We’re all getting sick of the lectures on climate change

In theory, people being more political sounds great. Less dreary conversations about the weather and the ‘footie’, and more water-coolers surrounded with colleagues fizzing with enthusiasm about democracy and its pleasures. But the actual practice of this presupposes that we will all be open-minded and curious and – unless we are extremely learned about something – that the opinion of all citizens shall be equal. Above all, it fails to observe that pontificating about something you’re not an expert in – just because you have a more elevated station than the people you’re preaching to – totally negates this democratic dream. It simply sets the stage for a silly symphony of busybodies.

This came to mind on reading that the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has this week issued new guidance instructing doctors, as ‘trusted members of the community’, to lecture their poor patients about the dangers of climate change. This is troubling enough given the average duration of a face-to-face appointment with a GP in England – when you finally get one – is just 10 minutes. Furthermore, this 11-page document also suggests that doctors should cause even more anxiety to patients by ‘working from home’ and cutting back on tests and prescriptions – in the name of saving the planet, of course.

So basically doctors are being advised by the RCP to do less of the things doctors have historically been required to do, while amping up the scolding about an area they have no training in. It also urges doctors, after scaring their patients with talk of burning rivers and the like, to keep an eye out for the poor creatures showing signs of ‘eco-distress’ – that is, anxiety and depression allegedly caused by climate change. I would venture that if this condition exists in any great numbers, it’s caused not by climate change itself but by people banging on about climate change, alongside the other anxieties that stem from not being able to get a GP appointment, a medical test or a prescription.

We’re not quite at the stage of those crazy Canucks. In 2021, a doctor in British Columbia actually diagnosed a woman with ‘climate change’ – thought to be a world first – after she reported having breathing problems following a hot summer featuring a slew of forest fires. How many years at medical school did it take to come to this razor-sharp conclusion?

Dr Kyle Merritt opined:

‘She has diabetes. She has some heart failure… She lives in a trailer, no air conditioning. All of her health problems have all been worsened. And she’s really struggling to stay hydrated.’

I’m sure we’ll get to where Canada is eventually, though. When a society is as single-minded about scaring itself as the Kool-Aid-quaffing Canadians have been for some time, there’s no telling what rabbit holes we’ll race each other to the bottom of. It’s telling that the RCP document showcases such condescending gems from the World Health Organisation as ‘don’t debate the science’ and ‘talk about the health benefits of climate action’. I wonder what health benefits the people inside the ambulances blocked by Just Stop Oil over the past few years have gained from climate-change action?

The NHS isn’t just keen to lecture patients about climate change; it’s also chasing the Net Zero dream. A rather chilling report published earlier this year in the Telegraph revealed that the NHS plans to introduce electric ambulances in order to reach green targets. Paramedics have already expressed concern about the dangerous effect this will have on patients, as ambulances spend hours recharging instead of collecting the sick. Former chancellor Nigel Lawson once famously said that the NHS is the closest thing that the English have to a religion, which makes doctors the priests. When the NHS itself follows the new false gods of everything from climate change to trans rights, the stage is set for the mayhem of unbridled magical thinking.

Like the old priests, doctors are often no better than the rest of us; often, they’re worse. The majority of them may well be driven by the desire to improve the human condition – but the idea that they are somehow holy receptacles of wisdom is absurd. I’d definitely listen to a doctor’s advice on what to do with, say, a broken leg, because I’m aware that they studied the subjects of sickness and health into their mid-twenties, while I was chasing off to interview gormless pop stars. But take lessons from them on politics or lifestyle? No thanks.

They’re hardly paragons of virtue. According to a 2021 study, around a quarter of medical students and GPs smoke. Their levels of alcohol and drug abuse are higher than that of the population generally. At my local hospital, the Royal Sussex County, dozens of patients have allegedly been killed by malpractice and alleged whistleblowers have been sacked. An alarming report in the Daily Mail this week claims that there are around 33 rapes and sexual assaults every week in hospitals in England and Wales. If the NHS really is our religion, it’s turned from being a benign Christian one into a rather savage paganism.

It would be helpful if doctors of all kinds could be encouraged to concentrate on the basics a bit more – that of keeping patients safe and making them better – and leave the lectures to David Attenborough. The same principle applies to policemen who don’t bother catching criminals but have all the time in the world to harass women who believe that biology is a fact of life; banks who go bust and need bailing out, but ‘de-person’ people they don’t like the beliefs of; and, of course, Gandhi ruddy Lineker. Just do the jobs you’re paid for and get your noses out of other people’s business.

So, yes, while I instinctively feel that a society in which all citizens are interested in politics would be a wonderful improvement, the politicisation of public institutions and services does not bring that about. It’s driven not by a genuine desire to foster more debate, but by a determination to close it down and make the gap between the governors and the governed ever wider. These wretches are the kind who can’t see a debate without clutching their pearls and calling it ‘divisive’, especially when their side loses, as with Brexit (though curiously their desire for a second vote on leaving the EU wasn’t deemed ‘divisive’ in the least). These people want a world in which the ‘grown-ups’ do the politics while the rest of us are corralled and controlled and counted by the head, like a cross between branded cattle and naughty children. No thanks.

So, physician – and policeman and banker – heal thyself, before you start telling the rest of us what we should believe.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.