Phil is furious that the NHS, and GPs in particular, are about to pay for Gordon Brown's profligacy
So there he was, walking away from the camera, his final, mawkish (and yet somehow suitably duplicitous) speech made, Gordon Brown with his wife and kids, wandering off like the cast of The Wizard Of Oz down the yellow brick road of political obscurity. I could barely restrain myself from spitting at the television.
I have rarely been so angry. With a metaphorical tip of his hat and a wry smile, the irresponsible shitehawk danced off into the sunset, skipped nimbly out of the way of responsibility for his crass actions.
I don't think I was ever really angry until that moment. I don't think I was ever really incandescent until I heard the reaction the next day. ‘Didn't he look happy at last?' said one soppy bastard. ‘He wasn't really a proper politician,' said another. ‘You do get the feeling that he wasn't in it for the money. I admire him for that.'
I despair. Thirteen years of cynical exploitation and we still get reactions of this order – from doctors, no less.
Let us look at the figures. In 13 years, from a country that was more or less in credit, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have bequeathed us a nation that is £1.4 trillion in debt. That works out at about £100,000 of debt for every household in this country, and given that only about a third of households contribute anything other than VAT and National Insurance to the economy, your personal stake in this fiasco is around £300,000 each. Rather more, in fact, as we earn more than the national average.
The interest alone on this debt could amount to as much as £70bn a year, or 70% of the national NHS budget, if interest rates creep up from their current historic lows.
What does this mean for the NHS? Well at the very least, as has already been floated, we will have a funding freeze for the next three years, meaning a 20% cut in real terms. This would actually be feasible, if we were able to cut swathes through the managerial parasites that clog up our hospitals and PCTs, but given the adminidroids will make decisions on what to cut, who seriously believes for a second they will cull themselves? Front-line services will go, and are already going.
And you're going to pay too. You should not forget that the very real pain that is going to be inflicted on you and yours, the diminution of your standard of living, the erosion of your savings and the postponement of your retirement date is due in no small part to this deluded, incompetent moron Gordon Brown and his predecessor, the grinning Tony Blair.
They'll go down in history, these two preening idiots, as the greatest folly in our political annals. They put their own narrow political objectives before the interests of the nation, and they spent our money and raided our pension schemes as if the cash was their own. And for what? To build up a client state of Labour-voting dependants in non-jobs throughout our country? Why else would we need a Community Outreach Diversity Officer?
Manufacturing, backbone of any nation, is all but destroyed, to the point where a box of England's Glory matches is made in Scandinavia. Can we not even do that?
We've had it. We're going to get out-of-hours back and a couple of pay cuts, and then we must learn to cut our cloth for the years ahead.
It's going to be really, really rubbish. And never forget who is to blame. They spent our money as if there was no tomorrow. Except now it's tomorrow.
Dr Phil Peverley is a GP in Sunderland
Peverley
