However, the UK is a sovereign country and has made a choice. My opinion is that a union can only be completed through monetary union (even if unfortunately many in Germany still want the D-Mark back) and most likely only with a fiscal union (at least some taxes).
But since the UK, as a sovereign industrial country, has always stayed with the Pound and wanted to stay (except for the Scots), it is probably better the way it is now, even if the island’s macroeconomic numbers don’t look all that rosy, at least not from the mainland perspective.
All in all, I think that there were no winners in this campaign, but unfortunately only losers.
pro-Brexit? @TomasJ seemed rather keen to believe Scotland’s reducing life expectancy was somehow Brexit related but I’m not sure he was stating that it was a positive thing.
I was interested, as a victim of the us medical system, in the first few posts. I get to the bottom and it’s suddenly “empty grocery store shelves were a good idea”
Pro-Brexit people can block me RIGHT the fuck now.
Medical cost and Brexit are important - and somewhat touchy- subjects because it affects peoples’ lives on a very real, physical level. The matters deserve each their individual thread, though. IMHO.
UK’s NHS seems to like spending money on such things as diversity advisors who insist it should use terms like “cervix-havers”, “people who menstruate” or “birthing parent” rather than “women” or “mother” …
A member of my extended family was a “procurement consultant” for the NHS, they paid him £120,000 p/a to order the latex gloves and scalpels.
But “our NHS” is a bit of a holy cow and nobody must ever criticize it.
Our public health care system suffers from the politicians continually trying to “fix” its ails
We have those
But successive governments have screwed it up and they try to fix it
They’ve cut funding - which results in fewer staff
They were less than supportive through covid - so there are fear staff
And now they are trying to fix things by … moving surgeries from busier hospitals to less busy ones
Trying to see that EMT’s are not waiting in ER’s for hours
But nothing about increasing funding so that staffing levels go to where they need to be
I dont know if ours has “equity specialists” but I do know that they simply dont have the requisite # of staff
HMG keep spending more and more on the NHS but no matter how much they spend it will probably never be enough.
Over 60% of the UK population are now overweight and > 30% are obese, I do wonder if they didn’t think the NHS was there to patch them up no matter what whether they’d take more care of themselves.
A friend of a friend is a consultant and she was telling us of the range of illnesses that used to finish off OAPs but the NHS can now fix (at a cost)… only so they die a few months later of something even more unpleasant.
Then of course we have the thorny subject of nett migration with 14% of the UK population being first generation immigrants and 300,000+ still arriving each year. But you mustn’t raise the practical questions about school places, GP surgery / hospital capacity, social housing, etc… because if you do you’re a “racist”.
