DavidS wrote: ↑Thu Jun 25, 2020 10:22 am
daveuprite wrote: ↑Thu Jun 25, 2020 8:15 am
So poor old Tom Moore shuffled up and down his garden a million times to raise money for the NHS (which is not a charity, by the way). And then the goverrnment spaffed up the wall the equivalent of about half the money he raised on a late, discredited and totally useless contact tracing app.
The government ignored expert advice and offers of help from Apple and Google, who actually know about these things, and announced their own bespoke app with a big fanfare and a declaration of how enormously vital it would be. Now that they have cocked it all up, they try to rewrite history by saying it was never supposed to be more than a small additional measure in controlling virus transmission. O'Brien from 1984 would have been proud of that one. What an embarrassing shameful mess.
Do your charity research properly.
Thought you'd had enough of posting about this? Oh well
I used the word 'equivalent' deliberately.
The point is (had you read the post thoroughly) that the government has wasted millions on insisting that it knows better than the largest web-companies how to set up this tracing app. and it's been an abject failure. Another failure in a long line of failures, that have cost thousands of lives. And it wants you to look elsewhere rather than actually critique its performance. This is clearly working on you, David, because you seem willing to forgive this government almost anything, or defend it, or turn a blind eye. Well some people won't. Some people want tax-payers' money spent well. Some people have friends and relatives who died needlessly and whose families want answers.
As to the NHS charity arm (NHS Charities Together), well the NHS shouldn't have to have a charity arm. Pretty much everything NHSCT does should debatably be part of the core services you ought to find anyway in hospital settings or within the employment contracts of NHS workers. The NHS is a tax-payer funded lynch-pin of the welfare state, set up to provide free health access for all at the point of treatment via taxation. It replaced an inadequate and scandalous mixture of private billing, Victorian outdoor /indoor relief, occasional philanthropy and a great deal of simply untreated illness - and the founding of the NHS was deeply opposed by the tory party. Central government funding via taxation transformed the health of a nation and its prospects in the mid-late C20th. It was never ever intended to be a charity, even in small part. I accept there are some exceptional circumstances where people want to show extra personal appreciation to individuals who saved their life or helped them in their hour of greatest need - of course that's reasonable. But Johnson has milked the recent charitable donations for his own shameless political ends, often as a distraction from the chronic under-funding of the core NHS budget and to make the public look the other way instead of at his pitiful mishandling of the covid crisis. As a German comedian (yes, there is one...) said the other day:
"We don't do charity in Germany. We pay taxes. Charity is a failure of governments' responsibilities". And a very handy get-out for incompetent, uncaring politicians.
