Is our military…

[Blue Maverick]

Many of the emergency services have the same sense of humour.. I met a couple from Soton last year and we're now good friends.. The fact that they are staunch City fans got us talking but we quickly realised that we have a similar sense of humour... Paul was medically discharged from the police after two catastrophic strokes.. He was part of a covert child protection unit in Hampshire and saw some serious shit

His missus was amazed how alike we were in terms of our dark sense of humour

I only did 22 years in the RAF but saw my share of sights that I wouldn't have been near in civvy street with four Falklands tours (post conflict), 9 months in Belize and two tours of Iraq before I left... I took part in a number of SF exercises and totally agree with another poster who said that you wouldn't look twice at an SF person in the street... They are the ultimate grey men (or women)

At Basra we had a vehicle maintenance compound right next door to the SF lads and some of my lads took great delight in firing leftover boiled eggs and apples from packed lunches into their compound at lunchtime with our compressed air tyre inflator... They would eventually lose their cool and come charging round in their buggies and threaten to "take us to the fucking cleaners"... Or words to that effect ;-)

#Goodtimes

The yoke was on them , I’ll get my coat

 

[Bluemanc100]

The yoke was on them , I’ll get my coat

Good job they were hard boiled .. I’ll grab mine too

 

[metalblue]

England’s poorest people get worse NHS care than its wealthiest citizens, including longer waiting for A&E treatment and worse experience of GP services, a study shows.

Those from the most deprived areas have fewer hip replacements and are admitted to hospital with bed sores more often than people from the least deprived areas.

England's poorest 'get worse NHS care' than wealthiest citizens

Study found stark differences in A&E waiting times and experience of GP services

www.theguardian.com

"We have an accessible and fair legal system".

New research shows both the public – and legal professionals themselves – believe only wealthy people have access to the justice system.
Those at the centre of the legal system see it as even less accessible than members of the general public do.
Barely one in five people in the UK believe the justice system to be ‘fair and transparent’, new research has found.

People believe the UK justice system is ‘unfair, confusing and inaccessible’

New research shows both the public – and legal professionals themselves – believe only wealthy people have access to the justice system.

www.allaboutlaw.co.uk

“England’s poorest get worse NHS care than it’s wealthiest”. Wow what a headline. Let’s dig into this a bit shall we….

We know deprived areas make far more demands on our services than wealthy areas. They tend to have much poorer diets, living conditions are lower, and mental health suffers as a result (amongst other things).

That article makes a big point about the number being admitted from deprived areas with bedsores. You get bed sores by staying in bed, weight is a significant predictive factor in bed sores assessment, the report doesn’t explain the community setting these patients were admitted from nor does it say what services had been involved prior to admission, two vital components in assessing the point of failure (the person or the state) and given it’s headline if there were any evidence to indite the state here they would have done so.

You can read a lot about health inequalities in the UK but are they really inequalities - ie do they have materially less services per head of population (inequality) than the rest of the country or do they just need more than the rest? I’d argue they just need more (over 1m hospital admissions in England are obesity related). Obese people are more likely to suffer from respiratory conditions, obese people are more likely to live in deprived areas and have lower income, people with underlying respiratory conditions were more likely to die from COVID. Headline “Poor needlessly die from COVID”. But what was the root problem here? Obesity. So why are people in deprived areas more likely to be overweight? Don’t they know how to cook healthy meals? Are they just fat and lazy? Not in my book, when you can feed a family of 5 for under £3 from Iceland’s (frozen chicken nuggets and chips) versus cooking a healthy meal for £5-£10 what are you going to do when money is tight? So first things first we need to provide access to healthy lifestyle choices. Increasing benefits at the bottom end is certainly one way (and possibly cheaper than fixing the problem), we need to also include a “fat tax” like the sugar tax that makes that unhealthy choice more expensive than a healthy one. Result is less demand on all the services with an improved mental and physical health - not just for obese people - it’ll take years to reap the benefits but they will come. Yes this is a simplistic view of a complex situation and I’m not about to write a 20,000 word thesis on it …but you get the correlation.

So nothing there that’s says we don’t all have equal access and can’t be proud of our NHS. Some use it more than others.


Legal access. “New research” was actually 2015 (appreciate you copy and pasted it). It doesn’t really say what the consider to be inaccessible but I simply don’t agree legal access is inaccessible in the scenarios that we should care about. Anytime someone returns a product and gets a refund they are accessing our legal system. Sometimes you just have to know your rights and 98% of this country accesses the internet where you can readily get legal advice from various specialist forums. I got into it with a store the other week on something I’d brought about a year before (had 5 year guarantee) as I didn’t have the original receipt but could prove the purchase amount on my bank statement which is the legal threshold for “proof of purchase” - they argued a bit but once checked with a manger they processed my refund - I was happy to take a store credit to give a little concession but could have insisted on being given a full refund to my bank. Sacked from work unfairly? Plenty of places for recourse there.

Yes, our laws can be somewhat complex, so sometimes you need direct interaction with a legal bod, we can all access citizens advice for free, or our local trading standards for advice, for more bespoke advice if you have home or car insurance it’s usual that you have it included. You can always reach out to “no win, no fee… “. If you turn up a court you can get free legal representation on the day. I, with no legal training whatsoever, was able to successfully defend a parking ticket by one of these cowboy parking outfits - a bit of Google and an hour of my time and I had a perfectly good defence that they failed to respond to thus case won and subsequent application filed for my costs. Even if you defend yourself in court and you have a fair but legally weak argument the magistrate will likely direct you to settle so you can almost get a free swing at justice. Just don’t go with too weak an argument that can be considered frivolous as they really don’t like that (and rightly so). Of course some people are just plain stubborn and when they run into each other and want to litigate then, yes, the law can be very costly and act as a barrier to what you see as justice.

I’ll close by referring to my previous closing line which was we don’t always get it right.