A SORRY tale of woe, confusion and anger about the future of the National Health Service surfaces in the agenda for next week’s annual conference of the British Medical Association.
While most doctors I know are staunch defenders of the spirit and ethos of the NHS, they are the first to warn that it is dangerously spiralling to its destruction.
Money is being poured into the NHS by New Labour but much of it is going into the building of empires – the creation of ever rising tiers of managerial posts. Alarmingly, in most hospitals there are as many managers as doctors, nurses and general medical staff.
And this includes hospitals in Camden.
The result can be seen in the bulging payroll of the public sector – nearly 900,000 new jobs have been created in the past year.
Is creeping privatisation threatening to destroy the NHS?
Yes, according to a motion tabled by doctors in Barnet and Finchley who warn that the “bogus pretext of patient’s choice and competition will destroy the NHS”.
Doctors in Camden also warn that the NHS is being ripped of by private health. A motion by the 200-strong branch of doctors in Camden and Islington urge the BMA to oppose the Private Finance Initiative hospitals being built – like the Whittington extension and the new University College London Hospital that opened last week.
Dr Jeff Hinchley, secretary of local BMA branch of doctors, told me: “The private sector is being paid inflated prices by the NHS, It’s ludicrous and costly. Besides, people don’t always need private when there is a perfectly good NHS hospital available.”

Wanted: 16-year-old boy to seduce Cate

WHAT sort of daughter would movie star Cate Blanchett have?
And which sort of 16-year-old boy could seduce her? If you can look into your own offspring’s eyes and honestly answer “mine” to that question, there might be a few quid in it.
Fox Searchlight pictures are currently searching for a 12-16 year old girl to play Ms Blanchett’s daughter and a 16-18 year-old boy to play Blanchett’s lover in an adaptation of Zoe Heller’s novel, Notes on a Scandal.
Set in and around Camden and co-starring Dame Judi Dench, it tells the tale of a secondary school teacher seduced by a pupil from a council estate. My friend in the production office tells me director Sir Richard Eyre, who scored a hit in 2001 with Iris, is desperate to cast “a real north London boy and girl” in the film, and that previous acting experience is not necessary. Anyone brave enough to have a go can attend a casting call on Sunday July 3, at the Menier Chocolate factory in O’Meara Street, SE1, between 10am and 2pm.
Good luck!

Writers Salman and Zadie flock to the writer

Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith in front of Giancarlo Neri’s The Writer

WRITER Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance on Hampstead Heath yesterday (Wednesday).
Mr Rushdie was one of the guests invited to the formal unveiling of Giancarlo Neri’s sculpture, The Writer, in between the Men’s Pond and Kite Hill on the Heath.
But, unlike the throngs of guests – including fellow authors Zadie Smith and Deborah Moggach, assorted councillors and other VIPs – supping champagne in a cordoned off area by the sculpture, Mr Rushdie was happy to take a back seat.
I caught up with him having a cigarette well away from the crowds where we reminisced about his days on the Camden community relations council in the 1970s.
In those days, he said, he was living in Tufnell Park – where, incidentally, the Booker prize winning Midnight’s Children was written – and helping Bengali restaurant workers, amongst others, integrate into an often harsh society.
While he lives in Notting Hill now, he is still a frequent visitor to the Heath.
“Things do definitely seem a bit better now,” he said.
“There isn’t as much racial tension on the street as there was in those days.”

Not such an original idea from the Dalek, after all

THAT minister with a voice like a Dalek, the nation’s education chief Ruth Kelly (pictured) may be claiming credit for the idea to keep schools open in the evenings, but this column knows better.
Kelly Hours, indeed – bah!
In fact, the idea was first espoused in Camden by a great campaigner of the 1970s Terry Hargrave with whom I shared many a glass of wine, along with one or two councillors, as discussion raged over the stupidity of closing schools in the afternoon when they could be turned into youth and community centres in the evening.
Commonsense, you may think.
Of course, in its ineffable wisdom the council ignored these arguments, many of them floated in the New Journal.
Educationist Ted Wragg, an implacable foe of Ruth Kelly, traces the idea in The Guardian on Tuesday back to the 1990s and the social reformer Michael Young.
But let’s give credit to Terry Hargrave who died tragically young in the 1990s, and all those other ‘ordinary’ people whose commonsense usually far excels that of the educated classes!

It’s court number one for tennis-mad Lord Phillips

LORD Phillips was appointed as the highest judge in the country on Friday, but it is the Hampstead-based beak’s performance in a different sort of court that is exciting comment in Camden, I hear.
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers (pictured) was appointed Lord Chief Justice on Friday and will take over the top job from Lord Woolf in October.
A keen year-round Hampstead Heath pond-swimmer, he plays tennis every week at the courts at Parliament Hill Fields.
My source in the club blazer tells me Lord Phillips has a “great backhand” but that “his service isn’t very good”.
Wimbledon fans looking for a new British hopeful may have to continue their search, I fear.