13th December 2007
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.
