Nhs

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron steps up his game

There’s something about a trip to Scotland that brings out the best in Tories giving speeches, and David Cameron lived up to the occasion the other evening. He reprised his social justice passage – easily the best part of his 2009 conference speech. Listing how Labour has made the rich richer and poor poorer, and how the Tories are the party of Wilberforce etc. Promising a “radical zeal” Conservative party – Amen to that. “Some people will say ‘you can’t do things like that.  You can’t afford to take those risks.’ I say with so little money and so much failure we can’t afford not to.” That’s the spirit.  “Those

Friday

Fraser Nelson

In response to CoffeeHousers

CoffeeHousers have left some characteristically forthright and thoughtful comments on the blog about my Keith Joseph lecture, and I thought I’d answer them in a post.   Tiberius says that I don’t mention voters very much – I talk only about ideas. The voters have been taught Labour ideas: isn’t this something the Tories have to deal with? First, I firmly believe that the public are open to persuasion, open to new ideas having seen the collapse of Labour’s ideas. But, in my lecture (full text here), I do mention voters quite a lot. As Keith Joseph put it, it is folly to seek the ‘middle ground’ between political parties,

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Why winning isn’t enough – and a response to The Fink

I delivered the Keith Joseph lecture last night, entitled Winning Is Not Enough. My point: that the Tories have adopted so many Labour policies out of tactical considerations that they are in danger of getting to office only to find they have signed up to continuing Gordon Brown’s agenda. The problem is not so much Gordon Brown himself, but his misunderstanding of government and politics: it’s his ideas that are so dangerous. If those ideas survive with a blue rosette, they are no less dangerous. And if a Tory government adopts these ideas then that’s not change. It’s more of the same.   By the time you add up all

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Mike Bloomberg Seems to be Inspiring Tory Health Policy. Which is a Problem.

If there’s one thing Team* Spectator agrees upon it is, I think, that Tory health policy is utterly inadequate and desperately confused. One especially problematic promise, however, is the notion that what we need is a Department of Public Health. How will this work? Well, the inspiration would seem to be Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New York City. This is not Good News: First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt. On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron has the positioning right – but fiscal questions remain<br />

Here, CoffeeHousers, is my take on this morning’s Cameron interview: 1. General demeanor: excellent, articulate, confident. The complete opposite from Brown. It does make you think that he should wipe the floor with Brown in the TV debates. 2. “Last week we saw William Hague and George Osborne going to Afghanistan together. First shadow Chancellor, the man who is going to be in charge of the money, on the frontline seeing what is going on in Afghanistan”. Indeed, but the NHS pledge and deficit cut pledge imply deep cuts to the military. To govern is to choose, and Cameron has made his choice: NHS spending before the military. If I

Thursday

Alex Massie

David Cameron’s Immodest Belief in Government

David Cameron’s response to the Queen’s Speech was, of course, dictated by both convention and political nit-picking. Nonetheless, I agree with Sunder Katwala that it’s rum to see a Conservative leader complaining that the government isn’t proposing enough legislation. A useful reminder that whatever else they may be, Dave’s Conservatives do not take an especially modest or reatrained view of government. On the contrary: if there is a problem there must be a bill and damn the consequences. So Cameron, correctly, identified Labour’s approach as believing that “The answer to every problem is more big government and spending” at the same time as he demanded that the government do more,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Rod Liddle’s Education Policy is Antediluvian Piffle

Rod Liddle reminds us that he’s no liberal. This will not, I imagine, trouble him unduly. Nevertheless, his disaste for the middle-classes gets the better of him when he writes: The mantra of consumer choice was co-opted by New Labour and applied to all sorts of perfectly unsuitable things. Children should go to their nearest comprehensive school, without right of appeal. If that school is failing then the local education authority, or the government, should take steps to ensure it no longer fails, by either sacking the headteacher, or spending more money on it. Middle class monkeys will still shift around from area to area looking for schools which they

Monday

James Forsyth

An untrumpeted change

John Rentoul rightly flags up the story in this morning’s FT that about 100,000 NHS patients have gone private and had the state pick up the tab, the private hospitals have had to agree to do the work at the NHS price. For those of us who would like to see the NHS move towards a model where the state pays for healthcare but it is provided by a whole panoply of providers, this is an encouraging step. This kind of consumer-focused reform is hard to reverse. The story, as John notes, hasn’t got as much coverage as it should. John blames this on the press’s lack of interest in

Wednesday

Alex Massie

School Choice in a Single Sentence

Matt Yglesias makes the point in splendid fashion: We should let a thousand flowers bloom and then kill 20-30 percent of them if they turn out to look ugly. Exactly. Logically, mind you, this is how we might approach other policy questions. In Britain, that might mean welcoming regional variation in the NHS (Oh noes! Not the Postcode Lottery!) and treating that as a feature, not a bug. Then we could learn from each other and see what works best in any given set of circumstances. Centrifugal* forces are your friend, not the enemy. *Typo corrected.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The NHS isn’t free

If we are going to have a sensible debate about the NHS in this country, we need to deal with the myth that the NHS is free. Yes, the NHS is free at the point of use, but we all pay for it through taxation. I suspect that slightly fewer people would still ‘love the NHS’ if they knew precisely how much they were contributing towards its costs through all the taxes that they pay. I say this as someone who has no desire to import the US system. Before I went to live in the States, I was quite a fan of the US healthcare system. But having lived

Fraser Nelson

Finally, a stroke of good luck for Gordon Brown

This UK-US spat over the NHS has spilled over into a snowballing twitter campaign, with comments flooding in from Brits. Nigel Lawson said the NHS was like a religion to Britain, and many have come to defend the faith. Brown has lent his support to the campaign, and it’s perfect for him. It allows him to play the patriotic card, telling those yanks (especially – boo – the conservative ones who watch Fox news, and their neocon supporters like Class Enemy Hannan) where to shove it. He also gives President Obama – he of Obama Beach fame – some political support. Finally, it allows him to claim that the NHS

Monday

Alex Massie

Stephen Hawking Has Not Yet Been Murdered by the NHS

There are, I think, two essential truths in international health policy. No-one sees fit to copy the National Health Service and no-one sees fit to copy the American system. Still, for all that we need NHS reform (hardly a surprise since just about every health system is under strain and needs tweaking), the picture of the NHS given by some of the people opposed to Obama’s health plans is, well, not hugely accurate. Take, for instance, this Investors Business Daily editorial which claims that: People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man,