THE title for my piece this week was to be ‘Putting General Practice Back into the Heart of OUR NHS’ but with the UK adrift in a ship with no rudder we must look at the present chaos and hopelessness first.

How can there be calm and excellent care in the medical services when there is absent thought and probity at the top of our country? And how can doctors and the allied professions deal with so much physical and mental illness when the causes are national and fundamental?

I sampled what goes for ‘news’ on the BBC last night. Mr Sunak, the current PM, was shown in front of a gathering of nurses. He entered swiftly with the broadest smile and extravagant gesticulation, a transmitter/receiver stuck behind in his belt.

An ‘initiative’ had been fed to a compliant press to deal with all manner of failures in OUR NHS. £1 billion was to be spent on providing 5,000 beds. That is 0.25 per cent of that spent by HMG on ‘covid’.

Say there are 200 district general hospitals. That is 25 beds per hospital. How many are ‘virtual’, with the patient being ‘cared for at home’? 400 extra ambulances are to be drawn out of the hat; with great difficulty in discharging patients it will mean there are even more outside A&Es.

Kings Fund – quote: ‘The total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2019/20, while the number of patients treated has increased significantly.’

This is compensated in part by often very short post-operative stays. I visited an 85-year-old last week who had a mastectomy at the RD&E with axillary node sampling, who had been taken home the same day. She was pale but she was alert, well and with a son.

But I know there are others who need more time. The greatest weight is the acute medical condition like heart attack and stroke. These humans need a great deal of care and prompt discharge is often not possible, especially with no community hospital beds.

Scandalously, there was again no mention of them, and yet recovery is easier near to home, and a precious DGH bed freed up. So Zahawi has been sacked for income tax ‘irregularities’.

He should have resigned, or alternatively been sacked when our taxes had heated his wife’s stables. Just as a previous Totnes MP had our help in building a duck house!

The reader will agree that that ‘they laugh in our faces’; we need to clear out the Augian stables with vigour – immediately. Stephen Kinnock was pontificating on this news. He has forgotten a previous actor/PM who had Bernie Eccleston and Labour donor at No 10 just after that landslide election.

It was coincidence only that tobacco advertising on Formula One machines was allowed to go on for a few years more. And local ‘Lib-Dems’ might forget Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg who allied with PM Cameron.

He, like Blair, breached the Charter of the United Nations with the UK being part of aggressive war, that being Libya. It had no grounds in self defence. And they might forget also that he moved quickly to Silicon City and a fine income from Facebook etc.

As that general practitioner faces a patient with a rotten hip and no prospect of prompt surgery, or the poor soul with unremitting depression with anxiety, how does his or her morale and energy survive in the face of such widespread societal disintegration?

Other ‘news’ told of a survey by the Children’s Commissioner. Ten per cent of nine-year-olds had viewed pornography including sexual violence. If parents truly educated their children there would be no easy access to the sewers on the www net, nor would increasing numbers of children be obese for instance.

The fact is that those elected, plus some of those corruptly or inappropriately selected, but have hands on the levers of power in our dear country, are detached from reality and do not care deeply.

The current ‘Chief Executive Officer’ of NHS England is Amanda Pritchard. Last week she called for the training of more doctors. She should have said ‘retaining more doctors’. She is at the top and out of touch.

They are retiring early, burning out ie breaking down, and emigrating. A recent BMA survey of young doctors with over 4,000 responding (and thus skewed) found over 80 per cent wanted to leave the service, or go abroad. And they were skimping to heat their homes.

So, if you agree there is no rudder, or steady hand with a brain above at the helm, what should we – in a revolution of the mind I yearn for, insist should happen urgently. There are two paths. One is a General Election but putting Xs against a colour, Tweedledum, Tweedledee or tweedle, is unlikely to see 50-plus truly independent MPs in parliament and a transfusion of principle and common sense into the forum of our nation.

I believe we need another National Government – part elected, but part infused with citizens of established probity who have been forged in real work. There are many good people here. I have called for years to separate OUR NHS from His Majesty’s Government.

The finest and most moral experts would form an independent National NHS Executive which would be responsible to the House of Commons. This would be the likely end of the NHS being a political football.

If you want to see farce, go on line and view the proceedings of the Health and Social Care Committee, chaired by an MP who probably has little or no knowledge of the health service.