BBC Employees Keep Their Jobs After Being Found Guilty Of Bullying And Harassment

Dozens of staff at the BBC have kept their jobs after being found guilty of bullying and harassment despite the corporation’s zero-tolerance promise.

The broadcaster has upheld or partly upheld 33 of 154 cases in the past two years but only one person has lost their job.

A Freedom of Information Act disclosure has revealed that an additional 105 complaints were dismissed and 16 were withdrawn.

The findings come eight years after the inquiry into BBC bullying and harassment sparked by the Jimmy Savile scandal.

But the figures show misconduct is still an ongoing problem after sources told a newspaper outlet that executives aren’t adequately protecting complainants.

The BBC said it takes appropriate action in each of the cases and the figures don’t include BBC Studios which produces much of its TV content including Strictly Come Dancing.

Since 2013, there have been 508 formal cases of bullying and harassment, 32 of which were sexual misconduct complaints.

cafter a Respect at Work review, implementing a zero-tolerance culture where people feel able to raise concerns and have confidence that they’ll be dealt with properly.

One person who’s since been involved in a case said the new attitude is more about protecting the institution than the person.

The BBC has also promised to settle claims quicker after it was accused of taking too long in the Dinah Rose QC’s report.

The corporation said it would resolve disputes in 30 days, with 60 days allowed for complicated cases, but in the past eight years have seen an aggregate of 79 days for resolution.

Paul Siegert, the broadcasting organiser at the National Union of Journalists, said that many of those accused were managers and the BBC were too afraid to dismiss them because they were concerned about the negative publicity.

And he said, that usually, those that are guilty leave quietly without a payoff, a completely unacceptable way of cracking down on improper conduct.

He added that the National Union of Journalists had been involved in some cases which had taken more than a year.

The BBC said that the BBC should be ambitious about resolving cases quickly, but that they could be complex and needed to be examined with rigour and care.

And for those that haven’t already done it, it’s now time to cancel your TV licence, but then, of course, they’ll send in an army of people to chase you up and intimidate you – the TV licence has absolutely no value for money.

The government are already considering replacing the BBC licence with a new Household Tax, which means that no one will be exempt.

Boris Johnson is a Socialist coward, and he won’t let you cancel your licence, nor will it be put on a subscription basis, and once he puts the TV licence into a property tax, people won’t even have a choice about paying it.

This is pure out and out bullying, but of course, their TV footmen will look you square in the face and swear blind that there’s absolutely no bias on their part, scout’s honour! And of course, there’s no accountability if you’re a loyal stooge of the political regime.

Of course, the simplest way to resolve the matter is to just close down the BBC, or there should be a referendum on the licence fee, and I’m guessing that the BBC would lose badly.

Meghan Markle And Prince Harry Ask To Meet With The Queen

Royal aides have been left bewildered by the sheer audacity of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle after they requested a meeting with the Queen.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reportedly hoping to introduce the Queen to their daughter Lilibet, who was born earlier this year on June 4.

However, a source told a newspaper outlet that no meeting had been agreed upon yet and that it had left Royal aides shocked, given the pair’s interview with Oprah Winfrey only months ago.

The source told the publication that Harry and Meghan had made this offer but that a lot of people were shocked by the absolute nerve of it, and that they may genuinely want to see the Queen but it’s breathtaking given what they’d put her through.

Her Majesty’s staff haven’t answered so far, but there’s been discussion about Christmas, and whether an invitation should be sent to Harry and Meghan after they refused one last year.

It was said that the Queen is still very fond of Harry, and would like to see Lilibet and her brother Archie.

A newspaper outlet has approached Buckingham Palace and representatives of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for comment.

Earlier this year, the Sussexes announced the birth of their second child together and announced she had been given the middle name, Diana, to honour her beloved late grandmother.

Harry and Meghan both took several months off work to care for Lilibet after she was born, and their eldest son Archie was reportedly delighted about the arrival of his little sister.

The olive branch from Harry and Meghan comes as furious palace aides are hunting for the source behind the profoundly disturbing exposure of top-secret plans that are to be enacted when the Queen departs.

The details of Operation London Bridge, including ministerial protocols and funeral arrangements, were published yesterday morning in a move described by Whitehall insiders as disturbing, unnecessary and upsetting.

The plans for the huge operation were only shared with a tiny group of people and reveals that all Whitehall flags must be lowered to half-mast within ten minutes followed by a TV address and UK tour by Prince Charles and a pre-planned memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral for ministers that will be made to look spontaneous.

If the Queen does decide to send an invite to Harry and Meghan for Christmas, and she does agree to meet Harry and Meghan, she might lose a lot of public support.

Harry might be her grandson, but he’s done a lot of damage to the Monarchy, and the fact that they have the nerve to ask for this meeting after their disgusting, non-stop betrayal over the last two years, does make you wonder if the Queen will agree to a meeting with them, but when all said and done, Archie and Lilibet are her great-grandchildren, and there’s no getting away from that, and sometimes blood is thicker than water.

Of course, the meeting will be held behind closed doors, and perhaps she should have witnesses there, and Harry and Meghan be made to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement.

The Queen is a 95-year-old woman who doesn’t need the drama, and what she should be doing is relaxing and putting her feet up and enjoying herself, letting everyone else get on with it.

Once the Queen passes away, then you will see things come out of the woodwork, but it won’t matter by then because either Prince Charles or his son William will have to deal with all the gossip.

There Will Be A Mass Slaughter And Burning Of 100,000 Pigs

Farmers could be forced to slaughter approximately 100,000 pigs because of a post Brexit shortage of butchers to work in abattoirs.

Leading figures in the livestock industry say that the animals face being destroyed and burned because Home Secretary Priti Patel has failed to include the job on a list of shortage occupations, which would enable foreign butchers to enter the United Kingdom on a skilled worker visa.

One said they found it baffling that ballet dancers were on the list, but not butchers.

Pig farming is the latest industry to be hit by shortages of workers after hundreds of thousands of EU citizens went back to their home nations as a consequence of Brexit and the pandemic.

A shortage of HGV drivers, who are also not on the list, has led to bare supermarket racks and pushed some driver’s wages over £50,000, while growers in Scotland said last week that they had to destroy 2.5 million broccoli crowns and 1.5 million cauliflowers because of staff shortages.

Last week, Greggs became the latest fast-food chain to notify customers about shortages of goods, joining McDonald’s, Nando’s, KFC, Beefeater and Subway.

Dr Zoe Davies, chief executive of the National Pig Association, said a 15 per cent shortfall of abattoir butchers had led to a backlog of 85,000 pigs awaiting slaughter, increasing by 15,000 every week.

Just over 200,000 pigs are sent to the abattoir every week, and unless they can be butchered soon, they will have to be destroyed as it becomes expensive to maintain them.

Dr Zoe Davis said that the migration advisory committee had recommended to the Home Office that butchers should be on the Shortage Occupations List, but their advice had been disregarded, and she said that you have ballet dancers on it but not butchers – you couldn’t make it up even if you tried. A review of the list isn’t expected until next year.

The worker’s shortages have led to worries that much of this year’s yield could be left decomposing in the fields.

The most recent labour market survey by the National Farmer’s Union determined that more than a third of vacancies for horticultural workers were going unfilled.

According to the Office for National Statistics, a total of 27 per cent of food and accommodation firms have reported lower than average stock levels.

A report by accountants Grant Thornton found more than 500,000 vacancies across food and drink businesses.

Nick Allen, of the British Meat Processors Association, said that no one was asking that they return to freedom of movement. The UK voted to leave the EU so that their politicians could be in charge of the decisions.

It’s appalling to see these smart animals reared like this, and then to kill them for nothing. We should be kinder to these animals, and I These animals get killed for their meat but to kill them in cold blood is beyond barbaric.

Although taking the life of something because you like how they taste and being kinder are contradictory, and I guess it can never be kind to kill an animal that wants to live but to kill them in cold blood because they’ve got too many of them is beyond belief, and are these people paying for these animals to be destroyed?

Let them wander in the field, they could do that, but sadly for the piggies, house building and all the necessary infrastructure takes precedence. Housing is of course, much more important than the production of food for animals and humans, so this isn’t leaving many opportunities for animals to roam and graze.

Republicans Criticise Joe Biden For His Labor Day Weekend Vacation

President Joe Biden has come under huge criticism for going to Delaware for the holiday weekend amid the crisis in Afghanistan.

The president was scheduled to visit his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware two weeks ago but had his journey pushed back due to the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Hurricane Henri.

But after touring the destruction of Hurricane Ida in Lousiana, Joe Biden decided it was time to take a break back home for the holiday weekend, but the move was slammed by Republicans who called the president out for flying home amid the crisis in Afghanistan, where hundreds of citizens and allies had been left behind, due to the botched removal and evacuation from the country.

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tweeted that American citizens were still stranded behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, and meanwhile, Joe Biden is vacationing in Delaware, and he said that Joe Biden left Americans hostage in Afghanistan.

Alabama Representative Mo Brooks also pointed to the Americans who were left behind, and he tweeted that Joe Biden would be spending his weekend on holiday in Delaware, while approximately 100 Americans will be spending their weekend abandoned in Afghanistan.

New York Congresswoman Claudia Tenney criticised Joe Biden’s trip, while calling for him to be held accountable for the $85 billion of military equipment that was left behind in Afghanistan.

She posted that Joe Biden was a career politician who’s only ever worked in DC, but for the rest, they were responsible for the equipment that they used at work, and that if they lose it, they pay for it. Joe Biden lost $85 billion in military equipment and then left for vacation, and that Congress must hold him accountable.

Republicans also mentioned other problems that the country was facing, including migrants at the US Mexico border and the residents of New Orleans who were still left without power.

Karine Jean-Pierre, White House deputy press secretary, said on Friday that Joe Biden was dealing with many multiple crises, but she said this was the role of the president, to make sure we keep working and said that they had addressed multiple crises at the same time.

On Thursday, Senate Republicans accused the White House of evacuating thousands of Afghans from the country while leaving American citizens and allies behind.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken revealed that up to 200 Americans were still stranded in Afghanistan even though the last US flight left the country a day before the evacuation deadline.

And now, Joe Biden is attempting to distance himself from it, saying everything went great, expecting that folks believe it.

Joe Biden isn’t supposed to answer questions, he’s just an empty suit, and he’s just a corpse that hardly even knows who he is and this guy’s got nuclear codes! But don’t worry, he can’t remember where he put them.

And to think, the American’s put a man on the Moon, but Joe Biden can’t manage to get American’s out of Afghanistan.

President Joe Biden is a disgrace with crisis after crisis during his short term in office.

Hundreds of people have died and hundreds of people are critically injured due to his bad planning, and all we have seen of Joe Biden is the bald spot on the back of his head as he walks away when he’s asked questions.

And he didn’t even answer the phone for two days while on vacation when Boris Johnson called to ask him why he was removing the military, and now he’s back on holiday while more than 200 Americans are still behind enemy lines.

Joe Biden said that no American would be left behind, and he said it many times, yet here he is, leaving Americans behind.

He can’t defend this, he lied and to everyone’s faces, and where’s the respect he promised?

Now Working Pensioners Face Paying National Insurance

Working pensioners could now be charged National Insurance for the first time to help fix the social care crisis, and Treasury officials are considering the case for extending the National Insurance system beyond the state pension age of 66 where it currently stops.

Insiders said the move would raise comparatively modest sums but would have symbolic significance as a new system to pay for the care of the elderly that’s not financed solely by higher taxes on people of working age.

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are thought to be close to a deal to cap social care costs. This would deliver the Prime Minister’s manifesto promise to end the scandal that sees thousands of older people compelled to sell their homes to pay the bills.

The ministers are eyeing an increase of at least 1 per cent in the National Insurance rates subsidised by both workers and employers.

The entire cost could reach £10 billion a year, but the plan to increase National Insurance has alarmed some Tory MPs as it breaks a separate manifesto promise not to increase main tax measures.

The amount of pensioners in work has increased sharply in recent years and is now thought to total more than 1.3 million.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates the Government could raise about £1 billion for every 1 per cent of National Insurance levied on working pensions.

Treasury modelling is thought to have estimated considerably lower returns, perhaps a little as £120 million a year.

A Treasury insider said that there’s a fairness argument that if older people are going to benefit from a policy they should help finance it where they can afford to.

However, those over the state pension have paid into the National Insurance system all their lives, and you would certainly expect some opposition if they tried to extend it.

Helen Miller, deputy director of the IFS, said there’s a clear case for extending National Insurance past the state pension age, and she said the prevailing system already embeds a pretty significant tax break for people beyond retirement age, adding that if you were to increase National Insurance for social care you wouldn’t be starting from a level playing field.

She said that initially a lot of spending would be on the older generation and that they shouldn’t automatically eliminate them from helping to pay for it.

However, it’s shocking that older people have to work to live because their pensions have been delayed, and this is like a kick in the teeth for them, and the IFS is mad if it seriously thinks a billion pounds can be raised from 1.2 million pensioners.

And why someone has to pay so that migrants can be housed, fed, given medical care and not just for a little while, and I doubt any of them will work for years, but it seems that our politicians want every penny they can squeeze out of anyone foolish enough to work.

Should Have Jeremy Corbyn Been Prime Minister?

Boris Johnson has been Prime Minister from 24 July 2019 to the now. Some people adore him, some people loathe him, but how many now think that Jeremy Corbyn should have been Prime Minister, or are most people happy that Boris is in charge.

One great thing about Boris Johnson is that he doesn’t so much play his cards close to his chest as much as wave them around for all to see, and I can’t think of any reason why people backed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, although those that did vote for him, knew precisely what they were voting for.

I mean, let’s face it, if people wanted a No Deal Brexit, they could have backed Esther McVey who was knocked out with nine votes, and Dominic Raab with thirty.

Conservative MPs who wanted to leave without a deal had safer options to secure than with Boris Johnson, but they elected him anyhow, even though every single Conservative MP backer of Boris Johnson knew he was going to disappoint them, but presumably, they thought it wouldn’t be one of them.

And they didn’t seem to mind that Boris Johnson told them different things behind different closed doors.

The thing about Boris Johnson is that he tells his voters what they want to hear, but what you really have is a guy standing on a platform with betrayal in his heart, and we can always be sure that he will deliver.

The problem with the puppet is that he really wants so much to believe that his relationship with his candidates is special – the trouble is he doesn’t roar the truth.

Boris Johnson would be excellent if only he was limited to the occasional appearance here and there because he really is an upper-class buffoon, although he does have enough sense of humour and self-awareness not to take himself too seriously, and he would be a rather entertaining chap to have a few drinks with.

But then he got himself into a position of authority and the nastier side of him began to appear. Self-centred and self-absorbed, ruthlessly ambitious and likely to turn his opinions on a sixpence to earn votes, relying massively on his sharp tongue to gibberish his way through.

He’s all show and no substance, and he speaks so well and so amusingly that many don’t stop and think ‘What are you on about Boris.’

Jeremy Corbyn is pretty likeable because he’s not from the same mould as most of the other parties. After all, other parties are usually part-time, self-serving and backstabbing, and the Conservatives are terrified of Jeremy Corbyn because he’s a genuinely amiable person who’s never in his political career done a backflip or played the same political games as they have.

People said he wasn’t Prime Minister material, but they said that about many great Labour leaders, for example, Clement Atlee and look how he did as Prime Minister and a model for all who came after him, but of course, none came even close because the establishment has become infected and infiltrated with establishment lackeys who just want an easy life and want to line their own pockets.

Jeremy Corbyn is a simple man, in that he’s lived in the same house as he’d done for numerous years and takes his politics seriously, and he would have been the best thing for the vast majority of the UK public since the passing of Margaret Thatcher.

And the establishment was right to be terrified of him because he would have no doubt been a real maverick if he were to have made it to No 10, and I would have looked forward to his leadership with glorious anticipation.

Hunt Is On For Leaker Of Queen’s Funeral Arrangements

Enraged palace aides are seeking the source behind the genuinely disturbing leak of top-secret plans that are to be enacted when the Queen dies.

The details of Operation London Bridge, including ministerial protocols and funeral arrangements, were published yesterday morning in a move described by Whitehall insiders as disturbing, unnecessary and upsetting.

The plans for the enormous operation were only shared with a tiny group of people and revealed that all Whitehall flags must be lowered to half-mast within ten minutes followed by a TV address and UK tour by Prince Charles and a pre-planned memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral for ministers that will be made to look spontaneous.

Their exposure has stirred anger at Buckingham Palace, with sources saying there’s now a major desire to discover who the mole is and what their motive was.

And a royal source told a newspaper outlet that it was genuinely disturbing that such private information, which was not only deeply personal to the Queen but also had far-reaching security implications.

It’s thought the plans were leaked after being updated during the pandemic.

Whitehall bosses are also believed to be on the warpath to hunt down the source and could narrow down the likely offenders by examining which version of the documents were released.

A Cabinet Office source said that they’d looked into which version had emerged so that they could decide whether this dereliction of duty demanded a formal government investigation.

It sets up a possibly awkward meeting for the Prime Minister tomorrow, as Boris Johnson and Carrie will be meeting Her Majesty this weekend at Balmoral despite the courtier’s mounting concerns over COVID. It will also be the first time their 16-month-old son, Wilfred meets the monarch.

Buckingham Palace has refused to comment, but a royal insider said officials aren’t happy, adding that they’re not talking about this and that it was a matter for the Government.

Royal expert Angela Levin said that she thought it was awful and cruel to release the top-secret plans about the Queen’s demise.

The ten-day plan was leaked to POLITICO after being updated during the coronavirus pandemic with the day she passes away being called D Day.

It was first hatched in the 1960s but was never published in such granular detail. And there’s no suggestion that Her Majesty, 95, is in bad shape, but there are major questions about how documents so sensitive could be made public, although I’m not sure what all the excitement is about because many of these details have been known for years, perhaps not all of them, but some of them.

What the fuss is all about is not that we now know what’s going to happen when the Queen departs, although these plans will presumably be changed now, but that they were leaked by someone else.

And of course, you also have to consider that the people that work in the Royal Palace, workers, aides et cetera are all a pack of traitors, especially when there’s money involved because they will then always leak, sell and stir up drama about the Royal Family, perhaps they should be mindful of who they have working for them.

But it’s constantly being printed about information about the Royal Family from royal insiders or palace sources, so why feign outrage now?

And yes, it might be in poor taste to air such details, but nothing is shocking here, it’s just a timetable and logistics.

Truck Drivers Could Be Banned From The Road

After railway bosses raised concerns about disruptions to services caused by negligent truckers, they’re contemplating banning truckers from the roads if they hit low bridges.

Network Rail said bridge strikes costs about £23 million a year and was endeavouring to recover damages from HGV operators involved in avoidable accidents.

The Infrastructure Manager said it would report collisions to the Traffic Commissioners for Great Britain, which has the power to revoke licences, and in the 12 months up to March, there were 1,624 truckers, or more than four a day, despite the drop off in traffic during lockdowns.

They blamed sat navs for sending them on routes with bridges that were too low for their vehicles, but it seems that the rail industry has little compassion for the motorists, arguing that it’s their responsibility to know the height of their HGVs.

Network Rail chief executive Sir Peter Hendy said that a lorry or bus crashing into a railway bridge wasn’t an accident, and he said it was a failure of professional operators and drivers to properly plan their routes and know the height of their vehicles, and that it could cause accidents and serious injuries for road users, delays for both road and rail travellers, and could cause a catastrophic railway accident.

As a result of such incidents, Network Rail is attempting to recover the entire cost from operators and motorists, and also report all of them to the traffic commissioners for consideration of enforcement and revocation.

Rod McKenzie, managing director of policy and public affairs at the Road Haulage Association, added that specialised sat navs already allow motorists to programme in the height of their vehicle, meaning that they can circumvent crashes.

This week train services in and out of Cornwall were interrupted for two days with people advised not to travel to the West Country after a Tesco driver got his lorry wedged under a bridge.

Locals heard a tremendous bang when the HGV became wedged under the low archway in Plymouth on Monday and the mainline wasn’t completely open again until Wednesday night.

Keith Fletcher, who lives just by the bridge, said that they heard a huge bang which they don’t usually hear when someone hits the bridge, and he said that the lorry actually lifted the stonework about three inches up and that this was the most damage they’d seen in the twenty years that they’d lived there.

It’s the responsibility of employers to provide drivers with the proper GPS because it’s a vital tool for their job, and if employers aren’t equipping them with professional sat navs and they end up using their Mickey Mouse mobile phone sat nav app, then it should be the employer’s responsibility and not the truck driver.

And we often see HGVs squeezing along our weight restricted country roads daily, which is so frustrating.

Mind you, some of these sat navs can take you on a magical mystery tour with an additional 30 minutes added for fun.

Buses in London have a warning system that tells them when a bridge is too low so that they can stop in plenty of time, well, that’s the intention anyhow.

GreenRoad’s core safety system is installed on all of Stagecoach’s 8,000 buses in England, Scotland and Wales.

If the technology determines that the bus is travelling towards a low bridge, it will sound an in-cab alert, allowing a safe exit route that avoids the bridge. Perhaps lorries should have the same system fitted by law?

Ambulances Are Delayed In Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods

The ambulance chief said that ambulances can be delayed in low traffic neighbourhoods because paramedics are unaware of road changes, and London Ambulance Service chief Garrett Emmerson said some paramedics were caught out when the roads were changed very quickly during the lockdown.

It was announced earlier this year that in eight months, ambulance crews in London encountered more than 150 instances of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs).

And Garratt Emmerson told LBC radio that the LTNs were not recorded on SatNavs, which meant crews were obstructed in areas they didn’t know.

He said that it’s fine if you know the area, but that their crews work all over London, but when going into an area of London that they know less well, and having to rely on satellite navigation that’s not up to date, that’s when a lot of problems occur.

And during lockdown last year, LTNs were used to redirect traffic away from residential neighbourhoods, and a government official insisted that 200 LTNs created in the United Kingdom during the pandemic had gained more support than criticism.

However, the measure, which has involved installing cycle lanes, blocking off roads to through traffic and widening pavements, have proven unpopular amongst motorists, especially commuters and taxi drivers in London.

The neighbourhoods were generally touted to obstruct emergency service vehicles, with video footage emerging, showing fire engines halted and crews forced to run to the location.

Garrett Emmerson said he couldn’t say the delays caused by the LTNs cost lives, but he said the speed with which they were built was a significant problem, and he added, have they delayed responses? Yes, in certain situations he believed they’d delayed certain responses because they had to be put in very quickly.

According to data revealed in May by a Freedom of Information request, some 159 delays to 999 calls were flagged by paramedics in the eight months to February this year, and according to the government’s analysis of more than 100,000 emergency callouts, since they were implemented, the zones didn’t improve response times.

In March a controversial London cycleway blocked three emergency services vehicles in just 24 hours.

A blue-lit fire engine was halted, a police car’s driver was forced to turn around and an ambulance had to weave between traffic after congestion built up on Chiswick High Road, west London.

And video footage taken from a flat overlooking a busy road, which features Cycleway 9, showed emergency services struggling to get past slow-moving vehicles and buses in three separate incidents.

You would have thought an intelligent council would have tested the impact of these things before introducing them to see if they did have an impact, and they had no right to do this without notifying the public first. After all, we do pay our taxes towards this sort of thing, so therefore councils are supposed to work for us. Of course, they’ll tell you it’s temporary, but then, of course, it’s not.

But of course, this is the plan. If you cause more congestion, then you cause more pollution and more pollution equals more tax and a reason to go green – they’re not as simple-minded as they appear, and we should never underestimate them.

They were designed to make it more difficult for road users, nothing more. Part of the dribbling stupidity of the fake green agenda, and they lie, as they always do, and we should believe nothing that comes out of government, local or national, except tax hikes, believe that!

Face-To-Face Doctor Appointments Are Down 3.4 Million A Month

GPs are holding 3.4 million fewer face to face appointments a month compared with before the pandemic.

The surprising numbers reveal the scale of the shift towards consultations held remotely.

There were seven million more appointments every month conducted over the phone in June this year when compared with the same month in 2019 before coronavirus struck.

The Alzheimer’s Society said virtual appointments don’t work for people with dementia, while Labour, which examined the NHS England data, said the shift raised the risk of serious illness being misdiagnosed.

In June, 56.3 per cent of GP appointments were face to face, only slightly up on the 52.9 per cent in January when England was in lockdown.

The data also shows far fewer home visits are taking place, despite restrictions easing in May to allow up to six people to gather indoors.

In June 2019 there were 18,441,483 appointments conducted face to face by GPs in their surgeries, representing 79.7 per cent of the total number of consultations.

The proportion fell after March 2020, when the COVID pandemic took hold and lockdowns were imposed, and the figure is yet to recover 18 months on.

By June this year, the number of face to face consultations stood at 15,033,172, down 3.4 million on two years before.

At the same time, the number of telephone consultations rose from 3,106,915 in June 2019 to 10,583,202 this year, an increase of approximately 7.5 million. The number of home visits fell in the same period, from 211,526 to 161,689, a drop of 49,837.

Labour said the figures could mean that elderly, disabled or vulnerable people are going without the help they require.

Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s health spokesperson, said that while online and telephone consultations work for some, for others it can mean a missed diagnosis for serious illness and that it was important ministers put forth an NHS rescue plan with the resources and staff to bring back face to face GP consultations quickly and safely so that everyone who wants one can get one.

Gavin Terry, head of policy at the Alzheimer’s Society, said that people with dementia have been worst hit by the pandemic and the reduction in health and social care services has had a disastrous impact on them.

He said that virtual appointments and assessments just don’t work for many of them and that it was essential that face to face appointments were available to all so that dementia could be diagnosed as quickly as possible, helping people to remain independent for longer.

This situation is going to end up killing more people than COVID ever will, but then perhaps that’s the idea.

GPs are hiding from their patients, they’re failing to diagnose conditions and risking patients lives, and now if you phone up for an appointment rather than talking to a doctor, you end up talking to a nurse.

If a doctor refuses to see you and misdiagnoses a serious problem, then this is negligence, and we are all being failed by our GPs and we should be issuing proceedings against these doctors, who will all eventually fall like a pack of cards.

Instead of calling it the National Health Service, we should be calling it the No Health Service.

And Boris Johnson should be taking charge, sending GPs back to the surgery where they should be doing their job properly because this is going to lead to serious misdiagnoses down the line, resulting in even more pressure and ultimately death. Everyone knows that early diagnosis not only saves lives but also saves money.

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