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Trivial or Great

There is a very narrow gap between trivia and great and important matters of State. The snowy weather is fun for lots of people. It’s pretty, sledgable, seasonal, and lets children have a few buckshee days off school. Yippee! (Although I guess that most of us are getting pretty tired of it now, and spare more than a thought for the cold and elderly, the essential services working under difficult conditions, and those suffering from assorted injuries as a result of snow-bound over-exuberance.) Yet if the grit or the strategic gas supply runs out, it could have terrible consequences for our already miserable economy. And therefore for our even more miserable Prime Minister.

The plot to remove him, apparently hatched in a curry house by Messrs Hoon and Hewitt, and the possibility of others like Bob Ainsworth potentially joining them, truly looks like Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Yet it could have a real and lasting effect on the outcome of the General Election, and therefore on all of our fortunes.

It was a welcome relief from political shenanigans to experience some real life in Malmesbury on Friday. I spent a shift with the Ambulance there, and as you would expect was immensely impressed by the sheer professionalism, determination, caring yet unselfconsciously cheerful approach of all of the people I met. They do a great job on the ground. Yet I remain deeply worried that the amalgamation of the Wiltshire Ambulance Service with all of those from neighbouring counties into the so-called Great Western Ambulance Service will not only do nothing to improve the service (it is now much worse performing in many way than the old and much abused Wilts Ambulance Service), but would also have the effect of sucking our ambulances from rural Wiltshire into neighbouring urban centres.

And so it was. Clinical team leader Philip Green and Emergency Care Assistant, Gina Magor and I were summoned to pick up a sick gentleman in Bath and take him to the Bristol Royal Infirmary. It took us four hours all told, during which time Malmesbury’s sole ambulance was not available for local jobs. And I am told that this happens all the time. The local ambulance takes people into hospital in Swindon, Bath or Bristol, and then gets a local job in those areas, often meaning that they do not return to Malmesbury for the entire day. I spoke up against the amalgamation at the time, my objections being pooh-poohed as out of date parochialism. But I have to say that my experience on Friday precisely confirmed my worse fears. Like so much of our public services I saw brilliantly professional workers hampered by absurd, time-wasting and expensive bureaucratic practices. Bring back the old Wiltshire Ambulance Service, I say. The amalgamation was another apparently harmless piece of management re-organisation which has real and lasting effects on the lives of the people of North Wiltshire.

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