Does our Prime Minister have nothing else to do?

On Wednesday evening I received a message about the BBC and the NHS (both using taxpayers’ money) joining in a Twitter campaign to promote the joys of the NHS in the United States where the battle about Obamacare healthcare reform health insurance reform is raging.

Would I join the battle and Twitter anti-NHS messages? My reply was that I don’t do Twitter as it is a waste of time and see no point in joining the battle that way but I shall alert a few American bloggers. This I duly did and they duly ignored me. In fact, as far as I can make out nobody apart from the British media is at all excited about that campaign.

As I wrote on EUReferendum, in connection with the ill-fated attempt on the part of the Guardian and its readers to tell Americans how to vote, this sort of behaviour is not well regarded in other countries, especially as feelings are already running high.

By now probably everybody knows about the idiotic Twitter campaign on which various people, led by the PM and his fragrant wife, told those boorish Yanks that they love the NHS. Also everybody knows that the whole debate here has degenerated into another discussion about Daniel Hannan MEP, who has clearly abandoned all hope of making himself a career in domestic British politics and is spending a great deal of his time taking part in American talk shows and participating in American debates.

In response he has been called unpatriotic and an opponent of the Conservative Party, both ideas completely idiotic. Why on earth is it unpatriotic to criticize the NHS, a failed model of healthcare, if ever there was one? (It is not, in fact, being proposed in the United States, in so far as we know what is being proposed.)

So we have a situation in which the Americans are discussing the future of healthcare in their country, with occasional reference to the NHS though that rather silly nonsense about Stephen Hawking was not used by American conservatives, despite James Delingpole’s winsome little posting. The story appeared briefly on one outlet and was taken off as soon as the mistakes in it were pointed out.

Would that stupid and ignorant comments about American healthcare made by all sorts of people in Britain could be taken off as soon as mistakes were pointed out. But no, we are superior and we know best even when we do not bother to find out what is going on.

I had one debate with one of these superior personalities who was making sniffy comments about whacky death panel arguments. I suggested that he stopped using words like whacky and tried to find out what has been said about those panels including some serious analysis of Obama’s comments about his grandmother’s hip replacement operation. In return I was told that this particular idiot was not going to get involved in Palinesque wackiness. End of discussion with one rather stupid and ignorant person chuckling at his own wit and intelligence and no understanding that actually Palin won the debate.

The best summary of all the misunderstandings and stupidities spouted on both sides of the Pond was made by Dizzy on his blog, which I rarely read as I am not particularly interested in the topics he chooses. Perhaps I shall do so hereafter.

Sadly, unlike what’s going on in USA right now, the structure and delivery of healthcare services is not even a matter for discussion in the UK anymore. Instead, the snobbish and arrogant British superiority complex rears its head, and stupidly deems that the structure we have is the best possible. Bland, meaningless and nonsense statements about it being the "envy of the world" are rolled out, and the debate is simplified down to "spending more money is good, spending less is bad".

Essentially we have an infantile level of debate on the subject in the UK, and hilariously we have the balls to start trying to preach to a country on the other side of the Atlantic about how wonderful our system is and how terribly evil theirs’ is? Frankly, it's pathetic. On one side we have a system being caricatured and used as a political football, whilst on the other we have panty wetting screaming and shouting about how terribly unfair the caricature is, and equally silly caricatures thrown back. It makes everyone look like complete and total morons.

One cannot help thinking that all this insane and vociferous support for the NHS is another display of our favourite sport – America-bashing, particularly right-wing America-bashing. Hey, some Americans on the right have made rude comments about our beloved NHS. How dare they? How bloody dare they? We know that they spend their whole time killing off poor people and their healthcare is the worst in the world with people dying in the streets because there is no NHS to save them.

What do you mean they have Medicaid and their survival rate of every serious disease is considerably higher than ours? What has that to do with anything?

People are complaining about the NHS and ever more Brits are taking out private health insurance? What has that to do anything? We are out to prove to those uppity Yanks that we are the best in the world and that our … sob …. our very own NHS as created by Nye Bevan, using the Soviet model is the envy of the world. What do you mean nobody in the world has imitated it? What has that to do with anything?

Three questions present themselves immediately. One is about our Prime Minister. Has he really nothing else to do but to get involved in what is, after all, an internal debate in the United States of an extent that he would not dare to start in this country?

The second one is a little more complicated. Just exactly when did the NHS and the BBC become the epitome of what this country is about? People who are ready to surrender our parliamentary and judicial system, which really have been the envy or the world for centuries, scream blue murder if anyone as much as criticizes these two recent and failed institutions.

Thirdly, I should like to ask when are we, in Britain, going to have a serious discussion about healthcare that will involve radical reforms to the NHS. The twelfth of never, the way we are going.

Amazing, Americans are human

Well, in a manner of speaking. They are not that different from Europeans, whoever Europeans might be. Actually, this article in Prospect by Peter Baldwin, professor of history at University College of California, Los Angeles, is considerably better than so many on the subject.

Professor Baldwin seems to acknowledge that Europe is actually quite varied, though he appears to be a little surprised by that and he does not go too closely into how those divisions have appeared in history or appear now.

Nor does he bother too much with divisions in America. How does that high infant mortality pan out? Do we know? Nothing is more infuriating than being told a fact that is supposed to be important but is actually meaningless. Oh, and I assume he is being ironic when he lists President Bush's "sins".

But the piece is worth reading. It seems Americans are actually human. And well-read. This is my favourite paragraph because it confirms something many of us have noticed about America and has a go at that super-intellectual ditzhead, Simone de Beauvoir:

Simone de Beauvoir was convinced that Americans do not need to read because they do not think. Thinking is hard to quantify; reading less so. And Americans, it turns out, do read. The percentage of illiterate Americans is average by European standards. There are more newspapers per head in the US than anywhere in Europe outside Scandinavia, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The long tradition of well-funded public libraries in the US means that the average American reader is better supplied with library books than his peers in Germany, Britain, France, Holland, Austria and all the Mediterranean nations. They also make better use of these public library books than most Europeans. The average American borrowed more library books in 2001 than their peers in Germany, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, France and throughout the Mediterranean. Not content with borrowing, Americans also buy more books per head than any Europeans for whom we have numbers. And they write more books per capita than most Europeans too.

I must stop making assumptions about Californian academics.

When diplomats fall out

For some time now there has been a magnificent row going on between two ex-diplomats, Our Former Man in Poland, Charles Crawford and Our Former Man in Uzbekistan Until He Left Under Something Of A Cloud, Craig Murray. The row has now reached of virtual fisticuffs.

I take Mr Crawford’s side not just because I know and like him, not just because his analyses of the situation in Eastern Europe, Russia and the European Union are invariably accurate, wittily expressed but because Craig Murray has always appeared to me to be rather dishonourable. He was, after all, a diplomat for many years and, apparently, swallowed all sorts of unpleasant things about the countries he had been posted to. The alternative to that is not having diplomatic relations with any country but the few that we really approve of (and that approval might change from day to day). That would suit me fine but would it suit the likes of Craig Murray who needed a career?

His rather sudden indignation about rendition and Uzbekistan’s involvement sounded a little desperate but was temporarily all the rage because of the underlying anti-Americanism, so popular among our media and political establishment. (Will that now change with The New Messiah in the White House or will he mess up before the huge tanker of that establishment manages to alter its course? Sir Max Hastings seems to have changed his stance. Is that the first swallow or is he making a big mistake?)

Given all that I was delighted to read Mr Crawford’s frontal attack on Mr Murray who had been sniping at him and accusing him of a dishonest supporter of the evil Bush regime and that terrible rendition.

Mr Crawford has, rather nobly, read Mr Murray’s famous self-publicizing book and has noticed some discrepancy between the two accounts of what really happened:

Let's go back to the first posting you made on this subject (emphasis added):

I was Ambassador in Uzbekistan, and Charles Crawford was Ambassador in Poland, at the time this torture traffic was happening. In Tashkent I uncovered it meticulously, reported it and protested against it. In Poland Charles made no protest.

Which Ambassador do you want to represent you, British taxpayers? Huh? HUH?

Plucky Craig, the energetic principled uncoverer and reporter and protester of Misdeeds?

Or supine Charles, the qualm-free complicitous ignorer thereof?

Hmm.

Only one problem. A trifle really.

It looks to be the case that Craig learned about the CIA 'secret rendition' programme only after he finally left Tashkent in some professional dishonour yet with his payout from the taxpayer of £320,000.

How do I know that? Because this is what he himself says in his book Murder in Samarkand (Mainstream Publishing 2007 edition, p 362):

From other journalists at this time [sc when he had already left Tashkent in mid-2004 and was back in the UK, formally suspended from duty - see p 359] ... I learnt the first details of the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme ...

I now believe that in protesting about intelligence obtained by torture in Uzbekistan ... I had stumbled unwittingly across the the extraordinary rendition programme, and my objections were therefore threatening the legal and political basis of major CIA strategy in the War on Terror.

In other words, despite what he explicitly claimed on his site, as HM Ambassador in Uzbekistan Craig did not uncover, report and protest against this programme, meticulously or otherwise!

Why? Perhaps because he knew nothing whatsoever about it?

So much for his forlorn attempt to rewrite history and set himself on a higher moral unrenditioning aircraft than the rest of his FCO colleagues on this subject.

Read the whole exchange. Several of the postings are highly entertaining and very interesting in Mr Crawford’s no-holds-barred attacks on those who make apparently highly moral but, in reality, rather dubious statements.