I Didn’t Clap

On Thursday night, we were each urged to open bedroom windows, stand by doorways or on patios and at 8pm, offer applause to our health service and its staff. Social media is littered with memes and graphics demonstrating their creators’ and sharers’ gratitude and felicity for this organisation. Even if I were well enough, I wouldn’t have stood by my open window clapping into the darkness, like some escapee from the asylum. It’s not that I’m ungrateful. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, carers and cleaners attend work each day hoping not to bring anything nasty home to their spouses and children. A school is more easily closed during a pandemic than a hospital, but I’m still not prepared to applaud, glad of its frontline staff though I am. So why this seemingly petulant tone? Well I’ve got a few issues with our health service which the current pandemic has not assuaged.

Firstly, overpaid management. Why do more than two dozen NHS managers get paid more than the Prime Minister? Running a Trust must be a tough job, but is it really more pressured than the one whose finger is on the nuclear button and who bears responsibility for every hospital, school and prison in the land? One NHS ‘management consultant’ gets double the PM’s remuneration. Can I applaud this? No.

Secondly, some sections of the health service are seemingly motivated by ideology rather than science and care. A national newspaper reports that thirty-five psychologists have quit the NHS gender-identity service in three years on account of pressure to change children’s gender. Kiddies as young as three have been treated for gender dysphoria; numbers treated have risen from 77 to 2,590 in the last ten years. This is the same NHS we’ve all been asked to praise this past week. No thank you.

Thirdly, the NHS cheerfully kills over 200,600 children in a 12-month period. Furthermore, it generously performed a further 4,687 executions inside the wombs of non-resident mothers. I appreciate some of these women are in physical or mental danger; life stories are seldom straight forward. However, I better appreciate the more terrifying state of danger in which these little boys and girls are placed when mum goes down to the abortion clinic- kindly and enthusiastically paid for and managed by our NHS.

While management consultants and chief executives absorb precious funds while wards are poorly staffed, I’ll not be clapping. While NHS staff fiddle about with children’s self-identity, possibly doing permanent damage, I’ll not applaud. While countless children are snuffed out, their remains discarded along with general medical waste, I’ll offer no applause.

But to those frontline staff- and those who are supporting them- who continue working despite the dangers, I offer you my thanks and sincere gratitude. I pray the blessing of Almighty God be on you and your families. As you go out to work to save others, may you know Him who came to earth to save you.