Nhs

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

If it’s not ok to hound Sienna Miller and Steve Coogan, why is it ok to hound Nigel Farage?

Faragephobia reached dizzy new heights on Sunday afternoon, when a bunch of thespians and circus freaks invaded Nigel Farage’s local pub and hounded him and his family out. Behaving with grating and probably knowing irony like small-minded Little Englanders, though dolled up as punkish outsiders, the protesters were basically saying to Nige: ‘Your sort aren’t welcome here — you’re barred!’ And so was a public figure humiliated while doing that utterly non-public thing of lunching with his wife and young daughters — turfed out of his own local hangout by people who don’t like his policies on immigration, the NHS, and other stuff. But this was more that Faragephobia, more than

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Labour launches scary NHS attack poster

The post-Budget attack lines for Labour were clear in Ed Miliband’s speech on Wednesday: his party will allege that the Tories have a ‘secret plan that dare not speak its name’ to cut the NHS in the next Parliament. To underline that claim, Labour has this morning published its first election poster, threatening that the Conservatives would ‘cut to the bone’. Ed Balls, who is understood to have major input into this poster, said this morning: ‘After five years of David Cameron, our health service is going backwards. Our NHS just can’t afford these extreme and risky Tory cuts. And after their broken promises on the NHS in this Parliament

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Was Ken Clarke snoozing? If so, he missed nothing

The PMQs before the Budget is always pretty pointless, and David Cameron turned up clearly determined to trivialise his exchanges with Ed Miliband as much as possible. He came armed with a plethora of jokes about second kitchens, chuckling about throwing two kitchen sinks at problems, that if the Leader of the Opposition couldn’t stand the heat, he should get out of the kitchen, and that the Shadow Chancellor wouldn’t be able to tell which kitchen he could find his leader in. It was partly a device to blunt the attacks that Ed Miliband made, which predictably were on the NHS, on his promise not to reorganise the health service,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Budget 2015: The challenges for Labour

Ed Miliband will respond to the Budget today (the Shadow Chancellor responds to the Autumn Statement, and has a Budget speech the day after the main event). In the past couple of years the Labour response hasn’t been fantastic, partly because the Tories have got a very well-organised (and at times just rather brutish and silly) heckling squad ready to create a wall of noise, and partly because it is difficult to respond to a Budget that contains good figures. But Labour thinks the Autumn Statement gave it the opportunity to attack the Tories on something other than the cost-of-living. The party can now say that George Osborne is planning

Steerpike Steerpike

Andy Burnham burnishes his foreign policy credentials

If Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham’s future leadership aspirations were ever in doubt, then take a look at his reaction to the news of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election as Prime Minister of Israel last night: Burnishing his foreign policy expertise: tick. Cat-nipping the Labour left: tick. About as subtle as Burnham’s recent attempts in The Spectator to rebrand himself as ‘mainstream Labour’. The general election campaign has barely begun, and already potential Miliband successors are getting their ducks in a row.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Andy Burnham: I am mainstream Labour

Has Andy Burnham really reinvented himself to prepare for a future leadership bid? In this week’s Spectator, I interviewed the Shadow Health Secretary about his rather forthright views on the NHS: views that some suspect have conveniently changed in order to appeal to Labour’s base. You can read the interview here, but for Coffee House readers, here are some extended quotes from our discussion. Burnham was insistent that his views on the health service today are the ones he put into practice when he was Health Secretary under the last Labour government. When I asked whether he’d changed politically, he said: ‘Well, there are a couple of ways to answer

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Tories must commit to spending 2 percent of GDP on defence

At a time when Russian fighter jets are forcing civilian flights into UK airports to be diverted, you would expect defence to be one of the big issues of the election campaign. But it is not. It doesn’t fit into the script that the two main parties want to stick to. The Tories’ long-term economic plan doesn’t have space for any foreign entanglements and Labour would rather talk about the National Health Service than national security. But we do need to have a discussion about Britain’s role in the world and how we respond to the Russian threat. It is worth remembering that if Putin tried any funny business in

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Andy Burnham interview: ‘I wanted a different approach, because I’m mainstream Labour’

Time was when Andy Burnham passed for a middle-of-the-road Labourite: he was deemed insufficiently dramatic and impressive to secure much support when he stood for leader five years ago. But these days, his colleagues — and the bookmakers — consider the shadow health secretary the frontrunner in any new contest. At an otherwise funereal Labour conference last year, his speech received standing ovations. In three months’ time, Burnham will either be health secretary or a serious contender for Labour leader. He has already survived calls from within his party to remove him from the health brief, though he claims Miliband has never raised the prospect. We meet in the smaller

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: the NHS report that Labour tried to block

It emerged this morning that Labour MPs took the extraordinary step of blocking the publication of the Health Select Committee report into the NHS – because the conclusions backed up government reforms. I have just been handed details of this report, and it’s clear why Labour wanted it suppressed: it contradicts the party’s attack message. Here are the main points: No sweeping privatisations: there has been little increase in private sector providers since 2010. Nor has there been an extension of charges or top-ups during the current parliament, and that these are not planned. Less red tape: a general trend of declining administration costs in the NHS. No evidence that

Monday

John Raffles

This idiotic NHS ‘calculator’ can’t predict heart attacks. But it might well give you one

I can understand why the Tories have ring-fenced the NHS, but if they do want to indulge in a little trimming I know just where to start – with the moron who signed off on the online ‘calculator’ that assesses your risk of a heart attack. ‘Official NHS calculator predicts when you will have a heart attack,’ says a piece in today’s Telegraph. Actually, it doesn’t. Nor does it pretend to. But the NHS can hardly complain about being misrepresented for clickbait, since – even if you report its claims accurately – the ‘calculator’ is nothing more than an expensive PR gimmick. The NHS last week quietly abandoned its commitment to spend £243 million on

Friday

Andrew Langdon

Why is the NHS ring-fenced but the justice system isn’t?

Earlier this week, Sadiq Khan MP ‘admitted Labour could not reinstate £600m of legal aid cuts imposed by the government’. These are cuts which continue to have a very real impact on our society. They’ve left parents unrepresented when family judges are considering the future care of their children. They have deterred workers who are racially or sexually discriminated against in the workplace from bringing actions in the employment tribunals and priced out those who have suffered loss from bringing claims in the civil courts. The cuts have also driven the best lawyers away from publicly-funded civil work into private practice, and they have dried up the recruitment of junior barristers. We

Thursday

Melissa Kite

My life in ailments

My request to see my medical notes was granted in the end. I honestly don’t know why I wanted to see them, really. I’m just one of those people who suspects the worst of the state, and other large organisations, so if I get the chance to have a peek into what they’ve been up to behind my back I take it. This was my second Subject Access Request. The first was of the RSPCA, who I got a tad suspicious about after writing several critical articles and attracting weirdly sour-sounding complaints from them in which they claimed I was only criticising them because I was a supporter of hunting.

The Spectator

If you really love the NHS, you know it needs to change

To adapt Aeschylus’s aphorism on war and truth, the first casualty in a general election campaign is objectivity. Over the next eight weeks NHS staff can expect nothing but saccharine praise from politicians who are falling over themselves to say how wonderful the health service is, how committed they are to it. The Conservatives may revive their ‘NH-yes’ slogan, promising to safeguard its budget. Labour proposes to protect it from what few reforms the Conservatives promise and even Ukip is posing as ‘the party of the NHS’. A true friend of the NHS, however, would accept that all is not well, and that ‘protecting’ its current structure is an act

Steerpike Steerpike

Has a Tory MP been editing his Wikipedia page from the Houses of Parliament?

Thanks to the internet, it has become increasingly difficult for politicians to hide any past indiscretions. However, this hasn’t put some MPs off from trying. Mr S has noticed some edits have recently been made to Tory MP Craig Whittaker’s Wikipedia profile. The page has had some interesting amendments, with two negative references to the MP for Calder Valley being deleted. First, an edit in December saw all reference taken out to an incident in 2011 where Whittaker was arrested for an alleged attack on his son outside a petrol station. A second change was then made which saw a line deleted regarding claims that he had misled his constituents over cuts to the NHS. Whittaker has

Saturday

James Forsyth

National parties no more

All the election forecast models agree, the next election result is going to be remarkably tight. On these models, neither Labour nor the Tories are going to come close to winning a majority. They would both be about 40 seats short. Now, events could intervene to change things. But, as I argue in the magazine this week, one of the reasons Labour and the Tories are finding it so hard to win a majority is that they are not national parties anymore. Compounding this is that no party is aiming for full spectrum dominance in this campaign. Rather, they are trying to talk up the issues that are best for

Thursday

Melissa Kite

My request to see my medical notes has sparked all-out panic at my GP surgery

My request to see my medical notes has sparked all-out panic at the GP surgery. ‘What do you mean?’ said the receptionist who answered the phone when I called to ask. She sounded even more furious than the time I rang to ask if I could possibly have an appointment to see the doctor. On that occasion, she affected her best Lady Bracknell impression, ‘The doctor? You want to see the doctor?’ ‘Well, yes if it isn’t too much trouble,’ I spluttered, as she audibly bashed her keyboard in ill-disguised rage at my impertinence. On this occasion, she was horribly icy. ‘I mean,’ I stammered, ‘I want to see my

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The footprint of Britain’s immigrants – and emigrants – is important

Half a million people. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I mean, half a million here, half a million there, why, soon you’re talking a million, which is even more of a nice round figure. But that’s the statistic we should be talking about when it comes to the migration stats today from the Office for National Statistics. The crucial figure tucked away in there is in fact 542,000, which is the number of people who came to Britain in the year up to September 2014, excluding returning Brits. And of these foreign immigrants, non-EU citizens were the majority, 292,000 of them. That, I think, is more significant than the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why are the Lib Dems spending so much time talking about mental health?

Nick Clegg is to hold an hour-long phone-in next week on mental health. The Deputy Prime Minister will host the session himself on LBC on Monday. This is part of the emphasis that the Lib Dems are placing on mental health in their election campaigning. Now, there are lots of good reasons why the Lib Dems might want to campaign on mental health, including that it jolly well needs campaigning on because it is, as Clegg says, a ‘Cinderella service’ that suffers from long waits, poor research and less funding, yet one in four people will suffer from some kind of mental ill-health. But there are sound political reasons too.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour unsure about health policy its own councils support

The announcement today that Greater Manchester will receive full control of health spending – worth £6bn – has left Labour in a rather interesting position. On the one hand, it is easy for Andy Burnham to say that this sounds ‘like yet another NHS reorganisation’. But on the other, Greater Manchester includes a number of Labour councils who appear pretty happy to sign up to the provisional deal. Indeed, one of those councils is Wigan, which covers Burnham’s own constituency. Now one of the reasons that spending has been devolved to this area is that councils in Greater Manchester are keen, forward-looking and ambitious. George Osborne has long been a

Thursday

The Spectator

Let Greece leave the eurozone

To listen to Greek government ministers addressing the outside world during their breaks from negotiations with eurozone leaders this week, it would be easy to form the impression that Greece had a mighty economy upon which all other eurozone countries were pathetically dependent. ‘Europe is going through the difficult process of understanding that Greece has a new government committed to changing a programme that has failed in the eyes of everyone who doesn’t have a vested interest,’ said finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. The reality is that Greece is the dependent country, propped up by its creditors, and it is Greek government ministers who are having trouble in understanding the situation