestly admit that with my arrival and during the time I trained and worked in the NHS it was overall, properly and meticulously run. And those who were responsible for this occurrence were the “regiment” of Matrons, Chief Male Nurses and their legions of professionally trained and ancillary staff who conspicuously between them did an exceedingly excellent job. A situation which consistently prevailed for several years after I’d voluntarily left the NHS and, as was always going to be the case on my part embarked on the road and the several processes that would and did successfully enable me to become the Academic, among other things, that I always wanted to be after my leaving the Alleyne School, which had unquestionably given me the brilliant start in life that I’d attained.

Now, and in suitably blunt terms, the British NHS is an absolute catastrophe; a massive train wreck which was just waiting to happen, ever since successive British regimes of all political hues fell, in toadying fashion, for the useless and mendacious blandishments of the Rogue State USA pharmaceutical corporate “giants” – but totally intellectually challenged and graspingly avaricious, pygmy morons in my astute and contemptuous assessment of them, and one where the acquisition of money at all costs and by any means was the central element of all this, their deviant philosophy and sick ambitions; while conversely actual and general health care was in their vile analysis absolutely marginal unless it could be handsomely paid for. In a sentence the privatization of the British NHS.

A situation that has increasingly come about through stealth, corrupt mendacity, rank and quite imperturbable disingenuousness and downright barefaced lying by the British political, Rogue State USA, puppet master stooges arbitrarily dictating the terms of the current state of affairs as they specifically apply to the NHS; together with their comprehensively incompetent, totally unfit for purpose but nevertheless deeply imbued with their Florence Nightingale-type, wholly narcissistic, mediocre and in most cases even non-existent but all the same grandiloquent and grossly exaggerated administrative “skills” – while completely devoid of any hands on nursing or other pertinent health care expertise – vainly, non-empathetically and unilaterally dictating to the entirety of the British nation what, in these refractory oafs ‘perverse minds is best for the country.

Speculating, as an Afro-Caribbean myself, on how Mary Jane Seacole, were she to make a temporary re-emergence in the 21st Century, would react to and what she would also possibly say about the intentionally racist and scurrilous attacks on her by some so-called "prominent" members of the British political class - infamously Michael Gove: the bastard, parental paternity unknown, offspring of a biological slapper, Scottish mother who readily and unconcernedly disposed of him the moment she'd evicted him from her tainted body, after which and later at the age of four months he was adopted by a wholly biologically unrelated to him Scottish married couple. Subsequently to become, and still is, a far-right Tory supporter and later an MP for a "safe" Conservative, parliamentary constituency seat - or more apt and commonly known as a rotten borough cesspit - that Michael Gove still represents. 

And the avid social climber that he is - and realistically one would need to be such were they to similarly find themselves through discovery as in characteristically name changed Michael Gove's  invidious and considerably tainted, unknown biological origins situation - and in what is still quite clearly, a significantly imperialist and colonialist mind-set Britain among his tawdry sort, bastard Michael - both literally and metaphorically so - became a UK regime minister first under the tutelage of  David Cameron and after his departure Theresa May. But in addition to being an utterly obsessive and self-serving prat Michael Gove is also a hard core and sycophantic admirer and stalwart toady of the antipodean and obnoxious arch-Zionist capitalist, Rupert Murdoch.

This, therefore, is what, as I speculated earlier, would be the relaxed but incisive riposte of Mary Jane Seacole: the Jamaican born and nurtured, Afro-Caribbean British citizen; meritorious Crimean War Heroine, justifiably and worthy recipient of the British Order of Merit (OM) award, and the undoubted inventor and shrew initiator of what would inevitably become, what the world at large subsequently and informatively  came to know, fully appreciate and, accordingly, now universally distinguishes and exclusively recognizes as the incontestable precepts of modern day nursing, attendant with its fundamental and indivisible, caring principles. And from a knowledgeable and truly historical perspective - other than the skewed, sick and fraudulent one of Florence Nightingale herself and her band of latter day and calculatingly conspiratorial aficionados - the distinct usurpation and barefaced attempt at stealing the authentic ownership and rightful legacy of Mary Jane Seacole..

So as an Afro-Caribbean person Mary Jane Seacole  in direct reply would doubtlessly, stoically shrug her shoulders in expected realization  of the abject disbelief and contumacious posturing of her racist detractors, then quite instinctively draw in a deep breath through her closed teeth and partially opened mouth in what we Afro-Caribbeans derisively and in put down fashion refer to as a "stupes", while at the time of delivering this apt response seeing no specific need to either entertain or actually make a caustic verbal rejoinder; smile broadly and effusively in that characteristic Afro-Caribbean fashion of ours and laughingly reply: "What else is there to naturally expect from a phalanx of delusional white supremacist elements of the supposed master race, who conceitedly convince themselves that they know it all, and just as idiotically publicly state and insist that without them or the now departed past members of their kind nothing of value was ever previously known, discovered or invented.

Adding, would Mary Jane Seacole, convincingly and with a clever mixture of ruefulness and spirited optimism: "Every conscionable move that is conceived and embarked upon starts with a small step and a bigger purpose."