Should we be wary of private companies’ involvement in healthcare?
by Guest

contribution by Melanie Newman

“Wariness of private companies’ involvement in healthcare is a British obsession and an irrational one,” proclaimed the Times in an editorial yesterday, accompanying a lengthy article by Camilla Cavendish on the NHS.

Cavendish’s piece began with an almost delirious appraisal of Circle Health, the private healthcare operator that is 50% owned by its staff.

Circle’s hospital in Bath is “designed by Lord Foster, there is a grand piano in the front hall and the NHS patients get the same fluffy white dressing gowns and ensuite rooms as the private patients,” Cavendish gushed.
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11 Comments   ¦   Published at 1:47 pm, 10th November

by Sunny Hundal

It seems to me that it’s now more liekly than not that the Eurozone is going to collapse in some form or another. Italy’s debt is unsustainable and they still haven’t solved the Greece problem yet.

Put aside the technical questions of how all this might play out and let’s focus on the political ramifications, for this exercise.

by Guest

The government is dramatically cutting funding for local councils.

You may be aware of the headline figures but these don’t adequately reflect the depth of the devious ways in which this money is being clawed away from local services and kept by the Treasury in Whitehall.

by Dave Osler

One of the few political positions that sections of the far left and the free market right alike hold dear is opposition to immigration controls.

But I am still not quite sure whether it was the Socialist Workers’ Party or the Adam Smith Institute that sneakily managed to take over the UK Border Agency while no-one was looking this summer.

by Richard Exell

Many union members are getting pay increases of less than three per cent. So is it fair for people on benefits to get an increase of 5.2%, which is what the policy of uprating in line with inflation would mean?

It looks as though the government will exclude pensions from the freeze, if they go ahead with this plan.

by Paul Cotterill

Robert Peston is regarded as a reasonable financial journalist, but he lets himself and the BBC down badly today by exonerating the banks over the continued economic flatlining.

But Peston clearly hasn’t looked at the data properly.

by Jonn Elledge

By now, I assume, we’ve all read Helen Lewis-Hasteley’s skin-crawling round-up of the abuse and threats of sexual violence that women writers face on the net.

The men who make these comments pose a clear and obvious danger to society. But we shouldn’t hate them.

by Duncan Weldon

Yesterday was another big day in the Eurocrisis – the Greek government looks set to fall, Italy’s is tottering on the edge and France announced (another) austerity package.

But for me the real news yesterday wasn’t the stuff which made most of headlines.

by Carl Packman

Though the tactic of kettling was devised under former Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone’s term, and used before recent student demonstrations (notably as a means of keeping EDL thugs from clashing with counter protests), it was still a shock the first time I saw it being used on young people, who were visibly scared and certainly no threat.

On more than one occasion I have seen tensions rise, not before, but as a consequence of, the tactic of kettling. And further, rubber bullets kill, they have done before, and they could again. Why would we take such risks?

by Guest

A fresh arrival in austerity-stricken Athens over the weekend, the Today programme’s John Humphries joined the ranks of IMF inspectors and faceless ECB technocrats currently descending on Greece.

Unlucky Greece. In a series of interviews, Greeks are told they were “foolish”. Their pensions are “staggeringly generous”. Greece “spent too much for too long”. This is drivel.

by Guest

It’s often said that Adam Smith would turn in his grave if he knew what was argued in his name.

The latest Adam Smith Institute attack on the Robin Hood Tax would certainly be enough to make his skeleton blush crimson.

 

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