Hospitals will be ‘under immense strain’ as nurses go on strike, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation has said. So, let’s look at the figures behind the unhealthiest strike of all… what do you think?

The Health Foundation think-tank has said the average basic pay for nurses fell by 5 per cent in reality since 2011.

RCN general secretary Pat Cullen has said: “This is a once in a generation chance to improve pay and combat the staff shortages that put patients at risk.’.

“Patients pay a heavy price. We are doing this for them too.”

So, nurse are putting patients at risk – on Ms Cullen’s admittance – a. for the patient’s own good, b. on a bank holiday, c. when the country’s back is against the wall, d. when waiting lists are growing f. patients are left in corridors.

Now, let’s have a look at what people earn …NHS pay is operated in a banding system introduced in 2004.

A newly-qualified nurse starts in Band 5 and will earn £27,055 a year, slightly more in London. Most nurses operate in Bands 5 and 6, while Band 7 and above tend to be management positions.

The RCN has estimated that an average NHS nurse’s pay is around £34,000.

Here is the current banding scale:

• Band 5 – £27,055 to £32,934
• Band 6 – £33,706 to £40,588
• Band 7 – £41,659 to £47,672

The average income in the UK in 2022 was £27,600 per year or £1,950 per month.

So, let’s look at what people earn, according to JOBTED:

Dental Receptionist – Average Salary

The average salary for a Dental Receptionist is £8.50 net per hour (£20,000 gross per year), which is £9,600 (-32%) lower than the UK’s national average salary.
A Dental Receptionist can expect an average starting pay of £6.80 per hour. The highest pay rates can exceed £13 per hour.

 Nanny – Average Salary

The average salary for a Nanny is £8.80 net per hour (£19,200 gross per year), which is £10,400 (-35%) lower than the UK’s national average salary.
A Nanny can expect an average starting pay of £7.65. The highest pay rates can exceed £15.

Dietitian – Average Salary

The average salary for a Dietitian is £32,300 gross per year (£2,120 net per month), which is £2,700 (+9%) higher than the UK’s national average salary.
A Dietitian can expect an average starting salary of £23,000. The highest salaries can exceed £60,000

Fashion Designer – Average Salary

The average salary for a Fashion Designer is £29,310 gross per year (£1,960 net per month), which is £290 (-1%) lower than the UK’s national average salary.
A Fashion Designer can expect an average starting salary of £21,650. The highest salaries can exceed £70,000.

Journalist – Average Salary

The average salary for a Journalist is £32,160 gross per year (£2,120 net per month), which is £2,560 (+9%) higher than the UK’s national average salary.
A Journalist can expect an average starting salary of £17,630. The highest salaries can exceed £50,000.

According to the NimbleFins website, on average UK households spend £671 per week (£2,907 a month) to cover living expenses including a roof, food, clothes and transport.

Things ain’t easy in this mean and septic isle of course – but do we need to hold the health of our fellow man to ransom when, on average, we are getting by? Why don’t nurse, doctors, lawyers, train drivers etc negotiate better deals for the future when the UK is better able to pay …?

Don’t forget that the country is also under attack from that other fundamental of society, educationalists.

The fact that children endured devastating Covid-related chaos and disruption to education, all sounds a bit uncaring doesn’t it. Any educator should be trying to connect with their students.

Almost all of us have faced pay cuts in real terms, simply because of the cost of living, inflation etc etc … but is this really the time for unions to be bringing ordinary people on the street to loggerheads?

Shouldn’t we all pull together to get back on our feet, for the sake of our sanity, health and bank balance?

#nhs #bankholiday #strike #patients #hospitals

Howdyado everybody! Welcome aboard Leigh’s preservation society – it’s become a bit of a runaway since surrealist writer Eric Lastick began steering! Thanks mate!

However, some people are a bit confused by the intention of the site The Leigh G Banks Preservation Society – Surviving life with laughter, literature and love… but the answer is really there in the title.

It all began during Covid when we were living and working in Central Europe… our news agency, broadcasting and events business caught the bug and died.

But we wanted to save some of the work we’d been doing, and The Preservation Society was born – the clue came from this very old brilliant song The Kinks – The Village Green Preservation Society – YouTube

New members have asked why other news – other than about Dylan – appears on the site … well, the original site was there to stand up for people who were having problems and we began to focus on Parental Alienation, problems with child support. And of course, Bob Dylan!

So, some news of the day, like the Ukraine, Trump, ‘Richy’ Sunak, PA stories and different things do appear … they are worth reading and commenting on.

And so is the work by The Society’s resident writer Eric Lastick, he is one of the best surrealists I’ve been involved in many years …

Then of course there is my writing on Dylan, my true literary, rock n roll and cerebral hero for more decades than I care to remember.

The site is also there to get Eric’s writing and mine to people and we are happy for people to send their thoughts, pictures, writings, songs etc etc etc for publication, possibly on the site. What we won’t do however is baldy promote businesses, publications that have no story to tell, other than they want to sell you something.

Once again, thank you for joining us and let’s share some literature, laughter and love!

Cheers everybody!

So, the lid may have finally closed on justice for a teenage boy

The woman whose claims led to the torture and murder of teenaged Emmett Till, has died at the age of 88.

The Calcasieu parish coroner’s office in Louisiana confirmed the death of Carolyn Bryant Donham, Mississippi. She had cancer and was in hospice care.

Thanks for reading Leigh’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In 1955, Emmett Till was 14 when, while visiting his family in Mississippi, he was accused by Donham, then aged 21, of whistling, making lewd comments and grabbing her.

Days later, Till was kidnapped at gunpoint by two white men. Evidence indicated that a woman, thought to be Donham, identified Till to them.

We carried this story a while ago, when it first came to public notice again…

Leigh G Banks writes: The little hamlet of Money is notorious. Yet few have heard of this tiny Mississippi delta settlement.

Way back in the Fifties – when its reputation became forever linked with racism, bigotry and child murder – Money was said to be a ‘fine’ place to live…

...or die because of the colour of your skin.

It was a tin-roof town with a giant cotton gin and a church. And that was about it except for Bryant’s, a grocery store where locals, including the families of black share-croppers, would gather.

Then it all went wrong … a black teenager smiled at a white man’s wife. The teenager was called Emmett Till.

Emmett was a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago, and was visiting his uncle Moses Wright.

It was August 1955 and black boys and girls weren’t allowed to flirt. But he tried it with Carolyn Bryant – who owned the store with her husband Roy.

She was supposedly scared. Emmett was tortured, hanged and thrown over the a bridge near the fabled Tallahatchie Bridge.

It was Roy and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, who did it.

Money, Money, Money – it was a white man’s world.

Bob Dylan took up the cudgel and wrote the Ballad of Emmett Till.

He wrote: “And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial

Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till

But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit thisawful crime

And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see

The smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs

For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free

While Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea

If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust

Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust

Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow

For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!”

And then there is the fiction: Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe

#bobdylan #emmetttill

In the late 70s i was living that grand old hippy life of strange cigarettes, crash pads with cushions for floors and velvet curtains for walls … it was quite magical!

The Hari Krishna temple used to visit – and so, believe it or not did, Edgar Broughton with members of his Big Band … oh, how we danced and laughed heheheh!

Anyway, after one visit by the templers and the broughton-ers i found a copy of Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan! It had no info on the disc itself and the label was plain white with only two big black capital letter words on it – TEST PRESSING.

I had found the original test pressing of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde! it was more important than the Holy Grail, so. … i acquired it.

I kept it for years until i got divorced … incredibly the record was amongst the things i forgot to take away with me in that masculine moment of leaving home forever.

I went back for it a few months later and my dear ex-wife had helped the children to turn the discs into two matching ashtrays!

Rodney and Leigh investigate why the maths of business don’t always add up. We need to do our sums…then they go to war over Nukes

#maths #Nukes #war

CLICK TO WATCH VIDEO

We revealed this weeks ago – now everybody is talking about it

Almost 80 million mobile phones in the UK will receive a call from Armageddon next month.

The cacophony of our world will be drowned by the howling of a cyber siren warning us something is finally in the air, something we should be very afraid of.

Thanks for reading Leigh’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Our government, with its reputation for lies and indifference, says they want it to be a one-off and they ‘hope’ we never have to hear that sound again.

Thank you government for making us feel a little safer at a time when so many of us fear we are about to take the final ‘four minute’ journey home.

The government makes no mention of nuclear bombs sailing through our blustery cloudy skies and obliterating all our futures, whether you end up dead or alive.

What chance have we got? 80 million mobiles going off all at once …  80 million tiny plastic hand-held sirens filling our car, our streets, our pubs, our shops, supermarkets. Our homes.

How many of us will actually get back to our homes when those millions and millions of tiny sirens go off for real?

Officially, the government is testing a system that will allow them  and emergency services to send an immediate warning to the public if they’re ‘at risk of life-threatening situations’ like flooding or wildfires.

You will not be able to use your phone without acknowledging the message.

The Government’s National Resilience Framework, published in December, the siren is expected to launch across the UK in ‘early 2023’ but as of yet, it is still in its testing phase.

We are testing our chances of survival by getting some spidery authoritarian government robot to phone every one of us at the same time and tell us we could be about to die.

If it is a bomb from Russia with love, what are we supposed to do? Jump under our cars – or into the nearest ditch – and cross your fingers? Or should we all get under our kitchen tables for a few weeks while death outside reduces to a half-life?

Well, don’t shoot the messenger – but what has changed in the last 50 years?

I dare to say one word – NOTHING!

Protect and Survive was a civil defence public information campaign which began in 1974 and continued until 1980..

It was basically a badly produced document focussed on Nuclear War. And, yep, it told you to jump in a ditch or under your table and kiss your wife, your kids, your dog, your cat and your twitching a”rse goodbye.

It was a useless pointless deadly joke.

And in 2023 NOTHING has changed.

Do you know that In the past 10 years, 36 people have died as a result of flooding in England and Wales. And there were 334 fire-related fatalities in Great Britain during 2021/22.

However, if Putin blasts us, the first bomb to hit the UK is expected to wipe out 6 million – and maim another 4 million.

Let’s take a look at Thatcher’s Protect and Survive – what could it do for us way back then, and what can it do for us today?

What have these prime ministers bothered to do to help out in the case of nuclear war?

Callaghan, Blair, Brown, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak… they were our guardians, our protectors.

THE FUTURE ACCORDING TO THATCHER’S ROAD MAP TO DESTRUCTION

34 MILLION OF US WILL DIE IN PUTIN’S MADNESS, SAYS NUCLEAR WAR SCENARIO

Margaret Thatcher was a tyrant, a grocery girl who ate all the plums.

She chose Meringue for hair and adopted a shrillness that could make a blackboard screech.

But one day the Iron Lady took a step too far … she’d already killed industry, Northern cities were wastelands of boarded-up shops, teachers were banned from discussing LGBT. And the poll tax had just happened.

There were riots on our streets.

On the other hand Vladimir Putin is a working-class hero to millions, a boy-dun-good, the richest man in the world some say.

An action man too.

Most of us though see him as a murderous bare-chested horseman of the apocalypse.

Vlad isn’t very well either. Some say he is about to drop dead. Certainly, he does look a bit autocratically bloated.

Stress I guess.

After all, he has been waving rusty old nuclear popguns in the air and threatening mankind.

He has has taken on inhuman proportions.

And in a way has sent us back to a future as the Iron Curtains are twitching again.

Yep, it’s like we are back in the 1980s when Mrs T came up with her final cynical act.

Dear old Maggie rushed to print with the Protect and Survive government pamphlet. Designed to keep us alive in the event of a Russian nuke piercing the very heart of England.

World tensions were rising. In 1980, nuclear war seemed closer than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis 18 years earlier.

Then we read Protect and Survive! Get under the table, it said. Or hide in a ditch!

And, if you hear the air-raid klaxons clanking and wheezing out the four minute warning, then don’t forget to brick up windows. Oh! And remove handles from all toilet cisterns (to stop usable water being flushed accidently).

And as Putin bombs and maims the Ukraine and threatens the world, Protect and Survive, incredibly, is still probably the best we’ve got!

It’s just been rewritten a bit!

Latest government advice says: “Hand sanitizer does not protect against fall out. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth, if possible.

“Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask.”

The Government advice is, in essence, if Putin nukes us then you still have to get under the table, put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

Back in the day they published 150,000 copies for a population of 65m people.

Now we have a population of nearly 80m and a myasma of languages and cultures.

In fact there seems to be so little information on how to survive that people like war prepper Yara Ghrewati, aged 39, are going it alone. She has a secret shelter, a car boot packed with essentials, and a bow and arrow to hunt squirrels.

The bushcraft instructor even suggests people should be willing to eat their pets if the worst happens and food supplies are cut. “Any vegetarians are going to have a really tough time,” she said.

It is of course far from certain that Putin would be prepared to be the first leader to use nuclear weapons in wartime since 1945.

U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a “precedent” for the use of nuclear weapons., The invasion of Iraq was a big PR mistake too.

Even if Putin did issue the launch order, there is no guarantee it would be carried out. Nor can he be absolutely sure either that the weapons and their delivery systems would work.

But given Putin’s crimes — from Syria to Crimea to Salisbury— surely this lack of public planning over the past 40 years is just jaw-droppingly complacent on the part of Europe’s leaders.

The annexation – and new bombings – brings the use of a nuclear weapon a step closer by giving Putin a potential justification on the grounds that “the territorial integrity of our country is threatened”.

Any nuclear use in Ukraine would be likely to involve non-strategic, or tactical, weapons. But on average they are far more powerful that the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimates Russia has 2,000 tactical weapons for use on land, sea and air.

But Pavel Baev, a military researcher who once worked for the Soviet defence ministry, said that Putin cannot count on these weapons actually working.

“Most of these warheads are very old,” Baev, now a professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said.

But for the Russian leader, detonation of even a rusty old a tactical nuclear weapon is entirely acceptable.

And so the West needs to do some quick thinking about how it will help us all to survive.

More than 40 years ago, the 30 page pamphlet advised householders to make a fallout room and an inner refuge, like the cupboard under the stairs.

Families would be in there for at least two weeks, so there were tips on what food to stock up on.

People were urged to store three-and-half gallons (16 litres) of water each, keeping it in the bath and basins.

If people were not at home during the nuclear strike, they were advised to “lie flat (in a ditch) and cover the exposed skin of the head and hands”.

Today, the aftermath of a nuclear war will be  firestorms, a nuclear winter, widespread radiation sickness and the loss of much modern technology.

For years, crops from California to China will keep dying. Famine will set in around the globe.

Over the decades he total number of weapons has dropped by about 80 percent from an estimated 70,300 in 1986 to 12,700 in early 2022.

But the Ukraine does not have any – a brave and compassionate nation, it gave them up in 1994.

#putin #truss #biden #zelensky #nukes #nuclearbombs #thatcher #protectandsurvive #russia #ukraine #britain #worldwa

I can count my best friends on one hand… although I need to count one name TWICE to reach five!

Yep, four friends on my wagon – and I must admit one of them is my wife!

In reality, three friends then. That’s it!

Well, in fact we can digitally remove another of them.

So, in fact that leaves two… two fingers.

Yes me, Andrea and my best mate No 3 were like equal rights musketeers. We travelled, travailed, and tripped, bought and sold antiques – old stuff anyway – marauded round the country and planned to travel the world…

Then Jeff died. He wasn’t even old. But he was funny, irascible, awkward, looked like a Hell’s Angel and had almost a dozen children.

When he went, a lot of love and laughter went out of so many peoples’ lives.

I was working for a pan-European radio station staked by a barmy Teutonic billionaire and run by an elephant seal of a fat man, rather pongy too, a chain-smoking moron who claimed he had been trained as a lady’s hairdresser and jockey.

Once he was the ‘fifth digit’ in my handful of friends until I saw through his see-through tattered negligee of lies.

He is still here.

But Jeff is gone.

I miss Jeff…

Here is the first of two radio shows I made in his beautiful memory … funny stories about him and the music he loved to listen to as we drove over the hills and far away in search of old stuff, adventure and escape.

#broadcaster #radio #friends #enemies

We are just part of an equation to those who control our alienated children  

As parents we should shame the world’s blood-on-their-hands courts – and those lying exes.

Ponder these figures for a moment, if you will… you are quite likely to be a number in the equation.

I certainly am…

According to a new report by a group of psychiatrists, parental alienation is present in up to 15 per cent of divorce cases.

And 25pc of parents use alienating behaviour for at least six years after divorce.

The human breed is a vindictive breed.

More figures… 22 million people have been targets of parental alienation in the United States alone.

And in the UK, Children’s’ Commissioner Anne Longfield, releasing the first report in fourteen years into children’s mental  well-being, said one in eight children are suffering from ‘at least one’ mental health disorder.

Parental alienation is an epidemic everybody tries to turn deaf ear to – victims, perpetrators, children, CAFCAS, social workers, lawyers, politicians and governments.

But the real deafening silence comes from the world’s family courts.

Secrets, lies, loss, heartbreak and suicide.

And yet judges remain mandated to pound their gavels behind closed doors,  smashing hopes, dreams and love.

Thank you mi’lud.

But now the writing could be on the wall for those in the world who have made it their business to kill off 50pc of the love between a child and parents.

Wooden plaques with words painted ‘in blood’  are being delivered to courts from Swansea to Dublin, from the US to Canada.

Andrew John Teague, co-founder of D.A.D.s and the National Association of Alienated Parents, is making the plaques out of old pallets.

And even though they are only eight inches by five inches, they deliver a big message.

Andrew said: “I make the plaques in my yard out of pallets. They make the point in a graphic but dignified way and people are contacting from all over asking about them.

“I gave placed plaques at  Swansea and Cardiff … we have to highlight the suicides and the child abuse … Anyone can meet at any court if your area and leave a plaque.

“Many family court prolonged hearings are harmful for children. Blood on their hands.”

 #swansea #cardiff parents #divorce #aliens #alienated

 #familycourts #worldwide

The chaps take a look at British builders, manakins and woman-kins and new conservatories. Then they have a rant about Trump, Putin and just about everybody and everything else!

Click to watch

#Putin #Trump #Britishbuilders

The Preservation Society tells the story of the book they tried to ban … it has remained in the wilderness for more than six years

Journalist, editor and broadcaster Leigh G Banks was commissioned by a leading publishing house to write a small book on Staffordshire’s Six Towns … then, at the last minute it all fell apart.

Now the book – described as  offensive, objectionable and  inappropriate by the publishing house – is about to hit the streets.

Out of the Darkness, takes a road-trip round Staffordshire revealing how it changed from  the ancient grime and smog-ridden home of the world famous pottery industry to become a burgeoning centre for commerce and the arts.

It’s a personal journey round the Six Towns for Leigh G Banks which began in the early 1960s when as a child he visited Trentham Gardens with his grandmother, Ada. Later,  he became a fan of Burslem’s Northern Soul fame and in the book he talks vividly about his experiences  at the notorious 1970s Hollywood rock festival near Leek.

In the 1990s he upped sticks from Manchester and moved  to Staffordshire but it wasn’t until beginning to research Out of the Darkness in 2011 he discovered that many of his ancestors hailed from Slindon, near Eccleshall.

Leigh said: “It was clear my grandmother was drawn to the Six Towns although she never told me about  our family connections. But every chance we’d get we’d jump on a bus or a train from Manchester and visit for the day.

“I suppose because I came from a dirty old city like Manchester I was never offended by the grime of   Stoke but what I was fascinated by even as a child were the buildings and the architecture. I found it all majestic.

“I would wander the streets for hours just looking up, looking up  … that’s part of the ethos of the book, look up in the Six Towns, much of the history is above your head in the friezes and inscriptions on the buildings.”

Leigh got a call from the international publisher  commissioning him to write a book on the towns.

“I didn’t approach them with the idea, they came to me,” Leigh said: “I liked the thought of taking a look at the towns, their history and how they’d changed against a backdrop of my childhood.”

But a year into the publishing process things started to go wrong. “Out of the Darkness was being advertised on Amazon and on all the major book sites, we’d been given a launch day and had arranged a venue and a couple of lucrative deals with major stores and then, out of the blue, the rug was pulled from under us. It was a real shock.”

Correspondence from the managing director of the publishing house, said ‘our advisers share our view that much of the content of your book may be considered offensive, objectionable or inappropriate by some readers and consequently may harm our reputation and potentially damage our relationship with both our readers and our trade customers’.

`They were objecting to phrases and paragraphs in the book including:

• Pubs reeked on every corner.
• Stoke was becoming a slum while the Victorian super-rich lived in imposing elevated red brick mansions. They were closer to God up there.
• Let’s begin at Trentham’s highly technical new round-about with it’s dozen or so drunken lampposts and its already grimy black and white road sign pointing to all the roads that lead to the heart of this story.

Leigh said: “The objection to the description of the Trentham round-about was the funniest though! Who in their right mind would be offended by the description of  drunken lampposts – what if we’d said they were bent!

“We couldn’t believe it … I’ve made my living as a writer for more than 30 years   and know exactly what I am doing. Why they adopted that attitude to the book I will never really understand.”

He said: “A lot of people were interested and a number of book shops had put in orders – and a major supermarket had wanted to stock it, so we thought we’d better let people know what had gone on.”