Kristian Niemietz

Earlier this summer, NHS England published its long-term workforce plan. It has the backing of all major political parties and outside of health policy circles it did not attract much attention at first. But now, as its full implications (especially in fiscal terms) are becoming obvious, that is changing. A new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has modelled what this plan, if fully implemented, would entail. The NHS currently employs 1.5 million people, or about 6 per cent of the total workforce and a little under 40 per cent of the public sector. Under the health service's workforce plan, that number will rise to 2.3 million by 2036, accounting for around 9 per cent of the total workforce, and 49 per cent of the public sector workforce.

Thirty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism is back in fashion. The anniversary is a good occasion to reflect on some of the lessons that we have collectively un-learned, or perhaps never learned properly in the first place from the fall of Communism. The division of Germany into a broadly capitalist West, and a broadly socialist East, represented a natural experiment, and did so in two ways. It was, first of all, a gigantic economic experiment about the viability of socialism, and it produced conclusive results. Around the time of Reunification, West Germany’s GDP per capita was about three times that of East Germany’s. There was also around a three-year-gap in average life expectancy. But it was also a gigantic political experiment.

If there were a modern remake of the TV series Fawlty Towers, it would probably contain an episode called 'The Socialists', in which the one-liner 'Don’t mention Venezuela!' would become a running gag.   Mentioning Venezuela in the presence of a self-described socialist is considered boorish and impolite these days. Yes, a lot of people on the left have said foolish things about Venezuela over the years. But do we have to hold that against them forever? And why does this matter anyway? We live in Britain, not Venezuela. If 'Venezuela-mania' had no domestic policy implications, and if there were no wider lessons to be learned from it, I would sympathise with that sentiment. That is why I am not particularly bothered about, for example, Cuba-romanticism.

Danny Alexander’s latest plot to make the state a major player in housebuilding is just the latest in a line of useless political schemes to appease all the wrong people and let down all the right ones. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury made no effort today to tell us why the state would be particularly good at building houses any more than it would be good at baking bread or brewing beer. It is not clear whether his plan would even boost housing numbers. Take the government’s first foray into building for a while, which involves 10,000 new homes at Northstowe, a derelict RAF base in Cambridgeshire. What would have happened to that site otherwise? Presumably private developers would have bought that land and done similar things to it anyway.

We are used to political parties trying to claim credit for any positive development that happened during their time in office. The Labour Party’s current stance on healthcare is the exception to this rule. It represents the rare phenomenon of a party denigrating one of the best bits of its legacy. In the mid-2000s, the Labour government managed to inject a dose of competition into the once sclerotic provider-centric NHS. If shadow health secretary Andy Burnham is now positioning himself against the entry of private providers into the NHS, he is really positioning himself against one of his party’s biggest achievements.

What is ‘poverty’? It might sound a basic question but, when we hear about x percent of people ‘living in poverty’, what does that actually mean? The policy review conducted by Frank Field last year offered a number of insights into the issues of life chances and their determinants. But it failed to address that fundamental question: what is poverty? Until we know what we are measuring, it is impossible to attempt to tackle it. Poverty continues to preoccupy us. According to the British Social Attitude Survey, the majority view is that there is “quite a lot” of poverty in Britain today, and many expect it to increase over the next ten years.