I WAS intending to write some pieces about our NHS in its present state of planned chaos. But strikes are current and their causes need urgent study.

First the railway and the RMT. Britain invented the railway 260 years ago. Run efficiently it is the best form of public transport and an essential public service. The powerful national papers and the broadcast media – especially the BBC, have previously said that pay was the issue. Late in the day, they now add ‘jobs and conditions’, and apply this to the strikes by the nurses (the first ever), paramedics, postal workers, border force etc.

With spiralling fuel, food, transport and mortgage costs, demands for wage increases are understood. But there is much more to the strikes than this. As a lady ‘train attendant’, formerly ‘guard’, said on the BBC, she was very concerned for the passengers and how they were being treated.

Consider this please. Train time table leaflets are no longer being printed; you have to ‘go on line’. It was so easy before. You picked one up from the board in the ticket office at Brunel’s station. No computer nor cell phone? Bad luck. You want to buy your ticket for your journey? Is that good Hungarian born lady behind the glass, ready to tell you the best and cheapest way to get from A to B?

No, the ticket office is closed, as is being planned for the whole network. There is no notice telling you to go to the new machine by the electronic barrier. There my wife Sue, with failing eyesight, was helped to negotiate a complex choice of destination etc by a young employee. And if you go by car to the station, find £6.70 for the one machine, and then select the tiny, worn out buttons for the registration figures in poor light. Then see ‘No cash allowed’.

We loved train travel and still do – just. I often went to London to do with the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery editorial board, Palestine, Dr David Kelly and to march for instance against the war on Iraq. In former times you bought a token for parking with your train ticket – £1. And 50p was refunded with the ticket!

The nationally owned and run British Rail was gradually starved of investment. This was a key part of the strategy to move it into privatisation. It is said that, allowing for inflation, subsidies are now at least twice what they were in British Rail days. In the sixties, Beeching was told to close the C to D lines, making connections to the A and B stations difficult or impossible. So the car dominates. John Major obeyed the EU diktat of ‘competition’ and separated the wheels from the track!

So we had Network Rail for the latter, and ever changing and sometimes failing private but subsidised train operating companies for the wheels. Here is an example of both madness and greed. In fact of cartel. There are three ‘rolling stock operating companies’. Competition Commission blasts ROSCOs over train leasing costs. Inquiry chair and CC deputy chairman, Diana Guy, said: ‘There is frequently little or no competition to the existing, incumbent fleet of rolling stock on particular services when franchises are being re-let and new leases for rolling stock must be negotiated.

‘There are a number of reasons for this but the fundamental problem stems from the lack of alternatives to the incumbent fleets when Train Operating Companies are putting together their franchise bids.’

At the time of franchise renewal, TOCs review the leasing arrangements for a lower price as the asset depreciates over its lifespan. However, the CC is concerned that a lack of competition is keeping prices higher than the rate at which rolling stock devalues.

The RMT union unearthed this and much else in spite of the company names changing often. As I related re the ‘energy companies’, all is a complex nonsense that is costing us very dear.

Most of our fellow citizens want to do a good job.

Nurses know they are not able to care as well as they know they should. Add this – the ward computer needs feeding with yet more ‘stats’. No time to do this so noted in a pocket book and at the end of the shift then entered on the computer. Home late, and the letter from Halifax recording a raised interest rate.

I noted 12 ambulances at Torbay Hospital a few weeks ago, engines running to keep the cabins warm for the patients inside. Paramedics coming out with sandwiches, and no doubt from a machine. No chance was there for quiet lunch away from so much delay and distress.

And those helpful postal workers who are especially vital for the older citizens who live alone. Overpaid? Certainly dealt with by often aggressive management, instead of all working with respect for each other in common cause.

This is a good example of ‘management’ in the Royal Mail. You can apply this to management elsewhere in our sceptred isle. You will recall the Horizon computer system and how sub-postmasters/mistresses were accused wrongly of embezzlement. A few ended in prison and there were very tragically some suicides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

The Rev Paula Vennells was then Chief Executive Post Office. Later, and extraordinarily she was chairman of the Imperial Hospitals Trust! Steve Barclay, the present health minister says this: ‘It’s important that the trade unions honour the commitments that they’ve given to safeguard both life-threatening responses and emergency responses.’

Conservative governments, and Labour with Liberal ‘Democrat’ silence have not honoured their commitments to the nation over many years.

Two wards at Teignmouth Community Hospital standing empty in the planned chaos and great distress, confirms their bankruptcy of principle.

Do not forget that £400 billion was spewed out for Covid, three times more that the annual NHS budget!

I rest my case.