EU Referendum

When tasked with anything constructive, the EU is displaying a consistent and predictable propensity towards failure. Its positive contribution to the wellbeing of mankind is precisely nil. When it comes to destruction, however, its capacity is unlimited and unparalleled.

An example of this malign capability comes in The Sunday Telegraph today, which headlines a story, "New EU working laws will be disaster for NHS". This is the Working Time Directive and we have already pointed out the effect this will have on the retained fire service. This is much worse.

According to one of Britain's top surgeons, the changes required by the directive to hospital working hours - coming into force this summer – will be "disastrous" for patient care and result in "major service failure".

This is John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons. He makes no bones about it (to coin a phrase). The new rules are "an impending disaster" which will "devastate" medical training because no surgeon will be able to work a shift long enough to gain proper experience.

The multiple handovers of staff needed to comply with the rules will mean that patients do not see the same doctor for more than a few hours. There could be "dangerous" lapses in patient care, especially at night. "With nobody able to work more than 48 hours a week from August, the effects on patient care in the NHS are potentially disastrous," Mr Black says.

He goes on, retailing a litany of woes which all point to the fact that going to hospital will be that much more dangerous than it is already. People are going to die, unnecessarily, sometimes horribly. And the EU will be to blame.

Black is meeting Alan Johnson, the health secretary, in February to propose a "speciality opt-out" and an upper limit on surgeons' hours of 65 to 70 hours a week. "I have no doubt we will be told that it is impossible to alter or bypass the European law. I do not believe this," he says. "All manner of EC law must have been bent or ignored in nationalising a bank in 24 hours. The government can do it if it has the political will."

But what is terrifying is the Orwellian response from Department of Health. Instead of acknowledging a very serious problem, it offers the anodyne statement that, "A few hospitals have implemented the maximum 48 hour week across all rotas. We are monitoring the situation as some smaller specialities and isolated hospitals may find meeting the deadline more challenging."

Never must it be admitted that the EU is tearing our nation apart, much less that it is going to kill people. No, the bureaucrats merely "monitor the situation" and, in due course will find nothing wrong at all – as the rapidly-filling cemeteries offer mute witness to their lies.

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We have followed the drama of the removal of the UK "opt out" from the European Working Time Directive from afar, but with some dismay.

This was negotiated in 1993 by John Major as one of his Mastricht "victories". It was those same "victories" that had him proclaiming "game set and match" as he scuttled back to his hotel after the summit. There, he was to meet his civil servants for a debriefing, so that they could tell him what he had signed away, before he had to address the Commons later that day.

That all goes to show that, when it comes to lasting promises that have anything to do with the EU, politicians should not be trusted an inch … but then, that applies to everything else as well.

But little did our Johnny – now a born-again Tory sage - realise all those years ago that his deft handiwork was going to be unravelled. Still less would he have realised that this would totally stuff the fire services in the UK.

That latter point is very much on the mind of Jim Kilpatrick, Scottish national officer for the Retained Firefighters Union. He has written to The Scotsman warning that the directive could end the retained fire service in the UK.

Blasting the "misguided MEPs" who had decided to end the opt-out, he tells us that of the 67,951 personal employed within the UK Fire and Rescue Service, 18,827 work on a retained basis. These cover almost two thirds of UK fire stations and the actual UK landmass covered by the system equates to 91 percent.

The problem is that almost all retained fire fighters have some form of primary employment, which in itself averages around 40 hours per week. If you then add two hours training time and a minimum of two calls per week, this could mean that such fire fighters would easily exceed the 48 hour period on a regular basis.

Kilpatrick adds: "No-one forces us to spend our spare time in this way; we regard ourselves as paid volunteers. We do it because we want to not because we have to." But, with the directive, he fears that the system can no longer work. And without the "immense contribution" to emergency response his members provide, he is concerned that the fabric and function of the UK Fire and Rescue Service as we know it would collapse overnight.

He concludes by telling us that his members are extremely concerned that the EU will "legislate their jobs away" with dire consequences for the communities they are committed to serving. Like them, he says, "I am at a loss to see why legislation is proposed to take away freedom of choice."

Well, we are all at a loss, Mr Kilpatrick, but that's the EU for you. They care not what they do, and while they might burn in hell it looks as if, with the absence of your members, we will burn up here.

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It has been done by The Sun and now The Scotsman has picked it up.

We are told that patients in Scotland will die as a result of European (EU) rules governing work breaks for ambulance crews. This was claimed yesterday by union leaders, who are warning that huge swathes of country were being left without adequate emergency cover in the wake of a new pay-and-conditions deal.

The paper cited an incident that occurred yesterday when an ailing elderly woman, who later suffered a stroke, waited almost two hours for an ambulance to arrive. The closest ambulance crew was on a rest break in Duns - about 16 miles from the patient’s home in Eyemouth so a vehicle had to be sent from Kelso, more than 30 miles away. Its crew had difficulty finding her home.

It is also understood by the newspaper that last week, an Aberdeen-based crew could not be dispatched to assist a heart attack victim only a few hundred yards from a station where they were on a break.

All of this is good propaganda for the Eurosceptics, so who are we to complain at the prospect of headlines declaring: "EU rules kill patients" (even if the NHS is quite capable of doing that unaided).

However, as we reported in our earlier piece, it is a lot more complicated than is made out. Not least, some ambulance authorities are unaffected by what is supposed to be a law with uniform application throughout the EU.

There are plenty of things for which we can blame the EU but this, on careful examination, does not appear to be one of them – although the Working Time Directive is a complicating factor. And as we have found to our cost, wrongly putting the EU in the frame sometimes backfires.

So, if life is already complicated, it just got a bit more so.

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According to The Sun a London man has died after two ambulance crews could not be sent to his aid - because they were on EU-enforced lunch breaks.

The man collapsed in a betting shop, five minutes from his local ambulance station but the two teams there were on their break so a paramedic was sent in a car from the more distant Enfield station. When he arrived, he realised that the 73-year-old man – as yet unnamed – was having a heart attack. He called for an ambulance but, by the time it arrived, the man was dead.

On the face of it, this is another of those dreadful EU stories – the potential effect of which The Sun warned about last December.

But, it seems, other ambulance services have opted out of the Working Time Regulations, on the basis of an exclusion for where their duties "inevitably conflict" with the provisions of the Regulations.

Then one finds that the public sector union Unison argues that the duties of its members working within the police service, ambulance service and fire service do not conflict with the Regulations. So this begins to look more like union idiocy than the EU.

But then you read two detailed comments from ambulance workers, here and here, the perspective changes again. The problem then seems to have a great deal to do with the combination of a "penny pinching" new working contract in the NHS called "Agenda for Change" and the bureaucratic inflexibility of the system.

What started out as a quickie "shock! horror! probe!" story about the EU thus gets bogged down in all sorts of complications. The one thing you can say with certainty though is that the death of this man was not the result - directly at least - of "EU-enforced lunch breaks".

But I do wish we could be like the MSM. We could then ignore all the complicated details and go for the quick, easy kill – heedless of the fact that the story is wrong.

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