Support Your Striking Doctors

Doctors eh? Public school rowdies who spend most of their time fiddling with their bow ties, groping nurses or playing golf. Overpaid, constantly skiving off to do private work, probably Freemasons, rude, uncaring gits.



I should know - my parents are doctors. Some of the stereotypes are true: they have the social skills of a truculent whelk.

Actually, they largely aren't. Last time I spent much time with unrelated doctors they fulfilled another stereotype entirely: they looked like teenagers, which tells you how old I am. More specifically, they looked like well-paid teenagers who'd just caught a taxi from an indie all-nighter to their surgical round. Directional haircuts, pointy shoes, floaty dresses and manicured facial hair (not all on the same person).

Clothes aside, they looked like they'd just tumbled out of a nightclub because they were fashionably dishevelled, by which I mean they looked exhausted, not self-medicated at all. That would never happen. It wasn't even what's privately known as Death Week. They were junior doctors: the skutters of the medical profession. They've got their degrees but need lots and lots of hands on experience with real live (for now) bodies to translate theory into practice. They work insanely long hours on a schedule that would drive the rest of us mad, in conditions that a crane operator or lorry driver wouldn't be permitted for safety reasons, and they don't get paid nearly as much as you might think. Those bow ties and Rolls-Royces come much later.

They do get some extra payment for unsocial hours, outside 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Monday to Friday, seeing as that's when most of us like to sleep or see our friends and families or just stare vacantly into space without anybody's life depending on us. But now the Secretary of State for Privatising Health (a devotee of homeopathy by the way) has decided that 'normal' hours are 7 a.m. until 10 p.m., Monday to Saturday. A basic pay rise is mooted but there are no details. Lots of doctors doing emergency work will probably get a bit poorer, or more likely follow the massive crowd of medics packing flights to Australia. Lots more just won't go to medical school. Why spend every night with your arm up somebody's bottom for an eventual middle-class salary when you have the grades to go into banking and gamble with everybody's pension for a shedload of cash and no responsibility at all. You still get access to high quality drugs after all.

The juniors may strike soon – not emergency care, but routine activity, for very short periods. I know it's hard to generate much sympathy for a gang which is paid very well by national standards, has never supported the rest of the union movement and has a hotline to those in power (no Health Minister wants an appendectomy from a displeased doctor) but we need to understand that in the new economy, doctors, legal aid lawyers and a whole host of groups who used to think that they were the bourgeoisie and thus rising with the rentier class are actually all workers now. Their jobs – like those of educators and a whole host of others – are being mechanised, downgraded, sold off and casualised by a class obsessed by profit and a reductively-defined notion of efficiency. Like it or not, doctors are becoming as disposable and subject to the whims of the market as factory line workers. Their wages and conditions are to be degraded as much as humanly possible and their professional objections will be dismissed as special pleading. I certainly don't want a tired doctor on a reduced salary wondering how to pay off her £100,000+ student debts without going private or fleeing the country.

We need to support the doctors because if it hasn't already been you, it will be your turn next.

May The Odds Be Always In Your Favour

Note to self: the School Games aren't like the Hunger Games. For a start, the food this year is astonishingly good: tasty, plentiful and hot. Previous years' catering made me yearn for the surly presentation of cold greasy school dinners, it was that bad.

However, the Games' opening presentation was enough to put anyone off there dinner. After a long day's hard work, does anyone deserve to be confronted with a parade of Tory gargoyles. First up, we had Jonathan Edwards: excellent athlete, thoroughly nice man now he's stopped being a god-botherer. Then Tanni Grey-Thompson, fine paralympic athlete.

Two Northern Ireland fencers

Jonathan Edwards on the big screen. Had to make it monochrome, epileptics wouldn't respond well to the jacket. 

Tanni Grey-Thompson

Sebastian Coe: 'and at Thursday's election, your parents all moved to the left'. 

Then… oh dear. Sebastian Coe (wonder whether his LOCOG fees are being put through a tax-evading service company?), the CEO of Sainsbury's, another thieving tax-evader trying to buy the public's affection, followed by perhaps the only man who could make him look less selfish,  Jeremy Hunt, in what I hope and pray is his last official appearance as a public servant (ho ho ho) before his Leveson appearance next week and resignation in disgrace. He made one jokey aside referring to his recent troubles - tumbleweed.

The only amusing bit was the grovelling commentator who followed Hunt. After toe-curling praise for his support (despite this government's slashing of £162 million from school sport, resulting in less activity and a shrunken School Games), he moved seamlessly on to remind us of the most important bits of the Athletes' Charter - emphasising honesty and fair play. It's almost as if it was aimed at Mr Hunt. But it couldn't be. Oh no.

English hordes call for Jeremy Hunt's public evisceration

I can't post lots of pictures on Flickr until I get home - this internet connection is so slow I could personally visit your houses with printouts before they'd upload, but I'll post a few on Vole each day if I get the chance. As for me… well, I'm kitted out in bright blue 'event management' sports gear. I spent the day haring around doing, well, 'stuff', and learned quite a lot about armoury and weapons control. Tomorrow starts at 5.45 a.m. I shouldn't have any problem getting up: my room is at the end of City Airport's runway and flights start at 5 a.m.… If there are any quiet periods, I'm aiming to mark a dissertation per day. Today's seemed to have been mailed in from 1999: it discussed music downloading as though Napster and Kazaa were still relevant.

In other news: wonderful win for Hollande and France, and good news for the hard left in Greece. Shame that New Dawn (Greek Nazis) did well too though.

The most disgusting pervert on the internet

I just got a notification from Flickr about another user 'favoriting' (I know, it's not a verb, and it's missing a 'u') a picture I took. Oh goody. Perhaps one of my beautiful landscapes? Or one of my fencing action shots?

Er, no.

This is Jeremy Hunt, a man so unpleasant that even a Radio 4 presenter made the obvious slip, live on air. He's a Conservative Party minister. I took his photo - in the dark, at a distance, hence the poor quality - at the UK School Games. Oddly enough, his boring speech didn't mention his government's abolition of the event.

Delving into the users' profile, it seems that he or she seems to have some deeply perverse obsession with rightwing British politicians. Haza610: unless you moderate your desires (perhaps bestiality is a step up the moral ladder for you), you're blocked.

This morning's email haul hasn't been all bad: I've won $5,000,000,00 dollars (is that a trillion?) without even trying, thanks to Mr Collins Moore, and a young lady from the Cote d'Ivoire, Lilian Yao, wants to give me 10% of her £3,500,000 fortune if I just let it 'rest in my bank account', like Father Ted. See you, losers!