Very much needed.
First happy thing to report.
Unison have won their case making it illegal to charge employees for employment litigation. Introduced by the Tories in 2013.
The judges quite rightly said it was wrong to make it difficult/impossible for anyone to resort to law.
Those who paid will be reimbursed.
durhamjen
You state that the government statistics are completely wrong on immigration.
Your link to the Guardian uses the maybe
There's a dilemma: either your completely wrong, or the Guardian is.
Government immigration statistics completely wrong.
Interesting to see the gap in perception between brexiters and remainers.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/24/immigration-stats-blunder-far-perception-truth-media-warp-truth
They want to get rid of the Human Rights Act.
Doesn't look as though they need to.
Does that mean she has to pay it herself? Or is it us?
Rudd has been censured by a high court judge for not releasing a torture victim from detention.
This is extremely unusual - the judge in her criticism said " the Home Office needsto realise that deprivation of liberty is a serious abuse of fundamental rights, even more so when it involves torture victims........the Home Office needs to show more competence and act expeditiously when it comes to complying with court orders"
It is highly unusual for a high court judge to use such strong condemnation in criticising a senior government minister.
Rudd has been ordered to pay costs and also received an indemnity order.
buy not by - sorry.
All Jacob Rees-Mogg's kids!
Actually, they could buy houses up here quite easily, but I don't fancy the cost of the commute. Not many jobs in Consett.
... and that the 18% should be named and shamed Jen (in jest, of course).
I have just found out that in our district you need 13.4 times an average salary to by an average (mean) priced house. We should all feel ashamed that this has gone so far.
This is brilliant. The Spectator asked why so few 18-24 year olds voted Tory - and now wishes it hadn't.
politicalscrapbook.net/2017/08/the-spectator-asks-why-tory-youth-vote-is-so-low-gets-honest-answer/
I love the suggestion that they could get it even lower if they really tried hard.
I wish MPs would stop suggesting they are the ones with a magic wand though Welshwife.
The fact that Hunt took to Twitter and tried to tell Stephan Hawkin that he didn't understand numbers and evidence has now put him in the gutter (if he wasn't already there) as far as I am concerned. Does he really think we are so stupid we couldn't see he was being selective with his choice of statistics. Stupid man.
I know a couple of people working in the recruitment of doctors for permenant posts as well as locum in hospitals and also GP surgeries. This is far from being a new problem and has been going on for some years. It used to be possible to get foreign doctors to work a couple of shifts a week at extortionate rates but even that source is drying up.
For years the UK has not trained enough doctors or nurses and now the effects are really being felt with people retiring and others going home to EU countries etc and possible new immigrants deciding not to chance it incase they are deported or their family is not allowed to join them.
Hunt's promise to recruit 5,000 GPs lies in tatters
The government’s promise to recruit 5,000 more GPs by 2020 lies in tatters, with fewer GPs now than when this pledge was first made.
London going to lose 4000 police because of government cuts.
www.standard.co.uk/news/london/cuts-will-cost-london-4000-police-officers-at-time-of-unprecedented-treat-mayor-sadiq-khan-warns-a3615751.html
pbs.twimg.com/media/DHu_leKXgAENetO.jpg
This is what's happening to one of the firestations Boris shut down.
Research shows that one in ten own two homes, while four in ten own no property at all.
www.24housing.co.uk/news/one-in-10-own-a-second-home/
Who owns my other one?
pbs.twimg.com/media/DHvAaZNXYAAhfCJ.jpg
Real wages in UK compared to other G7 countries.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40993450
Private hospitals get big tax break.
There was an article in one of the papers about Lloyds giving out £60,000 car loans without any credit checks and then it dawned on me that the car was the security.
I must be "old school", any form of debt worries me.
www.taxresearch.org.uk/Documents/Talk%20NHS.pdf
Same thing in a mind map.
The NHS
Where we are
The NHS is under funded.
In cash terms budgets have increased but by rates far lower than population, demand and medical inflation requires, delivering an effective cut in capacity to meet need which is having a severe impact on a system where there was very limited excess capacity.
Social care has come out of this particularly badly.
Integrating social and health care will be hard because of differing payment models.
Holistic approaches to issues are but distant memories.
Super-specialisation may be leading to over medicalisation and excess treatment on occasion.
Generalism is now an undervalued discipline. Nurse led systems may help restore balance on occasion.
No one has a clue who is in charge in much if the NHS Ministers are reduced to campaigning for reform in the system for which they are no longer responsible. There is no co-ordinated planning because no one knows who can do it and no one knows who picks up the cost.
Despite this health and social care employs more than 3 million people: about 1.5 million in the NHS and the rest in social care. Many are on low pay. Increasing numbers work in outsourced posts.
Despite the claim that privatisation is not happening increasing numbers of contracts are being given to private providers. This does, however, remain a minority of service supply and is rarely in the most complex areas.
Back door privatisation, for example via the Naylor Report, is, however, possible.
Staff morale is very low.
There is a recruitment crisis.
There is a pay crisis.
Patient satisfaction remains incredibly high despite this.
There is fear of another NHS reorganisation: on average organisation structures in the NHS are lasting less than five years: many cancer patients have significantly better survival chances.
What politicians say
The NHS is in crisis.
All politicians think they have the solution.
According to the Tories (and in English politics they really matter) this solution quite emphatically does not involve privatisation, but then they quite emphatically said there would be no top down reorganisation of the NHS in 2010 and then delivered the biggest and worst one there has ever been in 2012.
In general, an assurance from a politician is not treated as of value.
What think tanks say
There appears to be little confidence in the medical think tanks. The Nuffield Trust did appear at the event whilst others were more notable by their absence.
The think tanks that were felt to be timid, too pro-market, too uncritical of ministers before the event, especially in 2012 and lacking backbone and vision in general.
I think there was a feeling that many felt the medical Royal Colleges had shown some similar traits. In their defence it was said that they had immense difficulty appearing apolitical as required by their charitable status but there remained a feeling that they were reactive, and too slowly, and that the medical profession had not been willing to deliver an alternative vision for the NHS that might solve the problems many could diagnose.
What the medical profession says
That it’s tough at the front line.
They are not driven by money but need to be paid.
Many are concerned junior staff are being underpaid,
Almost everyone in the NHS could find alternative employment involving fewer body fluid discharges that many in other professions would find unsettling.
There was an over-arching theme of getting back to a past where there was a clear NHS management structure from a minister downwards. There is now just a sense of hopeless, unco-ordinated drift.
What I said (for what it’s worth)
See here.
I added in discussion:
The current confusion is deliberate: it evidences that the invisible hand is at work.
Ministerial absence is deliberate: it is meant to indicate shrinking state control.
Uncertainty is deliberate: the system is designed to create the possibility of failure. You are meant to fear it because you will not behave appropriately unless you do.
A shortage of funds is deliberate: you cannot fail if you are properly funded.
The current NHS crisis is planned and working as anticipated.
What Stephen Hawking says
A publicly funded and publicly provided health service is the most efficient way of providing health services to all that are free at the point of supply and which do not discriminate on the basis of ability to pay. Private sector involvement distorts this outcome, unavoidably and so is to be resisted. This service will however not be perfect. Seven day a week service would be optimal. The reality may well be that social (i.e. staffing) and cost constraints will prevent this, even if he would like it otherwise. These compromises are necessary. The current direction of travel, which appears to be towards privatisation and more insurance involvement is a threat to the NHS model and universal healthcare as well as efficiency: insurers do not like paying. (I précis, I hope fairly).
The legal opinion
David Lock QC, who is also a former Labour MP, offered an opinion on the current NHS reform programme reflected in the STP (Sustainability and Transformation Partnership) programme, now well under way. This is my summary of what he said and my not entirely reflect his views.
This programme is crippled by the fact it needs legislative backing and the government has neither the the will, the majority or the time for another NHS reform.
STPs are meant to take markets out of some aspects of NHS management (although it was pointed out that STPs are designed so that they can be delivered by private companies).
Whether it is legal to now take market contracting out of some areas of NHS supply is doubtful: STP programmes may be a potential source of litigation as a result.
The STP programme has been under-publicised and needs to be subject to much more analysis. Local authorities have a duty to do this as they are involved and so access to this issue via local councillors should be possible.
The STP programme could open up a whole new hornet nest of problems by being done without statutory backing and by creating another layer of reorganisation without necessarily attracting funding to do it, whilst subject to legal risk.
Where to go from here
It is apparent that people want NHSD reform, with a passion that is rare in much of politics.
It was also noted that much of this was specifically focused e.g. on a hospital closure and not on systemic issues that often have much higher health impact e.g. the closure of smoking cessation campaigns and issues to do with preventive medicine in childcare (let alone child poverty). Fox hunting delivers bigger mails bags to MPs than the NHS still does.
Campaigns are not co-ordinated.
There is no central vision of what is required for a good NHS. We can look back to learn lessons but change only takes place in the future.
The challenge
Building that vision. At which point I say this blog has been long enough.
A response to James O'Brien.
"Yes, that just about sums it up. I hope you're having a lovely holiday, but can you hurry back please? Your country needs you! "
By James O'Brien.
"On holiday so may be missing something, but it seems Jeremy Hunt is teaching Stephen Hawking science while his party argues with a bell?"
www.thedailymash.co.uk/
You can probably find the Jonathan Pie video about Hunt on the same link.
"We have an NHS for three reasons.
The first is human compassion: I suggest that it is our natural pre-disposition to wish to relieve suffering in others.
Second, after World War 2 a unique confluence of sentiment, circumstance, political will and Keynesian economic thinking allowed a radical transformation of health care provision in the UK.
Third, people liked the outcome and are deeply reluctant to let it go.
That, however, has not stopped people trying to abolish what has worked so well. The result of their efforts is an NHS in crisis.
This crisis is not necessary: it is the result of the deliberate attack by neoliberal politics on the NHS. Neoliberal politics and the economics that underpins it assume three things.
Firstly, it says that all human beings are simply rational economic actors, reducing all decisions to an assessment of personal advantage.
Secondly, it says that only markets can in that case respond appropriately to the reality of human decision making because they alone allocate resources on a strictly competitive basis.
Thirdly, and consequentially, it argues that the size of the state must be shrunk because it has no role in supplying services that the market might deliver more efficiently in accordance with the spending wishes of consumers, including healthcare.
Neoliberals do, however, know three further things.
The first is that people don’t want to give up the welfare state: they really rather like it.
Second, they won’t as a result directly vote for neoliberal programmes.
And so, thirdly, neoliberalism has to be delivered by subterfuge. The irony of this – which implies that people don’t rationally know what neoliberals think they rationally want – is apparently lost on those promoting the cause.
Austerity is part of that subterfuge. It shrinks the size of the state. It happens to also shrink the economy. And it cannot also theoretically and practically work. But so what? Shrinking the size of the state is what matters. And so NHS budgets are cut.
Breaking up national services into small, vulnerable, local services is also part of the subterfuge. Vulnerability is key to competition. Who cares about inefficiency, cost and not meeting need? The option to fail must be built in to the system: competition demands it. So we get NHS localisation and fragmentation.
And the myth of informed patient choice is the third obvious subterfuge when most patients clearly want expertise and guidance and not to be left on their own to decide their fate.
As a result I stress that the NHS is where it is because of political subterfuge that is designed to undermine its very existence."
This is from an article by Richard Murphy, who was giving a presentation at the same place as Hawking today.
If you want to read the rest it's on taxresearch.
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