Thursday 13 December 2007

The United States of Europe

13
13th December 2007
12 Days to go till Christmas

tlm fact: I'm currently addicted (quite seriously) to KitKats

I hate Europe, the EU and any concept of the United States of Europe. There are a number of reasons for this and things just keep on getting worse.

First of all, the EUWTD (European Union Working Time Directive), what a fucking waste of space that is. It is all just lovely that people are not supposed to work more than 48 hours a week. In reality its just stupid, doctors for instance, who used to work 100+ hour weeks as of 2009 won't be 'allowed' to work more than 48 hours. Of course doctors will still work more than 48 hours, they'll have to, it just means they won't get flipping paid for it! Not only does this mean that we'll get paid less than junior doctors in previous years, but we'll also be hugely restricted in terms of the amount of experience we get. Most doctors will tell you that the most valuable experience they gained as a junior was doing nights on-call etc etc, but there will be very little of that in future. Instead you might, if you're lucky, be treated by a night nurse-practitioner, whoop-de-fucking-do! So when you're in hospital in a few years time, just bear in mind that the juniors looking after you have perhaps half, or even a third of the experience that the juniors of old had. I certainly wouldn't want to be a patient in that situation. So anyway, the EU, with all their good ideas can go screw, in reality, these things just are not going to work!

Next we have the EU rules which state that all applicants whether they're from England or Poland should have exactly the same rights when it comes to job applications. Now I'm not going to sit here and say that UK grads deserve preference for UK jobs, but if because of this 'freedom' within Europe, any graduates from UK medical schools are left without F1 posts (which isn't unlikely since it has already been announced that there are too many applicants for too few posts) then something is seriously wrong. It costs £250,000 to train us medical students not to mention the fact that we're £20, £30, £40,000 in debt. We should all (or at least those who are competent) be entitled to a job at the end of our 5/6 year slog. But no, that's not the way it is. The EU gets to stick its oar in and control everything.

You can barely walk around a town centre these days without passing a 'Polski Sklep', there has been a huge influx of Polish people since they joined the EU and were able to come here to work. And whilst I'm all for multi-culture I'd hate to think that these EU residents were being given preference for anything over British residents.

Today, Gordon Brown is going to sign even more of our power over to the EU, I really hoped that he'd have the balls to take a step back from Europe when he took over as PM but sadly it seems that I was wrong. It won't be long before we join the Euro, don't even get me started on that! If we join the Euro, I'm off to Australia (or at least I would, but I don't think missbliss would go for it), fuck the United States of Europe.

Two serious posts in a week, I don't know what has gotten into me.

4 comments:

missbliss said...

Australia really was lovely and most Aussies we met, on finding out you were going to be the doctor, practically invited us to live there.

You know how I feel about the zillions of Polish people here: all I've seen are hard-working people doing usually poorly paid jobs but still doing it with pride and efficiency. Compare them to the scum you and I see all day every day, chuffing on fags, 15 years old pushing a baby in a pushchair sucking on a Gregg's pasty. People who have the drastic combination of entitlement and persecution complexes.

Yes, it's strange to be in Sainsbury's and feel like you're in Warsaw because everyone around you is speaking Polish, and yes it's weird that the Lloyds TSB has Polish written all over the outside of it and yes it's weird that half the jobs advertised are for Polish speaking this-that-and-others[:(]. But apart from those Polski Skleps (which we do love saying) and the bus drivers who have generally been given no training on how to drive buses in the UK so are a bit dangerous :/ I don't feel any animosity at all. And I know you don't really, either.

I agree there ought to be a limit, when I visited relatives in Hampshire, they started calling Southampton Warsaw-on-Sea, and the north is very saturated. But when we went to Dublin it was the same story. I think it's a) a matter of perception b) that we really should have some limits or *deep intake of breath* quotas.

AMiB said...

Finally, someone who agrees with me about the working hours thing! I'm one of the advocates of long hours, and everyone else seems to be against it - didn't you know about it coming in? It's half the reason I'm doing this! (lol, not really)

The only idea that comes to my mind on how to remedy it would be to increase the length of training time, so that the number of hours spent working/learning adds up to how much they used to be - but no one seems to like the idea of this either...and understandably so.

About the whole UK jobs thing...I knew coming here that I wanted to go home at the end of it. However, I didn't realize how hard that would be, and I will probably end up applying for FY1 jobs. That being said, from what I understand, I get last preference, because even though I'm UK trained, I'm not a EU citizen - so I go to the bottom of the list. And what's at the bottom of that list? Unemployment.

The Angry Medic said...

Sweet Lord, Little. I've just been to Dr Crippen's blog. It can't be true, can it? Please tell me it isn't.

The Little Medic said...

Angry - I personally don't think its true, that comment could have come from anyone. I hope it isn't anyways.