Two examples of NHS discrimination today …
Discrimination #1
The Welsh Assembly today announced that it is abolishing parking charges in Welsh hospitals.
In Scotland, parking charges in hospitals are capped to £3 per day in the 6% of hospitals that charge for parking and in Northern Ireland only 20% of hospitals charge for parking compared to 92% in England. Twelve hospitals in England make over £1m per year in parking charges.
Discrimination #2
A new inhaler has been developed for asthma sufferers that improves the rate at which the drug is absorbed into the body helping the estimated three quarters of patients who don’t have enough lung capacity to take their inhaler properly … take their inhaler properly.
The Scottish Medical Consortium (SMC) – the public body charged with spending English taxes on the NHS in Scotland – has already approved the new inhaler for use on the NHS but the laughably named National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) won’t make its decision until later this year and if it costs money I think we know what the decision is going to be.
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At a vague tangent, if Scotland goes independent, will the ‘UK’ still exist?
If it does’nt, then we will all be out of Europe, which is not neccesarily a bad thing.
But if does still exist, how can it? When one half of the partnership has gone?
It all depends on whether the British government declares England the successor state to the UK or not. If Scotland left there would still be a UK, it would just be the United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. If the union dissolved completely then one nation would normally take on the role of the successor state so that international treaties continued to take effect – a bit like demerging a company, the parent company generally retains the contractual obligations that applied to the whole previously.
I believe that strictly speaking Wales is part of England as the last act of parliament to explicitly declare the status of Wales that I’m aware of confirmed its annexation to England. Northern Ireland isn’t actually a nation either strictly speaking, it’s a province.
Wales was conquerred and crushed, pretty much like Cornwall and Northumbria.
Oki, i was not aware of the concept of ‘successor state’, that seems cool.
Were the Irish not dealt with in 1801 and some odd union of crowns type thing?
Northern Ireland didn’t exist until the Irish Free State was created. It’s never been a country.
The most recent example of the concept of a successor state was probably Serbia which carried on as Yugoslavia after the break-up.