I went an official tour of a local prison a few weeks ago and was told that 10% of prisoners are ex military. I would guess that most of thgem would helped more by psychiatric care than incarceration.

HF, like I said, some individuals are better off under CITC & some worse off. My view is that political dogma decided to close the long stay hospitals not decisions based on the long term benefits to the individual & society, leading to terrible events like you mention.

The "facts" in terms of NHS spending I take from Kings Fund information, rather than making it up myself.

You have just admitted that the "cuts" you posted originally were "Not cutbacks per se",which means they weren't cut-backs, so why did you not state in the first place that policy decisions were to blame rather than NHS cuts?

Edited by bonzo dog on 14/10/2011 at 00:10

Unfortunately Labour didn't turn that around

Labour threw money at it, but not where it was needed. They had billions to sink into it but no organisation. They viewed all spending as good spending, if you disagreed with employing 6,000 non-required Managers then in Blair's eyes you disagreed with funding the NHS entirely. The NHS invested £14billion in a new computer system which doesnt work, they were told from day one it wouldnt work and it still doesnt work. NHS IT jobs are the short straw of the IT market as a result of this.

Maybe if Blair's lot hadnt thrown billions at the NHS which seemingly went nowhere (more managers than beds, for instance), the current Government might have money to invest and wouldnt need to look to open it up privately.

But away from politics its when you see health systems elsewhere in the World is when you see how remarkably lucky we are to live in this country with the services which are handed to us for nothing.

Edited by jamie745 on 14/10/2011 at 00:47

Unfortunately Mr H does have a point. Labour agree cuts need to be made and planned on £15billion this year themselves (gross, not net) and a further £11billion a year from 2012 onwards and the £6billion from the last year (net) from the Tories were based on Labour's plans to cut based on savings identified in the previous budget, but the new Government brought them forward.

Its reasonable to suggest Labour wouldve cut alot of the same things the Conservatives are doing, yet Ed Miliband leads the anti-cuts rally for the TUC and Labour have criticised and slammed every single cut, listen to them now you'd think they'd have made no cuts at all, the reality wouldve been very different.

When you spend £163billion more than you gain in taxation you need to fix it. This isnt a recession this is a debt crisis. Its like spending more than you earn and using credit cards to pay the extra, then using more cards to pay the cards, then getting a loan to pay the cards which pay the cards etc its all a house of cards (literally) and that is essentially the position the country has been put in. And its not just us, Europe is dealing with it as well, thank god we're not Greek.

As for the public sector, everybody agrees it needs reform. I worked briefly in the public sector, its full of people who couldnt survive in private business. Because its so hard to sack a civil servant, inadequate ones get moved instead, to offices out the way on their own which tend to be management roles so then you get the useless ones in charge. The pension system had always been based on high retirement rewards in return for low working pay but theres affordability issues now. Pensions costs the Government £122billion this year.

What annoys me is that we're all in the same boat (some more than others obviously) and the likes of teachers and other public sector workers seem to feel they should remain unaffected and then go on strike which only affects and harms the very people who they are employed to help and ultimately does nothing but inconvenience the people who are going to pay for their pension (you and me).

Theres plenty of people who havent had payrises for years but in the private sector you take it or leave it, but in a time of squeezed budgets the teachers et all still feel entitlement to their golden handshake which is probably the only reason they joined the profession.