The sound of one star clapping
Clap for our carers, your moment of reviewment has arrived. You get two stars, maybe you can bang them together to applaud yourselves. You would have got one star, but I wouldn't have been able to make that funny joke. Or the following even funnier follow-up joke commenting on the previous one. And so on.
Two stars might seem harsh, but personally, I think our carers deserve more than a gross sexually transmitted disease and I certainly am not going to get involved in an organised movement promoting it. Who I give the clap to is my own private business... hang on... ok, my mum just told me you're talking about the other type of clap and that sexual health is not a joke. Yea, that's what I'm dealing with.
So let's start over with the good clap. One star, the worst. Why you ask? Wellllll, let me a paint a picture. I'm sitting at my desk in my little flat, it's lockdown and times are tight. Delivery drivers are turning up with no PPE and I've got a tiger by the tail with a review; I mean I'm a gazelle lurching away from the claws of insanity with each word. I connect with with the best flipping comment about cartoon weasels ever, then this noise, this distraction. My weasel has gone.
I look out of my window and see a load of people clapping and some cheering. I researched clap for carers and messaged my friend who is an ITU nurse flat out transforming a hospital and training auxiliary staff on respirators in anticipation of the first wave (which they did in two weeks doubling the ITU capacity). I've had to edit his response: "Clucking woke me up, bunch of clucking trunks // Write a clucking letter to your MP about no PPE, do something useful // Or let me get some clucking sleep // Trunks."
Because let's be honest, we're not clapping the carers, we're clapping our own recognition of the idea of the carers. If we actually gave a cluck, we would have taken some action when the Health and Social Care act was written by private health care and passed in 2012. Minister Andrew Lansey was suspected of being lobbied, he was rumbled by a journalist and his diaries were requested. Personal diaries were withheld, then redacted, then slowed down in court by Cameron's government until 2018 when they were ordered to be released by a judge, still incomplete.
The Health and Social Care act has been an absolute disaster for the NHS. I see the goal as restructuring to compliment private health to eventually merge and to run the NHS down so that the proposition of private healthcare becomes the only viable solution. Anecdotally in bars, it was spoken about pretty freely. In the press every couple of days there was a new waiting list horror story, or a new 'whistleblower' story or a new 'nurses leaving NHS' story. I know because I was editing them *cough* for online *cough*. It's not a coincidence, massive budgets were being spent to keep this narrative going.
Since 2012, tens of billions of new pounds have been lifted from frontline services and put into private pockets, much of it into management consultancy fees in the corporatisation process of the NHS. These management consultants have implemented theoretical systems that squeeze the human beings keeping things moving. In practicality these innovations are torture for the people working the shift patterns. Sleep deprivation, irregular nights and days, not fit for purpose interfaces, layers of administrative obfuscation, sweeping short term changes. These people have been squeezed through austerity, paid unfairly, coerced through their own commitment to caring, to the point where many have left the NHS. They finally got the message, they are not appreciated. What they do is not valued in our society.
We have overwhelmingly voted for the people doing this, we have said that this is the way we want it. We can't then turn around and give some golf clap of recognition. Now a virus is killing frontline health workers due to viral loading, many of whom don't have adequate PPE protection. They are terrified but still turning up. Bravo, we clap ourselves. They are human beings, not heroes. They don't want to be put up on a pedestal, they want to be treated fairly. Most of all they don't want to be clucking clapped.
So yea, it'd be great if you could go back in time and change your campaign from walking out into the street and clapping, to writing to your MP about the treatment of frontline NHS workers. Please work on that. I eagerly await your response and I actually don't have the clap, for the record. Probably.