The once-cherished NHS has become a right-on blob of grotesque inefficiency and bloated management delivering questionable care, writes Giles Sheldrick.
It never rains… Wes Streeting is under pressure to sort the NHS out (Image: Getty)
It will come as little surprise, yet be no less infuriating, to millions of patients that the NHS continues to “take the knee” to a host of insane practices.
This once-cherished institution has become a right-on blob of grotesque inefficiency and bloated management, a bottomless pit of taxpayers’ money for, in a great many cases, questionable care outcomes.
No other publicly-funded institution represents, in word and deed, such a subservient attitude to political correctness.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has failed to intervene in a string of disturbing cases in which NHS trusts he ultimately controls allow men to use female changing rooms to highlight one recent example.
And so the madness continues apace inside the corridors of an institution where woke has become institutionalised.
Most would agree marrying a first cousin, although legal, is wrong not last because it increases the risk of children being born with life-limiting birth defects.
Yet the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database (NCMD), a government monitoring board holding information on children who die in England that has been handed more than £3.5 million in taxpayer funding, has just said it is “unacceptable to discourage close-relative marriage in a blanket way” because parents are only at a “slightly increased” risk of having a child with a genetic disorder.
Why is Mr Streeting not moving heaven and earth to stop this never-ending cycle of idiocy?
The NHS personifies political correctness like no other institution, says Giles Sheldrick (Image: Getty)
NHS England was asked, explicitly, whether it was actively ignoring what was said by the NCMD and directing its staff to say the opposite, that is, first-cousin marriage is harmful. It did not respond with an answer.
This is, let us not forget, the same health service that sees nothing wrong – legally or morally – with men pretending to be women and using female staff changing rooms across the NHS estate.
It is the same NHS which asks patients, or service users as they are often known, to choose from 159 religions, 12 genders and 10 sexual preferences before they attend hospital appointments.
And it is the same health service where some trusts have insisted on using the phrase “birthing person” to describe a pregnant woman who, once with child, “chestfeeds”.
It’s wrong, it’s maddening, and it is a major reason why public support for the NHS is through the floor. People have had enough of this virtual signalling tripe.
Where once people stood on their doorsteps to bang pots and pans in tribute to the NHS they now bang their heads against brick wall in despair.
More than six million people are currently languishing on NHS waiting lists, but with regular strikes no meaningful progress is being made to reduce the backlog.
At the heart of this extreme woke establishment is a deeply alarming propensity for its pearl-clutching management not to offend, whatever the cost.
The practice of close extended family members having children is legally permitted in many countries, culturally favoured in some, and legally banned in others.
More than three quarters of Brits oppose it.
But like so much that is wrong with the public sector the NHS hears no evil, sees no evil, and speaks no evil.
And therein is much of its problem.
Many will agree with Tory MP Richard Holden, who has campaigned to outlaw first-cousin marriage, and who said: “Our NHS should stop taking the knee to damaging and oppressive cultural practices.”
Maybe if it concentrated on treating the sick and needy, rather than forever ticking boxes, we might all start seeing the benefit.
