Save the NHS

For everyone sickened and enraged by the lies, distortions, malevolence and idiocy emanating from the Tory-led government, Saturday’s march and rally in central London, “A Future That Works,” is an important opportunity for us to show our anger and our indignation at how our country is being wrecked, and our people punished, for other people’s […]

Please sign the campaigning group 38 Degrees’ open letter to Jeremy Hunt, warning him not to mess with the NHS. Sometimes it’s almost unspeakably depressing to be living in England, in a dystopian fantasy that no one voted for, with a useless coalition government of the Tories and the Lib Dems that required Frankenstein-like engineering […]

I was at WOMAD last Friday when the £27 million Olympics Opening Ceremony took place, but a screen had been set up especially for the occasion, and I managed to catch everything from the 800 nurses celebrating the NHS, through the tour of Britain’s modern musical history, to the start of the athletes’ processions. The […]

Dr. Gabriel Scally, who resigned in April, also talks of “a very deliberate policy across all of the public sector to roll back the achievements that have been made in this country since the second world war,” and “a systematic downgrading, if not destruction, of civil society in England” by the Tory-led coalition government, as […]

Fed up with an artificial age of austerity, designed to destroy the welfare state and transfer every remaining function of the state — the NHS, education, land, property, even the police — into private hands? Fed up with being told by wealthy, out-of-touch Tories that “we’re all in this together,” when we clearly aren’t? Fed […]

Forcing people into jobs they don’t want, just to claim their benefit, might be defensible if there was pretty swiftly a real job available to those who were capable and wanted it, but as the Tory-led government has pushed its workfare scheme, the alarming truth is that it has created a forced working underclass of […]

Is there no end to the arrogance of this wretched government? In February, while pushing their vile bill to destroy the welfare state, the Tory-led coalition resorted to dismissing important amendments demanded by the House of Lords by invoking “financial privilege,” an arcane set-up whereby, as Conservative Home explained in a highly critical post, The […]

Although the mangled corpse of Andrew Lansley’s wretched NHS reform bill was passed by Parliament a month ago, the fight to save the NHS is far from over. On the afternoon of April 24, the campaigning group 38 Degrees, which mobilised over half a million people to oppose the government’s plans to hack up the […]

Less than three weeks since the Tory-led coalition government’s dreadful NHS reform bill was passed — aimed primarily at allowing private companies greater access to the NHS than ever before — a damning document has been published, which should have derailed the entire process. The document in question follows the judgment of the Information Commissioner, […]

Today, a leaked copy of the first draft of a risk register (PDF) assessing the damage that could follow the Tory-led coalition government’s reckless plans to reform the NHS (which involve devolving 60% of the NHS’s £100bn budget to new GP-led consortia, and introducing more competition into the NHS), was published by the Guardian. As […]