Nhs

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The silencing of Meirion Thomas; finding the Cross of St George in Tuscany; and healthy scepticism about NHS privatisation

This turbulent surgeon Sir: I have taken Meirion Thomas to task before in your letters pages, saying that since one third of NHS professional staff are immigrants, it would seem churlish to deny health visitors access to the very doctors we have poached from them. Meirion Thomas is not a whistle-blower (‘Bitter medicine’, 3 January) — he has not told us anything that our own prejudices haven’t already informed us of. And quite rightly he is being encouraged by his colleagues to zip it. Is there any business, let alone political party, that would tolerate such pointless, if not divisive, mudslinging from within? Dr Tom Roberts Derby Medical cover-ups Sir: Freddy

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the 2015 campaign begins, Charlie Hebdo and Britain’s A&E crisis

Will the next Parliament be impossible to handle? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth and Compass’ Neal Lawson discuss the latest Spectator cover feature on the challenges facing Ed Miliband or David Cameron if either manage to secure a majority on 7 May 2015. Will the Labour left or Tory right prove too troublesome for the respective leaders? Should Miliband or Cameron be the most worried? And are we on the brink of major electoral reform? Hugo Rifkind and Isabel Hardman also discuss the A&E crisis facing Britain and the problems of the NHS being used a political football. Who is to blame for the current crisis and will the government

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

So the near collapse of A&Es around the country is all my fault?

Oh, I see. So it’s my fault. There I was, thinking that the general swamping and near collapse of accident and emergency services in hospitals across Britain might be the result of, you know, some sort of systemic problem within the NHS. With me, a mere member of the public, just being an occasional victim. But no! Apparently it’s all because I took my wailing two-year-old daughter in, one Sunday afternoon last year, to get some antibiotics for her ear. This is good to know. For, had I not been told that all this was the fault of chumps such as me heading to such places for the sorts of

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: In which today’s big loser is the NHS

Everyone predicted a sombre PMQs. It was anything but. A mood of opportunistic and lacerating silliness dominated today’s exchanges. The NHS – poor thing – was fought over like a bunny rabbit caught by two packs of ravening hounds. Miliband’s aim was to take the word ‘crisis’ and gum it to the health service with Superglue. He accused Cameron of destroying walk-in centres, wrecking social care and wasting billions on reorganisation. In reply Cameron airily waved five billion brand new pounds to be spent on social care which he says Labour opposes. Then he blundered by asking Miliband to suggest a solution to the problem. This not only validated Miliband’s

William Cook

A & E just saved my son’s life. Let’s not forget how important it is

We were lucky. The ambulance came in half an hour. By then my teenage son Edward was unconscious. He’d had a headache the day before, but by the evening he seemed to be getting better – sitting on the sofa, watching telly, annoying his little sister. We’d been through the meningitis checklist on the NHS website: no rash; no stiff neck; no aversion to bright light. He ate a big supper and went to bed. In the small hours he started vomiting. We thought it was the norovirus. By dawn he was delirious. Then he stopped responding altogether. My wife and I went with Edward in the ambulance. The paramedics

James Forsyth James Forsyth

PMQs: Playing Punch and Judy with the NHS

Today’s PMQs was, predictably, about the NHS. But the Punch and Judy nature of the session seemed particularly small in the light of events in Paris. After expressions of solidarity with the French, normal business was resumed. Ed Miliband was enjoying himself, confident that he was on his party’s chosen turf. He piled into Cameron accusing him of blaming patients for the crisis and demanding that he apologise to those who have had to wait for more than four hours. Cameron fended him off, but didn’t look particularly comfortable. However, he had a good counter-attack ready, attacking Miliband for allegedly having told the BBC’s Nick Robinson that he wanted to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour seeks urgent question on A&E crisis

Andy Burnham has put in a request for an urgent question on the A&E crisis, I have learned. The question, which the Speaker has yet to decide whether or not to grant, is as follows: URGENT QUESTION Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on the major incidents that have been declared at a number of hospitals and on A&E performance in England. This might seem rather unsurprising at first glance, and it would be on any other day of the week. Today Ed Miliband will face David Cameron at PMQs and as I blogged earlier, it would

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How will Ed Miliband use the A&E crisis at PMQs?

Towards the end of 2014, David Cameron was finding PMQs ‘boring’. He knew that it was turning into a session where each week both he and Ed Miliband basically said the same thing over and over again, usually with a long string of statistics that the other couldn’t quibble while in the Chamber. He would talk about the importance of a strong economy, while Miliband would talk about the NHS. And then everyone would filter back out of the Chamber having learned nothing. Well, today the Prime Minister will probably find PMQs takes the same ‘boring’ format, but if Miliband crafts something less stunningly dull than a string of statistics

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

The A&E crisis must be all my fault, obviously

A preview of Hugo Rifkind’s column in this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow… Oh, I see. So it’s my fault. There I was, thinking that the general swamping and near collapse of accident and emergency services in hospitals across Britain might be the result of, you know, some sort of systemic problem within the NHS. With me, a mere member of the public, just being an occasional victim. But no! Apparently it’s all because I took my wailing two-year-old daughter in, one Sunday afternoon last year, to get some antibiotics for her ear. This is good to know. For, had I not been told that all this was the fault of

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Does anyone in London actually know how the Barnett Formula works?

We’ve just had two years of intensive constitutional politics. Time enough, you’d think, for even London-based politicians and commentators to work out how British politics actually works. But if you think that you’d be wrong. Very wrong. Consider our old friend the Barnett Formula. Antiquated and not entirely fit for purpose – it being a 1970s convenience that was itself an updated version of the 1880s Goschen Formula – but hardly a mystery or a terribly complicated piece of financial wizardry. And yet it seems that almost no-one in the Westminster village actually understands how Barnett works. Yesterday, you see, Jim Murphy promised that he would use Scotland’s share of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is the NHS ‘crisis’ too complex for politicians to solve?

Is the NHS in crisis, or isn’t it? Jeremy Hunt doesn’t want to use the word, telling the Today programme that ‘there’s a huge amount of pressure’, while Norman Lamb argued that ‘I wouldn’t describe it as a crisis’ but ‘I readily acknowledge that the system is under intense pressure’. Few politicians want to describe something they’re notionally responsible for as ‘in crisis’ (though Lamb isn’t afraid to use pretty strong language about some areas of his portfolio, including mental health). But whatever word they use, ministers know that things aren’t hunky dory in accident and emergency departments at the moment – and this hasn’t been a cold winter. The

Thursday

Freddy Gray

How the NHS silenced a whistleblowing doctor

Almost two years ago, a cancer surgeon named Joseph Meirion Thomas decided that he could no longer keep quiet about what he regarded as a major abuse of the NHS. The Francis inquiry into the scandal at Stafford Hospital had just published its report, reminding doctors of their ‘duty of candour’. Thomas interpreted that to mean that health professionals ‘should feel supported and protected should they ever need to speak out.’ In that spirit, he wrote in The Spectator about ‘health tourism’ — foreign nationals using NHS services to which they are not entitled, placing an already overburdened system under yet more strain. His article caught the attention of Jeremy

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Even Ukip don’t dare break the unhealthy consensus on the NHS

There’s an irony about Ukip’s rise. Nigel Farage party’s popularity is driven by a widespread sense that the main parties are all the same. Yet in the past four years, the differences between the Labour party and the Conservatives have grown substantially, on issues from the size of the state to an EU referendum. In an election year you might expect parties to converge in the centre ground as they chased swing voters. It won’t happen this time. Labour is determined to stop left-wingers defecting to the SNP and the Greens, while the Tories, who have long had their own issue on the right because of Ukip, believe that their

Wednesday

Tom Chivers

How not to be taken for a mug by misleading health stories this New Year

The Christmas/New Year period is always fun for health balls. Because we like drinking lots of wine and eating lots of chocolate around this time of year, newspapers like to pick up on weird little studies which purport to show that those things are good for us, while leaving out inconvenient details, stuff like ‘the study was on some tissue samples in a petri dish’ or ‘the study was on a chemical which exists in wine in trace amounts but we’re pretending it’s about wine in general’ or ‘obviously chocolate isn’t good for you, for God’s sake’. So here are some hints and tips to avoid being taken for a

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Three senior politicians are accused of mass murder

Time travel came to PMQs today. The leaders discussed what year it will be in 2020. The answer, naturally, isn’t 2020. Ed Miliband quoted the OBR and claimed that the Coalition plans to shrink the state to the sort of slim-line figure it last sported in the 1930s. Rubbish, said Cameron. His diet will trim the national waistline to the dimensions it enjoyed in the late 1990s. Kenneth Clarke wittily chipped in to remind us that Blair’s government only hit this modest target by adopting the budget limits of the previous Tory administration. In which the chancellor was K Clarke. That was funny. Not much else was. Miliband’s gnashers are

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Who privatised Hinchingbrooke hospital? And does it matter?

When it comes to rows about the NHS, these days it doesn’t rain, it pours. In fact, fights between the parties about who cares more/privatised the most are turning into a weather bomb, such is their frequency. Today Nick Clegg turned up to Prime Minister’s Questions determined to highlight Labour hypocrisy on the health service, and he managed to shoehorn it in to an answer to Harriet Harman’s question about people trusting the Lib Dems (or not). The Lib Dem leader said: ‘In fact, the Shadow Health Secretary, sitting there demurely, is the only man in England who has ever privatised an NHS hospital, and they dare to lecture us.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Hunt and Andy Burnham’s NHS battle heats up

Two politicians unashamedly and eternally at one another’s throats are Jeremy Hunt and Andy Burnham, scrapping over who cares more about ‘Our NHS’. Today Hunt has written to Burnham complaining about a story in the Sunday People this weekend that 1,800 nurses have left the NHS in two months. Hunt is accusing Burnham of dodgy figures, writing: ‘As you will know as a former Secretary of State for Health, nursing numbers are subject to seasonal variation, which means there is always a temporary dip in the summer months – including when you were in office. You selected a random time period in order to present the most alarming scenario possible

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 December 2014

Home The government spent days announcing how the Autumn Statement would allocate funds. ‘Frontline’ parts of the National Health Service would get an extra £2 billion for the time being, £750 million of it diverted from elsewhere in the Department of Health budget. Another £1.1 billion from bankers’ fines would go to support GPs. Labour said it would give the NHS twice as much. Out of the £15 billion already set aside by the government for roads, a tunnel would be built for the A303 past Stonehenge. Of £2.3 billion (over six years) earmarked for flood prevention, only £4.3 million was set aside for the Somerset Levels, but £196 million for the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The very model of a political Chancellor

Autumn Statements lack the drama and traditions of the Budget. Gladstone never delivered one, there is no Autumn Statement box and no possibility of a dram of whisky as the chancellor delivers it. But this year’s Autumn Statement was more important, and more substantial, than next year’s Budget will be: the Liberal Democrats are adamant that March is too close to the general election for the Budget to do anything other than update the fiscal forecasts and set out the duty rates. The test this week isn’t economic but political. As with last year, the Tories have spent the autumn racing down a rabbit hole after a populist policy initiative:

Kate Chisholm

Why you have to listen to this year’s Reith Lectures

Each year the Reith Lectures come round as Radio 4’s annual assertion of intellectual authority, fulfilling the BBC’s original aspiration to inform and educate (although not always to also entertain). Each year, though, it’s hard not to feel a certain resistance to Lord Reith’s lofty legacy. Radio might be the perfect format for delivering a talk. Perfect for the lecturer because there is just an audience of one to focus on. Perfect for the listener because there’s nothing else to distract you. No intrusive soundscape. No other voices to confuse. But not all intellectual giants have the ability to communicate, nor an understanding of radio’s particular qualities. Sometimes the lectures