Society

Shock! Horror! Another report reveals the shameful care given to the elderly in British hospitals. People in the twilight of their life reduced to begging for food and rattling the bars of their beds in a desperate attempt to get the attention of medical staff paid to care for them. The findings came in reports of random inspections by the Care Quality Commission watchdog that found concerns in 55 of the 100 hospitals visited, with 20 of them — one in five — breaking the law in its levels of neglect. They found patients starved of food, denied water, spoken to rudely or simply ignored. It is sickening stuff. But

Governments worth their salt know that a single young person out of work is a tragedy, but a million young people being on the dole is a political catastrophe.   This week’s unemployment figures fall just short of that symbolically important figure. But they also put the coalition’s solutions in sharp focus. Ed Miliband did well in PMQs this week because he could see the panic in David Cameron’s eyes.   It isn’t that the government doesn’t have a solution. It has a solution for all the country’s ills: the riots, social dislocation, worklessness. It is called the Work Programme. According to its champions it will deliver on every front.

Yesterday was a rare good day for Andrew Lansley: the Health Bill survived its trial in the House of Lords. But there are no fanfares in this morning’s press for the near-moribund health secretary. The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Mail all lead with the story that 50 per cent of English hospitals fail elderly patients according to the Quality Care Commission. Lansley may have thought that his struggle was with nit-picking peers, who are determined that he, as the secretary state, remains ultimately accountable for the NHS in the letter of the law. But, maintaining the standard of NHS care is his real battle. The irony of the

The Lords has been debating the Owen/Hennessy amendment to the NHS bill, which threatens to upset the coalition. Owen and Hennessy have called for the bill to be referred to an extraordinary committee, which would report by 19 December, and they insist that the secretary of state must remain ultimately responsible for services.  Lord Howe opened for the government and spoke of the need to delegate power away from the secretary of state. The he added: ‘We are unequivocally clear that the Bill safeguards the Secretary of State’s accountability. However we are willing to listen to and consider the concerns that have been raised and make any necessary amendment to put

‘400,000 children will fall into relative poverty by 2015, says IFS’ we read on The Guardian’s front page today — yes, one of the most pernicious ideas of recent years is back. It’s the definition of ‘poverty’ as being figures on a spreadsheet, households deemed to fall beneath an arbitrary threshold. It’s almost entirely meaningless, and diverts energy and resources away from a real fight against poverty. I really do believe that, as ideas go, this one has damaged Britain more than almost any other over the last two decades — and it’s high time it was confronted.   The ‘poverty’ that the Institute of Fiscal Studies is talking about

“I don’t believe that wrongdoing did occur”, said Liam Fox in his apology yesterday. With today’s front pages dripping with accusations, Fox has some work to do to substatiate that claim. The Guardian reveals that “Political lobbyists were paid thousands of pounds to help a Dubai-based businessman arrange a secretive meeting with Liam Fox”: “an invoice, seen by the Guardian, shows that Boulter enlisted the services of a lobbying firm to help him skip layers of bureaucracy and meet Fox for an urgent meeting on the 41st floor of the hotel. The invoice shows Boulter paid Tetra Strategy £10,000 for “project fees”. It is understood that the fees covered fixing