David Craig, on December 21st, 2023As Christmas comes closer, I doubt anybody wants to read me moaning about the ongoing collapse of the West due to the stupidity, greed, incompetence and venality of our West-loathing rulers.
So, I propose to give it a rest till Wednesday 3 January 2024.
Just before I go, I noticed this short video from the excellent Simon Webb’s History Debunked YouTube channel bemoaning the quality (or lack thereof) of far too many ‘British’ doctors.
Webb discusses how easy it is to get dodgy medical degrees in some countries. But he doesn’t touch on a possibly more important issue – corruption. A couple of years ago, after a totally avoidable plane crash, Pakistan International Airways found that around a third of its pilots weren’t actually qualified to fly planes. They had either cheated in their tests often by paying someone else to take the tests for them or their families had paid bribes to testing officials or, in the case of attractive female aspirants, offered sexual services in return for qualification. Given that the whole of Pakistan is rotten with corruption with Pakistan being at number 140 out of 180 countries on the Transparency International Corruption Index, at the same level as such earthly paradises as Liberia, Uganda and Cameroon, there is no reason to doubt that a similar (or worse) level of corruption exists in Pakistan’s medical education system.
Slightly further down on the Corruption Index is Nigeria at number 150. Currently around 500 nurses from Nigeria are being investigated by the Nursing and Midwifery Council for having paid someone else to take the tests they were required to pass to become eligible to work in Britain.
The number of foreign-educated NHS staff is rising:
Over 100,000 NHS doctors and nurses come from countries where corruption is a way of life: India – 60,533, Nigeria – 22,581, Pakistan – 7,082, Ghana – 6,134, Zimbabwe – 5,917, Egypt – 4,148. So it’s not inconceivable that up to a third of them – 30,000 foreign doctors and nurses employed by our collapsing NHS – achieved their qualifications using ‘creative methods’ rather than actually acquiring the necessary knowledge and competences to practise in the UK.
Anyway have a great holiday and, if possible, try to avoid going anywhere near any multi-culturally-enriching medical staff. Though, with many doctors on strike until the evil Tory government is replaced by Starmer and his band of fools and knaves and with the NHS comatose your chance of seeing someone with any medical qualification, however dubious, are vanishingly small.
Here’s Simon Webb:
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Enjoy your well-earned break. Hope 2024 will be better for all of us.
Enjoy the break David.
Take a break. I don’t know how you find the time to research everything but I am sure all your readers appreciate it. I’m also finding that other sites have become repetitive.
You focus on the NHS but I saw a case where a woman died after a fall in a care home. An ambulance was called but the care worker’s English was so bad that she did not correctly answer questions about the state of the woman and it was decided there was no need for an ambulance.
We also are constantly told that we don’t have enough care workers and need immigrants. Who is going to look after the elderly in the countries they come from, and who is going to look after them here when they get old? Nothing makes any sense.
I’ve just started reading Ayn Rand’s book “Capitalism” but she recommends reading “The Virtue of Selfishness” first. She says Capitalism is the only way by which individual human rights can be established and she believes the American Constitution was the most important document to achieve this and says it worked reasonably well for 150 years. She says that individual rights have been replaced by rights given to society which cannot work and it has resulted in people being treated like any other commodity. A few days ago I heard someone say that the UK needs a constitution but our politicians would never agree on one because they know it would have to limit their powers. Often we get told we have an unwritten constitution which is more nonsense, or they refer to the Magna Carta. What is most frightening is that there are reports that many younger people want a dictatorship.
We need an understanding of the causes of our problems and solutions to deal with them. That seems an impossible task in the West. Let’s make 2024 a year to deal with this.
You deserve a good one mate, all the best.
Quite agree with all the above.
Thanks for your sensible posts Sir David.