Society

Amanda Pritchard is resigning as chief executive of NHS England, after three years in the job. Pritchard’s announcement, in the last few minutes, is not a huge surprise given there had not been a great deal of confidence among ministers and aides in the leadership of the NHS – though it is worth pointing out that this lack of confidence was not solely focused on Pritchard. Pritchard’s departure leaves Streeting and colleagues more exposed Pritchard had been very anxious to show that she was ready and willing to implement the reforms that Labour wanted to introduce, particularly the shift from acute, hospital-based care to preventive and community services. But she

Mike Amesbury, the former Labour MP who has been sent to prison for ten weeks for punching a constituent in the street, is rather unlucky: the truth is that very few first-time offenders get locked up. It’s probable that those convicted of similar offences in the future may still be imprisoned. But the use of short prison sentences for non-violent offences, however numerous and persistent, are under threat. Very few first-time offenders get sent to prison David Gauke’s Sentencing Review, which is due to be published in full over the coming months, is likely to make it harder for magistrates to hand out short jail sentences. Shabana Mahmood, the Justice

A contributory factor to the continuing impoverishment of Britain is psychiatric diagnosis – or rather, the superstitious official belief in it. More than two thirds of Incapacity Benefit claims over the space of two years were for supposed psychiatric conditions. Psychiatric diagnosis has produced more invalids than the first world war. It is the foundry in which the mind-forg’d manacles are produced – mass-produced, in fact. The most common diagnoses – of depression and anxiety, for example – are completely dependent on what the patient tells the doctor. The doctor’s default position, quite rightly, is to believe what his patients tell him. Failure to do this can lead to disaster,

There’s blood spattered on the pavement but locals in New Addington, an estate in Croydon, southeast London, seem curiously unbothered. ‘I’ve had no problems,’ Eli, who lives around the corner from the latest stabbing, tells me.  Eli’s house is close to Rowdown Field, where last March a human head and other dismembered body parts were found. Sarah Mayhew, a 38-year-old mother of two, was murdered and her remains dumped here. Flowers and solar-powered candles are pinned to the side of a metal cargo container in the car park visited by her killer. Leftover police tape flutters in the wind. The roar of traffic from the main road shatters the silence.