OPINION

       Keir Starmer should be ashamed of our NHS's performance (Image: PA)

       Look I know we’re supposed to be talking about Donald Trump’s nincompoop trade tariffs today, but something happened during Prime Minister’s Questions today which shocked me deeply. It should shock you too. I got a call saying my son had been taken into hospital in Seoul, South Korea, and that he was suffering from bronchitis. Obviously I was super-worried and tried to make contact.

       And I did. Being a teenager he was of course five tenths blase, three tenths amused, and in this case at least two tenths stunned. He texted these exact words: “Korean healthcare is insane. Within the span of three minutes the doctor saw me, someone tested me for covid and influenza, I was told to lie down while they injected me with some antibiotics and painkillers, then I just sat back down in the waiting room for the test results. Both negative by the way. After 15 minutes they told me they’d diagnosed me with bronchitis, and gave me the prescription. The entire service including all of the medication cost less money than lunch.”

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       Just to re-cap: Three minutes to be diagnosed, quarter of an hour to be treated and prescribed, and the whole thing cost less that a Tesco meal deal.

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       Which brings me to today’s Prime Ministers Questions where Imogen Walker (Lab Hamilton and Clyde Valley) informed us that one in six Scots are on a waiting list and Sir Keir Starmer pointed out that “over 60,000 Scots have been stuck waiting for tests or treatment for over a year.

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       “That is a 46 percent rise in one year. I had to check that figure as it is so staggering. And despite this backlog almost 50,000 fewer operations have been carried out.”

       The object of the staged PMQs exercise was to damn the SNP-led Government north of the border, and indeed all that pain, suffering and no-doubt death, does indeed rather damn them to a Hell where they are stuck on a waiting list for emergency surgery forever...

       But Sir Keir’s self-congratulatory claim that waiting times have been coming down for five months south of the border and we should, as one people, be welcoming a new dawn are, if anything, even more disingenuous. The realpolitik of our declining NHS is the complete reverse. There are 7.5m cases on the NHS waiting list in England.

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       A “good” wait time is three to four months, but three million sick people have waited almost six months and 200,000 people more than a year. So that is a 15 minute hospital wait in South Korea or four to six months, if you’re lucky, in the UK.

       “But that’s not an perfectly accurate comparison” I hear the head-in-the-sand supporters of the NHS cry, and they’d be right. But it’s not far off is it?

       You know, to give you a steer on the relative merits of the two health services? Have you ever - I mean ever - spent under two hours in a hospital waiting room? Me neither.

       I’ve had a procedure I need doing pushed back three times … I’m close to giving up hope of ever having it done (unless I go private of course.. which may be the subtext of the delays.) And, let’s be honest, we all know someone in the same situation.

       The NHS is a basket case for myriad reasons - its insanely huge size, its lack of accountability, its poor management, its catastrophic productivity, its inability to focus on what is important (a friend’s former daughter who is currently trans is getting lessons in how to talk like a man on the NHS, while the cancer waiting list grows. Tip: talk about football and use the F-word a lot love).

       I could go on. And on.

       In psychological circles they call it “normalisaton of deviance” or “habituatuion”. A situation where something has been so bad for so long that it is now perceived as normal. Over time our correct human reaction - in the case of the NHS outrage - is diminished and diminished and diminished, to the point where the situation is no longer seen as problematic.

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       So instead of taking to the streets and battering down doors in Westminster demanding people stop dying at the hands of inept managers and not-fit-for-purpose systems we stand on our doorsteps banging pots and pans and telling ourselves how lucky we are. I wonder what they would make of all that in South Korea.