NHS waiting lists - don't mention lockdown!
I think the lively election “debate” over NHS waiting lists provides an excellent illustration of the way in which false narratives can be created and then acted out by devious politicians colluding on both sides of the political divide. The Left takes up the role of Punch and attacks Tory Judy with accusations that Tory-cuts and planned NHS privatisation led to poor performance, Tory Judy counters by blaming irresponsible Leftist doctors for the parlous state of the NHS. To help with the distraction, statistics are butchered and circulated by a co-opted media. The chart below is currently plastered all over social media by Leftist Punch.
This chart was initially produced by statistical manipulator extraordinaire John Burn-Murdoch of the FT who ruthlessly twisted statistics to push the approved Covid narrative. Here the key point is to divert attention from the lockdown induced waiting list explosion in 2020 and focus instead on the left-right dynamics from forty odd years ago. This graph also relies on very dishonest stitching together of old and incompatible pre-2007 datasets1. Channel 4 produced an even worse hatchet job through highly selective cherry picking of statistics, also designed to push an anti-Conservative narrative2. Their “analysis” was so bad that I submitted a complaint to Ofcom, but received no response. You can find a detailed dissection of Channel 4’s dirty tricks on our website. It is also important to remember that none of this is accidental, everyone is starting with the same set of raw data, decisions about what data to show and hide are almost always Leftist political decisions, these outlets are not attempting to provide an objective picture in my opinion.
A child could grasp the fact that if you stop treating ill patients, as we did in March 2020, an explosion in the NHS waiting list is the only possible outcome. Looking at the number of NHS patients waiting for 52 weeks or more, you can very easily see this metric started from zero and then immediately exploded as soon as lockdowns started.
The increase in the total waiting list is less dramatic due to the fact that the opening number is large and also includes a large number of patients waiting a short period of time. Even so, all categories of waiting list increase as soon as lockdown starts (see chart from British Medical Association in notes3). This obvious fact cannot be expressed in our Puch and Judy show as both parties are complicit in this catastrophe and therefore they collude to place the subject of lockdown out-of-bounds.
Another tell is that the bureaucracy has deleted a number of very useful cancer waiting time metrics. Luckily I tracked these metrics during COVID and produced this jaw dropping chart showing the percentage of GP urgent referrals that were seen within two weeks. You can see that this metric was stable at around 95% for many years, deteriorated slightly from the end of 2018 but then collapsed as soon as lockdowns started.
When I went back to the statistics page to see what had happened in the meantime, I found that this dataset and similar metrics had been blitzed and replaced with near useless data, most of which was only available from 2021 onwards. Remember folks that a large part of the COVID PsyOp involved monkeying around with COVID related statistics, including creating the terribly misleading deaths “involving” COVID category. I suspect that the cancer waiting time statistics may have been axed as they exposed uncomfortable truths including the obvious truth that it was lockdowns that caused a collapse in cancer treatment.
Deliberately ignoring the lockdown elephant-in-the-room shows how our post-truth system is happy to act out irrelevant narratives instead of facing cold truths. If people linked enormous waiting lists to lockdowns, then they might get angry at the Tory AND Labour Uniparty consensus that imposed these lockdowns and try and find a way to stop this happening in the future.
As I set out in my analysis of the hopeless Covid Inquiry4, it seems pretty clear that the Deep State very much intends to retain the lockdown stick to use again in the future. Also people need to understand that the uber-wealthy achieved a staggering increase in their wealth over the lockdown period, even Forbes admits to a USD 1.2 trillion increase in billionaires’ wealth5. You can bet that this interest group certainly has no incentive to prevent future lockdowns, so long as lockdowns are again accompanied by enormous money printing (more on this later).
My take as a libertarian is that the main battle is between the individual and a coercive Uniparty state, the narrative mangers on both sides are keen to ensure that we don’t focus on the liberty crushing lockdowns and instead continue to watch the scripted political Punch and Judy show.
Let me have your thoughts below and please don’t forget to circulate our material and support our work, we have already had to suspend various parts of our activities due to lack of funding! Our work is very labour intensive and requires a fair amount of research skill, we will have to abandon this initiative unless there is a real market for truth based analysis and advance exposure of the Deep State’s strategies and tactics.
I leave you with a great Thomas Sowell quote
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/longer-term-view-nhs-waiting-lists-england
https://thinkingcoalition.org/covid-19/the-covid-non-inquiry/
It’s not just the politicians. Members of the public just want to “put it all behind us and move on” without looking at the gory details and knock on consequences (cost of living crisis anyone?) Whenever I bring up this sort of stuff I get the “give it a rest, we’ve gone past all that” response.