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I wonder how many of these British “holidaymakers” in France actually went to France to get surgical operations they couldn’t get on the holy NHS because the holy NHS has shut most of its hospital wards?
Not many.
To expand on this N-. If you are making an allegation I suggest you produce some shred of evidence that makes you think that British people went in droves to France to get surgical help. Bearing in mind that the French health system is also under pressure from covid-19, they may have stumbled on a long que of people seeking the same.
If you just turn up at a French hospital and demand the kind of treatment that I presume the OP is talking about (e.g., hip replacements or heart bypasses), you won’t get very far. Your EHIC won’t cover it as it’s not a condition that arose while on your trip, so you will need an S2 form (hurry, hurry while the Withdrawal Agreement lasts). Those are issued by the NHS, so I suppose you could make an FoI request to find out how many have been written out this year. I’m guessing it’s not very many. There were a few cases some years back of NHS trusts in Kent sending people to Calais for one or two procedures, but it’s not just something that you can up sticks and claim.
@SA – I was just asking, not asserting.
“Bearing in mind that the French health system is also under pressure from covid-19, they may have stumbled on a long que of people seeking the same.”
I doubt there’s any other “advanced” country which is as corona-insane as Britain. Basically much of the NHS has shut down and people have been clapping along with the prime minister to say “thank you”. I don’t know of any other country that’s as mental as that. Many nurses even now are going in to work and doing nothing all day long, because many wards remain mothballed – even as daily *reported* deaths “with Covid-19” are probably not even causing any “excess deaths” more than would be caused by the number of car crashes for the time of year being about 0.5 standard deviations above the 5-year mean.
@Nick – I wasn’t only thinking of hip replacements or heart bypass surgery, but of more minor surgery too, such as hernia repair or many other things, things that cost maybe a few thousand pounds privately in Britain but some people haven’t been able to get either on the NHS or privately – and indeed if people are claiming on private insurance then the usual route (expected by the insurer) is for them to see the guy who works as “their” NHS GP to get a letter after they’ve greased his palm, the same letter he’d write to refer them within the NHS (perhaps even to the same surgeon) without charging them – and all of this is difficult if the local GP surgery is telling you to eff off because you might spread germs, so you can imagine some people saying damn it, I will go to Ireland or France or anywhere I can get this problem fixed.
“I doubt there’s any other ‘advanced’ country which is as corona-insane as Britain.“
Is there any other country that has f*cked up the grade assignments for its state exams this year “because of corona”, for example?
As far as I am aware, there are NO other countries that allow most so-called “public” universities routinely to vary “entry offers” for undergraduate places according to what schoolteachers have told them about each candidate and what accent the candidates have spoken in at interview. In most countries, universities will publish the entry requirements for each degree course, and in a few cases they will say they will not accept more than the x students with the best marks, and that’s it. There is not even such a role as “admissions tutor”. And there are no interviews. Why should there be?
All the stuff about “socioeconomic” this and “socioeconomic” that in Britain is fake, a case of “I’m not lying to you” – or in this case, “Class? Oh we do our very VERY best to ENSURE that the son of a navvy gets EVERY ALLOWANCE MADE FOR HIM relative to the son of an investment banker. Access to knuckle-draggers is our ABSOLUTELY top priority.”
I don’t have current bureaucratic details to hand, but it used to be the case and very probably still is that whereas teacher-graded elements of GCSEs etc. could have their grades changed, it was considered completely unacceptable for them to have the RANKS changed – which says a great deal about what schools are all about. If a teacher said this student was a grade above that one, it was extremely difficult to get the board to admit that hey, the second student’s coursework when properly looked at and re-marked deserved a grade higher than the first student’s. As John Taylor Gatto rightly said, one of the fundamental functions of schools is “caste verification”.
Schoolteachers have been trying for YEARS to mark GCSEs and A Levels – not just coursework elements but every damned paper if they could manage it. Why? Because just occasionally a school student slips through their net. They HATE it when someone whose back they have put “C” on for years, and whom they have always “taught” accordingly, manages to get a B or an A, or, perish the thought, an A*. That’s like the world turning upside down for them.
Is there even any other country where teachers send “expected grades” to examination boards, let alone mostly without telling the students what grade they’re sending? What’s the point? There’s no decent point in it whatsoever, and the same goes for variable university “offers” for the same degree course, and also for universities interviewing students. There should be a required entrance bar and if you get over it, notify the university you’re registering for the course and then turn up on the first day of term. It’s like that most of the time in other countries.
The danger now is that once schoolteachers have got their filthy hooks into having a large role in determining what grades are assigned, the b*stards will resist like f*ck having that influence taken away from them.
Here’s another example of British craziness: this photo in the Financial Times showing a protestor holding a sign saying “Judge Potential Not Postcode”.
What a classic!
First, the idea that universities should choose who to “offer” places to on the basis of “potential” is cack. It may superficially sound good, but the notions that you have a RIGHT to go to university if you have the qualifications, a RIGHT to get good grades if you work hard and answer the questions right, and that human beings are NOT born with differing amounts of “potential”, but all with the same enormous potential – these three notions top it.
Second, don’t say “postcode” when you mean class or caste. Say class or caste. Postcodes don’t tell you a person’s class – or sometimes they do when you take the whole code which covers on average only about 15 properties, but the bit before the last three characters doesn’t and sometimes even the string that end before the last two characters doesn’t either. There are streets for example in which some children attend the local dump school and others go to one of the Clarendon schools. And moreover not all children who attend Clarendon schools are from the ruling class. The basis of the “education” system is not postcode but CLASS.
Moreover, use of the term “postcode” makes it sound as though the ruling class craps on the working class and stitches working class children up educationally because the ruling class is using an “objective measure”. Well no, they are not. They are subjective, mean and arrogant, extremely class conscious, and full of hatred against the lower orders. They know they are the ruling class. They don’t think they’re the “ruling postcode”.
Third, the protestor’s basic idea may be that awarding grades by teacher prediction is preferable to awarding them by “algorithm” (i.e. basically by what school you go to, but described using Californian Google-Apple-advertising language). Well schoolteachers may think they are “good at spotting potential”, but what they actually do is seek fanatically to cue children into their assumed “Brave New World”-type hierarchy and they get vicious when children (or even worse, a child’s parents) baulk.
What a classic example of “opposition” on the enemy’s terms – literally using the enemy’s psyops terms.
OK this is a young person and it is good to see her protesting… But still…
We live in a class society ruled by the ruling class.
The class that produces wealth or makes the wealth of nature available is the working class. It is not moneylenders or landlords or those who invest capital in production – they produce NOTHING.
That is not or at least should not be difficult to understand.I have had enough of hearing about “meritocracy” and “postcode” and “potential” and such avoidance and euphemism.
Argh! New College, Oxford, say they will “honour” all “offers” (source: BBC), even ones they made to students who haven’t made their grades. Oh thank you, thank you! This is one of the nobbiest colleges of Oxford University – it’s one of the nobbiest university organisations in the world – with a 600-year-old connection with Winchester College and close ties with Eton College too. Seriously if you are 18 years old and doing well at a comprehensive school and nobody in your family has been to university before, the idiot teachers at the school are unlikely to advise you to apply to New, unless maybe the Oxford colleges have split the country up into areas to conduct their “outreach” in (as Cambridge colleges have) and you look funny or something, so they can get some publicity out of you to show the world how equal-ops they are. They all love “hugging hoodies” so much, both before and after they pass the port they quaff in the service of “charity”.
The whole system of “offers” stinks and shows how patrician Britain is. Do your betters think you have the “potential” to “benefit” from university? Yes? Well here’s an offer, made to you after they heard your accent at interview and read what the school said about you. Be grateful? No? Well naff orf!
