Where is JT?

Hey JT

Good blog, it’s about time there was a site to let people have a rant at the increasingly crazy way our country is being run. My beef tends to be about the outrageous waste of money of local councils and national government. These people don’t earn a penny doing anything useful but exist by leeching off the rest of us through taxes. England must surely now rank as one of the highest taxed countries in the world.

I could do a whole series on politicians – European, UK and local; but for today I want to get just one aspect off my chest – National Government Advertising. Can anybody tell me what the current annual spend of GB UK is on TV, radio, poster and print advertising? The last accurate figures I could find left me speechless:

Government spending on advertising, marketing and public relations has also almost tripled from £111m in 1997 to £322m last year.

It gets worse I’m afraid…

A total of more than 3,200 press officers are now paid from the public purse - a three-fold rise since Labour first came to power in 1997. There are 1,815 press officers and public relations staff in Whitehall alone.  A further 1,444 are employed by 200 quangos and agencies funded by taxpayers. The Ministry of Defence employed 229 press officers and PR staff while the Home Office - recently blighted by a series of PR blunders - has 145 public relations staff. The figures do not include the 77 politically appointed special advisers working directly for cabinet ministers.

It’s no wonder millions of Britons are leaving the country every year; the lunatics really have taken over the asylum. What do we need 3,200 press officers for? Can you imagine what we could do with £322m!

I don’t know about you but I’m getting sick and tired of being threatened by my own government. I pay both my personal and corporate taxes in full and as I run my own companies, I’m forced to act as an unpaid tax collector for VAT, which takes up my time and costs me money. And woe betide if I submit a return a day late, as I’m surcharged for it and threatened with tax inspections. I pay business rates and local housing rates, I renew my car tax on time, I pay my TV/Radio licence every year and I find it highly offensive to be continually warned “we’ve got a huge computer, that knows where you live, it knows if you haven’t paid and we’re coming to get you.” Well if they know all that already, why waste money on advertising! Why don’t they just get off their PR backsides and do something useful instead, like changing jobs and collecting the obviously vast (and it HAS to be vast to justify this kind of spending) unpaid amounts from the people who don’t pay, instead of sitting in ivory Westminster towers, threatening those of us who do. Then we’d have a double result, more tax in and less money wasted on collecting it – it’s not brain surgery is it!

I know there are going to be people bleating on about how much good Government advertising does in warning us of dangers – things like (and here are four off the top of my head):

1. Speed kills
2. Hospitals are full of bugs, so wash your hands!
3. Get Flu jabs if you’re frail or elderly
4. Don’t drink too much

Well here’s my answer to all of the above and it cost me ten minutes to write it down (not £millions).

Speed doesn’t kill, bad driving does. If you’re stupid enough to be driving too fast and not paying attention (especially in built up areas) you don’t deserve to be driving. Site less cameras and sleeping policeman and employ more REAL police (not men and women in pretend uniforms). A camera will be able to tell you how fast a vehicle is travelling at a set point, it can’t tell you how badly that same vehicle is being driven. If you have a bad accident and it’s your fault, you should lose your licence. End of story.

Hospitals are full of bugs for two reasons. We did away with proper nurse training and replaced it with a University course. Don’t get me wrong I think our doctors and nurses are FANTASTIC but we have to get back to basics, not university courses. Put nurses back on the wards where they can be trained on the job by Sisters who know how to do it. Bring back Matrons who have overall control of the wards and this includes: nursing and ward cleanliness. Visiting hours are now bonkers, visitors seem to be able to wander in and out as they please at any time day or night. I’ve gone to visit people where there has been dozens clambering all around and sitting ON the bed. So here’s a straightforward approach – get rid of the private contractors, give the cleaning back to full time hospital staff.  Restrict visiting hours to two a day (Maximum) and restrict visitor numbers. With restricted access you could have a hospital staff member to monitor visitors, who would INSIST all visitors were scrubbed up before they enter and before they leave – end of problem.

We know flu is a deadly killer of the old and frail, and sometimes far more people than that. If we have a standard flu virus year (as opposed to a new strain), get the doctors surgeries to book the frail and elderly in for an appointment – that’s what letters were designed for! Spend your money on targeting those in need, not everyone else.

We have a problem with drinking in the UK, as a nation we seem genetically programmed to drink to excess, not moderation (maybe it’s our Anglo Saxon/Viking heritage). So putting out adverts of comatose women or young men climbing scaffolding to retrieve a balloon (and when did you last read of a death like that?) is a total waste of money. We know we are seeing more and more cases of liver disease in this country and sadly it’s affecting a younger and younger age group. So what brilliant schemes do our elected representatives come up with… posters and TV adverts, oh and here’s the killer (literally!); they actually EXTEND the time people are allowed to drink, in the bone numbingly thick hope that given more time, people will moderate their drinking because they no longer have to rush. Do these people ever go into our city centres? WE HAVE A DRINKING CULTURE, give people more time and they’ll drink more, how dumb can they be!

Of course I could just be cynical here and suggest that by giving people more time to drink, they’re spending more on alcohol, which of course generates more revenue from the tax on drink and so the government obtains more tax money. Surely they couldn’t simply be trying to kill our young, just to earn more taxes… could they? If they really want to do something about this, the answer is staring them in the face; restrict the available drinking time down to a sensible level and police licensed premises more strictly. The police used to do this, it was called Pub Patrol and if they see people drunk in a licensed premises they spoke to the landlord – because here’s the rub, it’s already an offence to sell intoxicants to someone who is already drunk. So start to prosecute the landlords and the pub chain owners and they’ll sharp get the message.

For the remainder who want to get blotted in their own time from supermarkets and the like, well you’re not going to stop that by putting adverts on the telly, are you! That needs a change of culture, better education and ultimately better health care.

My next ‘rant’ post for JT could be any one of a thousand against the type of government foisted upon us but I think for the next one, I may just have a rant about local politics and the money they throw around.

Malcolm