Cut the clap – get angry instead

I DIDN'T stand on the doorstep clapping on Thursday night for the NHS as I have before nor did I chuck a few quid at the 99-year-old doddering around his garden and raising £18 million, or whatever it is now. These are well-meaning efforts and may make people feel good about themselves but it’s gesture politics. We should be gathering in the street in silence with our heads bowed for all those who have died – the health and care workers and the civilians – because they have been failed abysmally by this government. And the idea that you effectively gift aid the health service by charity isn’t just scandalous and absurd, it’s utterly demeaning and potentially undermines what is the greatest political and social achievement of all of our lifetimes.

I stand down to no-one in my support of the NHS. I have reason to thank it, probably for saving my life, having had seven operations in the last year and exemplary care. My late wife worked in the Beatson oncology unit in Glasgow for many years and I have friends on the frontline now risking their lives for you and me. So that’s my medals on the table, as they say in football.

A few celebrities chucking a few pence, for them, into the pot and media-friendly escapades to raise money may be great PR, but they blur the real issue – properly funding the chronically-underfunded health service. Because this government, any government, if it thinks it can get away with it, will encourage these efforts so that it can replace spending, keep down direct taxation, and avoid the backlash at the ballot box.

A few years ago, the LibDems, or whatever they called themselves then, proposed a penny on income tax specifically for the health service – which is what the old bruiser Gordon Brown abjured as hypothecation when he was Chancellor – and were slaughtered in the vote. Mind you, they did have a buffoonish pop-up leader at the time and the rest of their policies were dreamed up by a mystical coven with a ouija board.

Brown did at least provide the last boost to the NHS – 18 years ago this past Friday – by putting in an extra £6 billion, 1% on National Insurance, which the then Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, consistent to this day, decried as “a tax on ordinary families”.

And, seriously, would anyone trust Health Secretary Matt “Tony” Hancock to wisely spend any charitable money raised? You wouldn’t trust him with your bus fare, even if you gave him a map to find a stop and had the mysterious process of hailing and boarding one written down for him. What are his qualifications for the job? Not even, as the Bard of East Cheam put it, a second class diploma from night school and nine out of 10 for woodwork.

A friend of my daughter, who is on the hospital frontline, remarked that it was very kind of the restaurant which had delivered dozens of meals for staff, but that they didn’t need the meals, so why not give them to the homeless or foodbanks? They weren’t furloughed and worried about the rent, and what they really needed was PPE and unbreakable commitments from government to increase spending on the NHS to the levels in other developed countries.

In October last year, the British Medical Journal published a devastating and largely ignored research paper on the NHS, comparing the UK to nine other comparable, high-income countries, including Germany, Netherlands, France, and the US. No surprise that the UK spent least per capita and “spending, patient safety, and population health were all below average to average at best ...”.

We knew that, we have known that for years. It’s not about doorstep clapping or writing a cheque, goodhearted as the motives are, it’s about the survivors of this pandemic holding to account those who have failed us and making sure that doctors, nurses, paramedics, bus drivers, cleaners and care workers don’t die for us in future through lack of protective equipment and government inertia.

Another pandemic

They are laying down the bottles in Stockbridge and Kelvinside, Bearsden and Morningside, or they should be. Not bottles of Chateau Lafitte or Dom Perignon but premier cru extra virgin olive oil. Olive tree leprosy, xylella fastidiosa, where sap-sucking insects have spread the bacterium, has struck the olive-producing areas of Italy, Spain and Greece, killing some trees which are hundreds of years old, and ravaging loads of the mere striplings. They are all going to have to be replaced with resistant trees or we’re going to have to stick to the sunflower stuff. Dinner parties in the New Town may never be the same.

From bard to verse

Shakespeare was born next week (probably) in 1564. And died, almost certainly, in the same week, on April 23, St George’s Day, 1616, at the age of 52. There will be a lot about him in the coming days, but probably not the dark side.

He married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older than him, at 26, because she was pregnant. Will fled to London three years later. It was not a happy marriage although it produced three kids.

When he died he left almost everything to his favourite child, Susanna, and nothing save the second best bed for Anne. He had quickly become successful and bought property in London, but structured it in such a way that Anne had no interest in it. His will didn’t even make provision for her to continue to live in the family home at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, which seems to have been huge, with two orchards and a 60ft frontage.

He was, almost certainly, a secret Catholic and he died the night after a drinking session with poets Ben Johnson and Michael Drayton.

Maggie O’Farrell, a brilliant and compelling author, has written Hamnet, inspired by the son of the playwright whose name, save one changed letter, was given to perhaps the greatest play ever written.

Hopefully O’Farrell will write a prequel centred on Anne (or was it Ann? Or Agnes?).