Reconfigure your Bullshit!

Having got more than a little warm under the collar about
politicians crapping on about their 'difficult
decisions’, I have realised that there’s another bit of
political word salad that seems to crop up every
time a bus is driven through local health services by
Patsy Fuckwit et al. As you can see from Dr Mustard’s
astoundingly life-like representation of Ms Hewitt doing
the job for which she is most suited, the latest bit of
New Labour bullshit to get my goat
is…….'reconfiguration' .

Basically, when it has been decided that a particular ward
or hospital should cease to exist, it has not been cut back, slashed, axed or destroyed - the service has been reconfigured!

New Labour found out about the average person’s irrational
dislike of having their local hospital shut at the 2001
general election, when Dr Richard
Taylor stuffed them in the Kidderminster constituency.
Since then, the reciprocal fear of being
Kidderminstered has loomed large in many Labour
MP’s consciousness. Therefore, Hazel
Blears’ seemingly brave actions this week look
slightly less altruistic, and slightly more like ‘own
bacon-saving’ to the trained eye. Ms Blears’ actions
don’t quite come up to the standards set earlier in the
year by the resignation of junior health minister Jane Kennedy who
even Dr Rant can’t criticise.

After the Kidderminster disaster, the government
introduced a marvellous new Quango called the Independent
Reconfiguration Panel. This august body was supposed
to act as an apparently independent expert body to rubber
stamp closures and deflect some of the blame from the
government, as part of the central decision making -
local blame tactic that hasn’t fooled anyone yet.

So a new Quango was born, and one that could only pass
comment on cases referred to it by the Secretary
of State of Health. How many times 2003 has the
illustrious IRP been woken from its expert slumber? Dr
Richard Taylor asked the same
question in parliament earlier in the year:

What has happened to the panel? We asked another
Minister at a Health Committee meeting a few weeks ago.
The answer was that eight cases had been referred by
overview and scrutiny committees to the Secretary of
State, and at that time only one of them had been passed
on to the panel. One had been withdrawn, one awaited
decision and five had been decided by the Secretary of
State without reference to the advice of the panel.

So there you have it, reconfiguration is
yet another meaningless load of bollocks brought to you by
our marvellous leaders. To illustrate this, the team has
tried to think of a situation outside the hallowed
corridors of power where using the word ‘reconfiguration’
wouldn’t make you look like a pretentious
twat……and we failed. However, as you can see, Dr
Mustard had a good go….…….