It must have been a slow news day: a nurse is seeking legal advice after being told by her employers that she wasn’t allowed to wear a necklace at work.  What’s so - ahem - special about this is that it’s a crucifix necklace:

Mrs Chaplin has sought advice from the Christian Legal Centre (CLC).

Its founder, barrister Andrea Minichiello Williams, said patients would be “astonished” at the trust’s actions.

“You cannot separate a person’s faith and motivation from other areas of their life, including what they do with the majority of their time: work.

“Unfortunately an aggressive, secularist, politically-correct agenda is being driven in the NHS and other public sectors at present.”

The CLC said it intended to assist the nurse in exercising her human rights.

Human rights?  Um… nope.  You might have a right to religious practice (and even then, it presumably can’t be more than a right to practice your religion in private, can it?), but I can’t for the life of me see how wearing a crucifix is central to anyone’s religious practice - rather, it’s an advertisement of faith, and there’s no right to proselytise or advertise.  Moreover, talk of “an aggressive, secularist, politically-correct agenda” just looks foolish - which is appropriate, becasue it is.  A hospital is a secular institution, dammit.  So’s the NHS.  It’s not about pushing a secularist, PC agenda: it’s about being secular and not having to bend to the non-secular.

What seems particularly disingenuous about this is the way in which the CLC presents this as an attack on Christianity, rather than a simple application of a rule about jewellery.  The Daily Fail seems particularly keen to present the story in that light:

Christian nurse removed from frontline duty for wearing cross necklace

screams the headline, before churning out the same quotations as the BBC (which makes me wonder whether the journalists reporting the story for either body have done more than recycle a CLC press release).  However, across at Tabloid Watch, MacGuffin points out that

[i]f [the story had] read ‘Nurse removed from frontline duty for wearing necklace’ would anyone be interested? No. But that is the story.

Or, rather, the non-story.  Would an NHS trust be justified in forbidding Christian jewellery?  Nope.  Would it be justified in forbidding certain kinds of jewellery across the board?  Um… yes.  Obviously.

Finally, the nurse in question does herself no favours:

“Everyone I have ever worked with has clearly known I am a Christian - it is what motivates me to care for others,” she said.

To which the obvious retort is this: do you mean that, were it not for your religion, you wouldn’t care for others?  That the non-religious are somehow uncaring?  Really?

Further to David’s post about the absurd claims spouted about Stephen Hawking and the NHS by some opponents of healthcare reform in the US, it would appear that the man himself has decided to put his side of things.  “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told The Guardian. “I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”

Right.

I’m going to put my cards on the table here.  The NHS is f’king great.  It’s not often that that’s said, but its no less true for that.  It’s occasionally messy, and it probably needs radical reform - but it’s still great.  It means that Stephen Hawking - and anyone else - can have life-saving treatment for FREE when it’s needed, and non-life-saving treatment mostly for free as well.  If medical treatment is in order, one way or another, you’ll get it.  You don’t need to buy insurance, because you’ve already got it.  Really.  It’s that simple.  Moreover, the vast majority in the UK agrees that, for all its faults, something like the NHS is a good idea in prinicple at least.  We can say that beccause YouGov and the Fabian Society asked 3000 people about their attitudes to the NHS:

The NHS is sixty years old this year. Which of the following best describes your attitude to it?
(a) Whatever problems the NHS may have, its commitment to free treatment for everyone means it is still one of our great national symbols: 70%
(b) The NHS was a good idea for its time but we now need a different way of running modern healthcare provision: 25%
(c) The NHS was a bad idea from the start and it should be abolished and replaced with something different: 1%
(d) Don’t know: 3%

Labour voters were 80-15-1-4.
Conservative voters were 56-39-3-2.
LibDems were 79-13-3-5.

(Source)

Note that option (b) doesn’t amount to scrapping socialised medicine: it can also accommodate coming up with another way to provide it.  Even Melanie Phillips hasn’t suggested that the NHS is a bad thing.  Yet.  The reason why we don’t often make a point of saying that something like the NHS is such a good idea is that it’s blindingly obvious.  We might just as well construct arguments about the cuteness of kittens.

Yes, there’s rationing.  Rationing’s good: the link between “ration” and “reason” is more than etymological.  Rationing simply means that those people whom we think ought to get treated first get treated first, and that those treatments that we think don’t have the evidence don’t get used until they do have it.  Simples.  That’s not unjust - it’s justice in action.

But let’s be clear here.  There is a handful of rightwing Tories that seems to think that the NHS should be scrapped.  Prominent among them is Daniel Hannan MEP, who’s popped up on Fox “News” to tell Glen Beck just how awful things are over here.  Hannan isn’t my MEP (I’m stuck with Nick Griffin, ffs), but the point is that he’s the sort of person to make Ayn Rand look like John Maynard Keynes.  His best examples of the true horror of the NHS?  That you might have to wait a couple of months for your free treatment of a non-life-threatening condition (gasp!).  And that sometimes A&E departments are busy.

That last one is a killer.  If you can bear it, scroll forward to 1:50 on the Fox vid.  Essentially, the details are that a friend of his with a broken leg was told to wait his turn on a Friday night, and - ZOMG!!!1!eleventy! - was told that he couldn’t jump the queue and self-medicate in return for money.

Well, I’m staggered.  Imagine having to sit in the same room as… I can hardly bear to write it… poor people (and Hannan is pretty clear that it was filthy chavs who were getting in the way).  Ugh.

I should take heart.  If the best the anti-NHS crowd on either side of the Atlantic can do is to wheel out cranks like Hannan, then their best isn’t very good.

UPDATE: Even the Tory front bench and Fox stablemate Sky “News” are distancing themselves from Hannan…

UPDATE 2: Oh, God.  Now the health secretary’s waded in, calling attacks on the NHS unpatriotic.  Patriotism has nothing to do with it, you idiot.  If patriotism was the best argument in favour of the NHS, it’d be in real trouble.  If the best the pro-NHS crowd is cranks like Andy Burnham, then our best isn’t very good, either.

When I first came to the UK I was lucky enough to bump into Bob Brecher giving a talk at a conference and was duly impressed by his approach, so when I was organising a seminar series at the University of Ulster I invited him to be a speaker. One point that I still recall from that excellent talk was his emphasis that structures are morally prior to people in regards to moral criticism. His point was that there is little point complaining about how unethical people are being if they are put in a position where they have little other choice. In other words criticising the system is prior to and more important than criticising the person involved.

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Wouldn’t you know it, my favourite religious commentator (and I favour one religious commentator over another in the sense that I favour a hangover over a migraine or burst aneurysm) George Pitcher has weighed into the prayer on the wards coverage.

Guess what?  His opinions aren’t impressive. more…

Via the Press Association, the BBC has been reporting the motion to be discussed by the BMA conference that would explicitly seek to allow doctors to offer to pray for their patients.  The full text of the motion is available via the Christian Medical Fellowship’s website.

Right.  Go and make a cup of tea.  We could be here a while.

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It’s another one of those posts about drug policy, I’m aftaid: this week’s All in the Mind covered the Portuguese experiment with decriminalisation (about which I posted recently), and is available to listen for the next few days.  Depressingly, one of the contributors dropped a fairly broad hint - accurately, I think - that the UK would not be willing to make any comparable experiment, not because of any evidence against its advisability, but because of the cowardice of MPs and the bone-headedness of the commentariat (and electorate) to whom they’re in thrall - this is about 13 minutes in.  (On which notion, remember this?)  The same contributor also pointed out that the three main political parties have been forced by this reality to admit tacitly that criminalisation probably isn’t the best move, but cannot actually say that this is what they think clearly and publicly - hence they’re not only pushing a policy that plainly doesn’t work, but also one in which they really don’t believe.

By spooky synchronicity, over at Practical Ethics, Roger Crisp considers the recent pulling of Release’s “Nice People Take Drugs” adverts, and suggests that

[m]odern attitudes to drugs mirror those of advocates of temperance in the nineteenth century, who were moved by the terrible harms done to individuals, families, and communities by the abuse of alcohol. Few these days campaign for the prohibition of alcohol, and it is widely thought that a licensing system can mitigate a good deal of the harm of alcohol without unduly restricting the liberty of individuals to consume alcohol should they wish

- which seems to be on the money.  Noone who argues for a reform of the drug laws is saying that there should be a free-for-all: it’s just a matter of pointing out that humans like getting off their chops (as do other animals, apparently), and that we aren’t going to let small considerations like legality and wisdom get in the way, so we might as well grow up about it and come up with a policy that reflects this.

Meanwhile, Ben Goldacre’s latest Bad Science column addresses similar concerns through the lens of the US’ reaction to the WHO’s report on cocaine in the 1990s.  I don’t want to give away the plot, but it’s fair to say that the word “petulant” could be used with justice.

Debbie Purdy goes to the House of Lords today to seek assurance that her husband won’t be prosecuted for assisting suicide should he accompany her to the Dignitas clinic.  It’s hard not to sympathise with her request - but, speaking on the Today programme this morning, former DPP Sir Ken MacDonald said that he hoped her bid failed.  And, at least from a legal point of view, I think he might be right.  In essence, his point is that there’s something wrong with going to court to get permission in advance to break the law.

He added, though - also correctly - that there’s a very good reason to review the law.  MacDonald came over as thoughtful and insightful - and a whole lot more impressive than George Pitcher, who had spoken on the same topic a little over an hour earlier.  Quite why he should have been given airtime is beyond me - his qualifications seem simply to be that (a) he’s religious affairs editor of the Telegraph and (b) the BBC seems to think that you can’t have ethics without a large slice of religion (just have a look at this page to see what I mean).  Still - there he was.  And, lordy, did he talk some bollocks - which is appropriate enough.  Worse, it was tired, hackneyed, and false bollocks.

There were several claims: that allowing PAS or euthanasia is socially harmful and undermines the “social fabric” - whatever that is; that it diminishes the importance of death as a part of human life; that it undermines palliative care; that this point can be proved by looking at Holland and its non-existent palliative care system; and that allowing PAS or euthanasia for the ill will inevitably lead to its being available to the healthy.

Let’s deal with the last point first.  more…