Don't bother the doctor - he's on a compulsory break

How long will you work today? Planning on doing some extra hours this week to catch up on the distractions of football delirium? First, I'd suggest you read the winsomely titled "Council Directive No 93/104/EC of 23 November 1993 concerning certain aspects of the organisation of working time".

The European Working Time Directive, for that is what No 93/104/EC is, tells us all how long we are permitted to work each day - namely, 48 hours per week, including overtime, with a minimum of 11 consecutive hours of daily rest.

The British Government is currently facing legal action from the EU for its lack of rigour in forcing British workers to slack off. Notwithstanding, the directive is now being applied in stages to the NHS. All British residents are advised to read it and make every effort to schedule their illnesses during proper European working hours.

Consultants and senior doctors have been covered by No 93/104 since 1998 and have been pretty much ignoring it - which is why you can still make appointments with them.

In December 2000, a "New Deal" was negotiated for junior doctors that limited their work to a statutory maximum of 56 hours a week, including on-call time. Patients now in British hospitals may notice that some Junior House Officers - they are the ones who have just got out of medical school - are busy jotting in their notebooks.

Their notes will not be about you, the patients, but about them, the doctors. Monitoring of the New Deal to make sure JHOs are not working too long requires them to keep a diary of their work times.

The consequences of the application of the EU Working Hours Directive are no surprise. The UK has a shortage of medical personnel. Hospital trusts are now trying to find ways to fudge the rules of No 93/104. In the meantime, as JHOs must work less while being monitored, the more senior doctors are being asked to work harder during their hours.

This causes resentment in the hospitals. One doctor in a teaching hospital who was asked to do a bit more work during his normal hours refused, citing instructions from his BMA representative, who, he claimed, had told him to demand extra time off or more money as compensation.

A difficult situation looms in August 2009, the deadline for implementation of the maximum 48-hour work week for all medical personnel.

Teaching staff and consultants worry that reducing the hours of junior doctors could impair their training. Intense short spells of work are no substitute for long hours of training and experience.

There is a further concern that the emphasis on implementation of limited working hours and mandated rest periods is deflecting younger doctors from the dedication associated with their vocation.

"I wouldn't want to be treated by this new breed of doctor we are creating," one consultant told me ominously. If a young doctor cannot get to know his patients and is jerked away from the continuity of patient care by some Working Hours Directive, the spell is easily broken: patient care is quickly replaced by self-interest and medical politics.

Meanwhile, apart from the practical reasons for familiarisation with No 93/104, I would encourage reading it for two important lessons. Thirty years ago, this directive would have been a hilarious script for John Cleese.

Today it is just sad reality. Who else but a paid-up member of the Euro parliament could contemplate the notion of a doctor downing stethoscope and leaving a patient's bedside because it was time for him to take his compulsory 11 hours of daily rest?

What mad official could actually write Article 13, which reads: "Member states shall take the measures necessary to ensure that an employer who intends to organise work according to a certain pattern takes account of the general principle of adapting work to the worker, with a view, in particular, to alleviating monotonous work and work at a pre-determined work-rate, depending on the type of activity"?

What deranged, autocratic mind could presume in modern-day Europe to dictate by law, to a free people, the number of hours we may work?

The answer is the mind of the statist, and this is the first lesson of No 93/104. Statism is the modern Western variant of the same system that has played havoc in other parts of the world; this mindset existed in the Chinese mandarinate, where the bureaucrat was the yardstick of human activity.

This is the mindset so exquisitely portrayed in I'm All Right Jack, a film that ought to have warned us that when the disease goes from the factory floor to the hospital ward, it will play out in exactly the same way.

Neither class nor geography can inoculate us; we are no more immune to it than Romanians or Chinese. But Romanian-type societies had, at least, the benefit of a state of mind that viewed the authorities as the enemy, the occupying power - or, as in Italy, simply irrelevant and something one must find a way around.

Our society, having a high degree of civic consciousness, views the authorities with some genuine respect, which permits them to do far more harm.

Many of the EU's directives, such as No 93/104, are an ideological denial of human variety. This is a familiar failing of Left-wing statism. Every human being, for example, needs sleep, but not all human beings need the same amount.

The Working Time Directive is yet another official enshrining of the European Parliament's policy of egalitarianism: the idea that because one person can work longer hours than another, he or she has an advantage that is by definition unfair and must be legislated away. Disparity is equated with inequality. It is no such thing, of course. The fact that one man or woman can work longer than another is simply a natural variation.

Behind all this is the bureaucratic fondness for social engineering that comes out into the open (both in the EU and in such collectives as the BMA or the Department of Health) when it places restrictions on the individual's freedom in the name of everyone having a better family or personal life.

What paternalistic insolence. Surely such matters are personal decisions. Some jobs will not be compatible with huge quantities of family life; some achievement will be won only at the cost of quality time. In saner periods, before what G K Chesterton described as "the softness of a padded cell", we would never have taken seriously talk about outlawing a person's right to work or capping a doctor's hours in order to force him to have a better private life.

Now we take this for granted and believe it to be a sign of enlightenment. But it is, as Chesterton predicted, "a refusal of the nerves to respond to normal stimuli", a time and condition where we no longer even detect, let alone respond to, insane policies of the state.

The second lesson of No 93/104 is in its applications rather than its written articles. The feminisation of the culture is a major contributing factor in the success of statism. The success of the feminists over our thought process is truly phenomenal.

To take one example: studies of female doctors in Canada, the UK and America have all shown that because they often drop out of work for family reasons, their productivity over a lifetime will average about 20-25 per cent less than that of a male doctor.

To acknowledge this as a fact that needs recognition in planning medical policies (particularly now that women are the majority of medical school students and graduates) brings on howls of outrage, as the Tory health spokesman, Philip Hammond, discovered.

Feminists admit the same fact, when they can turn it to their advantage. In a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, a former president of the American Medical Women's Association said: "One of the reasons for [lack of women in key medical positions] is that the structure of medicine is based on a male model of productivity and it doesn't allow for stops along the way for things like maternity leave and time for a family."

Res ipsa loquitur - the thing speaks for itself - I would have thought, but much of our society simply nods that yes, this is the problem. Feminists have convinced many people that hard-working men are detrimental to the advancement of women and the remedy is to legislate away any advantage detrimental to female careers or ambitions.

"Flexibility" in working hours is, of course, a good thing if it can be arranged, provided we do not penalise or fail to reward those who stay at work. And it may be that, one fine day, we will have enough doctors, nurses, technicians and cleaners to let everyone work a three-day week and eat lotus on the side.

But until that time, the last thing a free, energetic society needs - and the very, very last thing our beleaguered medical professionals need - is the EU's Working Time Directive. The only connection the authors of this directive should have with the NHS is as patients in its psychiatric wards.