How compassionate is your nurse?

Nurses are to be scored on how compassionate they are towards patients as part of a government plan to improve quality in the NHS to be unveiled in the runup to the 60th anniversary of the health service next month.

The health secretary, Alan Johnson, wants the performance of every nursing team in every ward across England to be measured, with the results published on an official website.

This is a stupid idea and will only lead to more money being taken away from healthcare. The patients will provide feedback but someone will have to check the feedback meaning at least 1 administrator will have to be employed in every hospital to check it over. They will of course be paid which will mean this money will have to come out of the hospital budget which they could use on treating patients.

I don’t know how many hospitals there is but let’s give an estimate of 200. If administrators were paid on average £18,000 per year then the bill for this new scheme would be £3.6 million per year which should be spent on healthcare. As you can see this is another stupid idea by a stupid government.

New born babies put at risk

A pregnant woman was forced to give birth in a hospital corridor after being turned away from two other hospitals when she went into labour.

Humiliated new mother Emma Johnson gave birth in a hallway at the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, West Sussex.

This new mother isn’t the first and she won’t be the last mother for this to happen to. Hundreds of sick babies have been turned away from London hospitals because of a shortage of intensive care beds. This is just in London. What about the rest of the country?

There is also a shortage of 2300 specialist nurses providing neonatal care which is putting even more babies at risk all because the government doesn’t know what they are doing but there is another element to this. Could it be that rising levels of immigration has lead to this?

Birth rates have rocketed in recent years which have taken government planners by surprise. Why is this when the native birth rate in this country has been steady? The only explanation there can be is that it is because of rising levels of immigration. Think of another reason why government planners failed to predict it when the native birth rate has not been rising.

60 soldiers killed by faulty equipment

As many as 60 British servicemen have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan because the Government failed to provide adequate equipment, a Tory inquiry has claimed.

Frederick Forsyth, the author and former RAF pilot chairing the special investigation into the treatment of the armed forces, accused ministers of 'frittering away billions' on pet projects while refusing to give troops fighting overseas the resources they need.

He said the work of the Military Covenant Commission - set up by David Cameron to help develop a Tory defence manifesto - had uncovered 'inadequate' policies towards the military in virtually every area it examined, from healthcare and education for troops' families to housing and legal support.

I am not surprised about this at all. The government haven’t even attempted to keep our soldiers safe. They would rather see the soldiers die than provide them with equipment which they need which is why I am glad that the government is being sued by families of those servicemen killed because of useless equipment. I hope they win and the government are forced to do something about it.

News roundup 75

Lost rivers of London to resurface in Boris plan. If rivers have been concreted over it could happen anywhere.

Pollution in capital exceeds limits by up to 100%. Yet another reason not to live in London.

Demand for green biofuels pushing up food prices, Government report warns. That was obvious.

Two more years of food price misery. I think it will be longer than that.

US flooding ruins crops and threatens global food prices. Get ready for more food riots.

Households that fail to recycle waste face £50 bin fine. They can only get people to recycle through force.

Poll: most Britons doubt cause of climate change. The enviroloons are losing.

One in five Freedom Of Information requests turned down by Government. We should have access to more information.

LDA staff competed to spend taxpayers' money, Mayor's audit reveals. It’s not their money so they will spend as much as possible.

£11million: The bill for Home Office staff perks in ONE YEAR. Why do they need those expenses?

MPs set to claim £40,000 perk. Build flats for our MPs. It will be cheaper in the long run.

Gordon Brown plans to fight only one election. I hope he loses it.

MINISTERS 'GAGGED', CLAIMS DAVIS. Gordon doesn’t like debate.

Now mobile phone users could be charged to RECEIVE calls in the UK. Why can’t the EU just stay out of it?

Royal Navy warships may form part of EU fleet. I hope not.

User-generated content and weblogs - a new challenge. Translation: How do we control criticism?

Abortion increase in young girls. Disgraceful.

Near £600k bill for hospital parking in East Lancashire. They should give the money back.

NHS trusts 'failing on hygiene'. They should be prosecuted if anyone dies.

Military families should get preferential NHS treatment, Tories say. Good idea.

Government U-turn on plans to build new warships... sinking hopes for hundreds of jobs. The government hate the military.

UK inflation set to hit highest in a decade. That’s just great.

Terrorists allowed to stay

Sometimes our judges should be shot for the stupid decision which they make. Abu Qatada won’t be deported to Jordan where he is wanted on terror charges. He should be deported. It is irrelevant what that country’s criminal justice system is like. At the very least he should be rotting in prison for encouraging terrorism against people who don’t believe in Islam.

Another terrorist will also soon be released even though at one stage he was one of our most wanted terrorists. What exactly is the government doing allowing these scum to live in the country they hate?

It isn’t all bad news. Abu Hamza is finally going to be deported to America where he will face trial and hopefully the rest of his life in prison.

Prisoners to be rewareded for going on the run

Prisoners who go on the run could have the time cut from their sentence, internal Government papers revealed last night.

Convicts will be able to count both the day they absconded and the day they were caught as time spent behind bars.

This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard. It is basically rewarding criminals for getting away with their crimes. It will just encourage more criminals to go on the run as all they will have to do is complete the rest of their sentence. It’s madness.

Anonymous witnesses to be allowed

The government has vowed to change the law to allow anonymous witnesses in some court cases after a key Law Lords ruling effectively halted the practice.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw said there was a real need for some witnesses to have their identities protected.

Mr Straw told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the law will be changed "as quickly as possible".

The ruling quashed the murder conviction of a man who was convicted with the aid of anonymous evidence.

While I sympathise with the government and the anonymous witnesses I think the law lords have made the right decision. Defendants should have the right to face their accuser as this is part of the process of a fair trial.

What the government should be doing is investing in witness protection programmes that will keep witnesses safe so that they do go ahead and tell their side of the story during a trial.

News roundup 74

Burglary Hook lad's jail let-off. Why isn’t he in prison?

Our 'arrest-shy' police: They make half the number the Americans do, warns think-tank. Its probably because of all the paperwork…

Police axe 999 response teams across Norfolk to 'improve service'. How will that improve the service?

Government call to give 'Blunkett's bobbies' more powers and responsibilities. Why not just give us more police?

Don't jail young thugs, give them 'intensive fostering'. We should be jailing more of them.

Murder suspects WILL keep right to win bail as ban would 'breach their human rights'. That’s just stupid.

Taxpayers fund support groups for paedophiles. It would be cheaper to execute them.

MEP arrested on fraud allegation. Yet more criminal politicians.

Ex-soldier repels machete armed robbers. He should have been given a medal.

Task force formed to stop county's foreign criminals. Just shows you how much crime is committed by criminals.

Caretaker sues school for £50,000 after fall because he 'was not trained how to use stepladder'. This man is an idiot.

School sports day axed by killjoys 'in case children fall over and hurt themselves'. These people should be sacked.

Council orders pensioners to take down plastic flowers - because they are health and safety risk. They are just justifying their stupid jobs.

Council bans 'brainstorming' and replaces the term with 'thought showers'... for fear of offending epileptics. It doesn’t even offend them.

Not even Labour would do this

Homeowners face having to pay a specialist to inspect their trees under a safety regime drawn up by one of Britain’s most respected watchdogs.

The British standard for tree safety inspection would require all trees to be checked by a “trained person” every three years, with a still more rigorous “expert inspection” by an arboriculturist every five years.

Tree owners will also be obliged to conduct a “walk-by” inspection themselves once a year.

The drive to make all trees subject to inspection is being led not by the Health and Safety Executive - which opposes the move - but by the British Standards Institution (BSI). Highly respected in the building and engineering industries, it is better known for its views on the composition of cement than on the health of trees.

I don’t think even the government would go for this. It would lead to even higher taxes and could be bad for the environment. There will be tens of thousands of trees under the authority of each local council. Could you imagine the bill councils would have to pay? All it would lead to is councils paying to have trees knocked down because they would be unable to afford the maintenance without substantially increasing taxes.

The government would be mad to go along with this. It would damage them during a time where they are trying to look like a green and environmentally friendly party.

Another hospital bans flowers

Banning flowers in Dorset County Hospital must have been a success because now other hospitals are trying it.

This time South End hospital has decided to ban flowers for health and safety reasons for a trial period of one month starting July 7th. The ban is being introduced because the hospital believes flowers could pose a safety hazard with all the hi-tech medical equipment around beds.

Could this idiocy be coming to a hospital near you? It wouldn’t surprise me.

Are there 2000 terrorists?

The government doesn’t seem to be able to agree on the amount of terrorists in this country. In May 2007 MI5 said there were 2000 terrorists in Britain. Lord Stevens the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner disagreed and said it was closer to 4000.

A few days ago Gordon Brown makes a speech saying that the security services are monitoring 2000 terror suspects in the UK. It’s been over a year between MI5 claiming their amounts and Gordon Brown making his speech. Are we supposed to believe that the numbers of terrorists have remained static? I don’t believe that for one minute. Either our government is hiding the real numbers or the security services are too incompetent to arrest a decent number in one year. I don’t think it would be hard to arrest 300-400 of them particularly if they were actually terrorists.

This kind of makes a mockery of the government claim they need more time to hold terrorist suspects when it looks like they haven’t even made a move on any terrorists that they have been monitoring. Thank god the House of Lords might overturn the 42 day detention bill.

Ministry of Defence owes £3.5 billion

A hidden £3.5 billion of debt has been run up in the Ministry of Defence under years of Labour mismanagement, say the Tories.

This wouldn’t surprise me. The Labour party are unable to spend money properly and I don’t think they are able to stay out of debt because the military is in debt, the country is in debt and their own party is in debt. How can they be expected to run a country when they can’t even run their own political party?

If the military is in this much debt they should have never spent £3 billion on a satellite called Skynet, probably named after The Terminator satellite that waged war on humans. Are they trying to tell us something or are the people that make up the names of the satellites not that creative?

Gordon to punish Richard Dannat

Army chief General Sir Richard Dannatt will not become head of the Armed Forces.

Sir Richard has incurred the wrath of ministers after commenting that soldiers are paid less than traffic wardens and their families in Britain are living in "appalling" housing.

He could have moved from his current post of Chief of the General Staff to Chief of the Defence Staff on the retirement of Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, but Sir Jock has been asked to stay on until a suitable replacement is found.

The government seem to hate opposition to their plans which is why they are going to punish Sir Richard Dannatt for speaking up for the troops. The fact is our troops are treated badly. They lack essential equipment that can save lives like the life of Guardsman Neil 'Tony' Downes who might have survived in his armoured vehicle if it had been fitted with electronic equipment capable of electronically disabling roadside bombs.

Spain to pay immigrants to go home

Spain will offer unemployed immigrant workers financial incentives to return to their countries of origin, labour and immigration minister Celestino Corbacho told newspaper El Pais on Sunday.

A slowing economy has halted Spain's construction boom and building sites are laying off workers, including many from Latin America, North Africa and Eastern Europe.

Corbacho said workers who agree to return will be entitled to receive accumulated unemployment benefits in two lump sums, provided they take their families with them and commit not to return to Spain for at least three years.

Corbacho estimated the incentives to be offered as of next month would affect 1 million workers and their families.

Immigrants account for about 10 percent of Spain's population, up from nominal levels in the early 1990s. In previous decades, many Spaniards left the country for northern Europe in search of work.

The BNP have been saying we should do this for years and now have been proven right. This is a common sense policy to deal with immigration but liberals just can’t see it that way. They are blinded by accusations of racism and just can’t handle that they are wrong.

Changing the education system

Our education system is inferior to many other countries. Children are given inferior teaching in failing schools and then they are over burdened with tests. The Liberal Democrats would like to change that.

The Liberal Democrats would replace national tests at seven and 14 which I think is a good idea. I don’t see the point in testing at 7 and 14. It doesn’t show anything but there is more reason to test pupils in their last year of primary school and secondary school. It shows how well the education is in both schools. In the last year of primary school they are about to take up a new challenge of secondary school while at the tests at secondary school decide their fate for the rest of their life.

The Swedes have also good ideas when it comes to education. I have covered that subject before but now the Swedes are going to adopt the IGCSE which is far more demanding that our own GCSE because it is internationally recognised and I believe we should do the same. Our country should be competing on the world stage and we need a better educated workforce to do this and the GCSE is increasingly seen as not worth the paper it is printed on.

Our schools minister doesn’t seem to like the IGCSE though. Jim Knight has said that "We do not agree that the IGCSE is in any way superior to the GCSE.” However as this government has an open door policy and is allowing anyone to come in and work the government should be allowing our workforce to compete on an international level like the Eastern Europeans are doing.

Labour could force people into debt

High-earning families could be kicked out of their council homes in an effort to help needy people stuck on waiting lists.

And tenants who own a second property also face eviction under plans being considered by ministers.

The move comes after a report found 261,000 households benefit from cheap council housing despite having an income of more than £2,000 a month after tax.

This includes 38,000 families earning more than £50,000 a year - way above the national average of £27,000.

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But four million people with genuine need for subsidised housing are languishing on waiting lists.

The study by the New Local Government Network said householders should be made to do an annual tenancy review.

High-earners would be encouraged to move out or face a rise in their rents.

If the government were so bothered about low earners having access to houses he would stop people coming into this country to allow more homes to be freed up. If there are less people there would obviously be more housing to go around.

This is also just going to hurt people who have not earned enough to afford a house partly because of sky high taxes. Does this government seriously think that people would keep paying rent to the council if they could afford to buy a house?

All this will do is encourage more people to apply for mortgages who can’t afford them or don’t want to go into debt but have to because of government policy. This policy will just force more people into debt and the debt in this country is already bad enough.

Less food and energy because of EU rules

If you were the European Union fanatic and you were faced with the prospect citizens of a member state wanting to leave what would you do to make them want to stay forever? The answer would be to make them need you for all sorts of things like electricity and food and that is exactly what the EU is trying to do.

A proposed EU directive could force our coal-fired power stations to shut down earlier than planned. Our government is already going to close down nuclear power stations.

The EU already has a law in place which has been blamed for the recent blackout which resulted in 500,000 homes going without power. The European Union’s Large Combustion Plant Directive sets strict limits on the number of hours that some of Britain’s largest and most heavily polluting coal and oil-fired power stations can operate before they have to close in 2015. The time is measured in “stack hours” — the length of time that chimney stacks, rather than individual generation units, are in use.

It is clear what is going to happen if this is allowed to continue. We will rely more and more on foreign nations to power our country giving us every reason to stay in the EU because we will suddenly need them to heat our homes even though they are the ones that caused the power shortages. The same is true for our food. Once they control our food supply they decide whether we live or starve to death.

A new EU proposal would outlaw four fifths of the chemicals used by UK farmers and cut crop yields by between a quarter and a half meaning that we will have to rely more and more on imports to feed our country.

The EU knows what they are doing. They know that their actions will result in less food and energy for us and could result in us starving or freezing if we left it too late to leave, that’s if we ever left at all.

House of Lords could delay treaty

As the our government and the EU continues with the ratification of the constitutional treaty regardless of what the Irish have decided we are left with the House of Lords to save us yet again but this time they probably can only save us until October but it could be enough time.

If the Lords manage to delay it on Wednesday you can thank Lord Owen as the plans of europhiles will be scuppered yet again. If that fails we might have to hope that the EU will be willing to listen to two countries if the Czech Senate votes to reject it which they most likely will.

The EU still probably won’t take no for an answer which will probably mean that they change some of the treaty and say it is something different and stop the Irish from voting against them and tricking the Czech Senate into believing it is something else.

News roundup 73

Pensioners seized by Heathrow police - over 'inflammatory' protest T-shirts. Where are their rights?

Ian Huntley 'to convert to Islam'. This man should have been short long ago. There is something wrong with him

Criminals 'will be forced to wear high visibility bibs while carrying out community service'. How exactly will this stop them from committing crime?

Children's Tsar has 9ft fence built around his house to protect him from the 'yoof' he champions. Reality has finally struck him.

Warning over immigrant purse-snatch gangs. Don’t you love the diversity of crime?

Stop the bin inspectors and get fined £5000. They should remember who they work for.

Monthly rubbish collections on the way, waste chief warns. I wonder what health concerns this will cause.

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol. Hopefully this could be harnessed on a bigger scale.

Civil servants sent to aid the poor live it up in 5-star hotel. How do they sleep at night?

Destroyers couldn't afford missiles

There seems to be a lot of cost cutting in the navy these days. When we get new aircraft carriers we will have to share them with France because we can’t afford our own.

Today I find out that HMS Exeter and HMS Southampton have been working without their Sea Dart guided missile system since Christmas so that the MOD can save a bit of cash.

The missiles, used to protect the destroyers and larger aircraft carriers against air attack, have been stored away even though HMS Exeter has sailed to the Mediterranean twice and joined a NATO-led operation in that time.

If these destroyers were ever attacked they would find it more difficult to defend themselves as their Sea Dart guided missile system is their primary defence.