The EUROCARE-4 study of cancer survival rates released yesterday by the Lancet Oncology journal does not make for comfortable reading for anyone in the UK, least of all the government. In a league of 22 European countries between 2000-02, England comes out 7th bottom, Northern Ireland 5th bottom and Scotland 3rd bottom in terms of… [Read More]
‘How would the Muslim community respond if ITV made a programme challenging Muhammad as the last prophet?’ So, according to a report in Saturday’s Guardian, does Anglican canon Dr Patrick Sookhdeo protest against the decision by ITV to broadcast, on some as yet unnamed future Sunday, a one-hour documentary setting out the Muslim view of… [Read More]
The DH sent out a press release today entitled ‘Statistical press notice: Patient choice survey and A&E statistics’. The content’s as bland as the headline; the section on the patient choice survey merely reads: ‘Report on the National Patient Choice Survey, March 2007 England and provisional headline results of the May 2007 Survey’. Yet these… [Read More]
Yesterday saw the publication of a report on the Middle East by a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Media accounts of it have largely focussed on one of its principal recommendations. This is that the Government ‘should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas as a way of encouraging… [Read More]
The BBC reported yesterday ‘that the number of serious complaints made against GPs over out-of-hours care has soared in recent years’. Complaints received by the Medical Defence Union (MDU) increased from 30 new cases in 2003 to 100 in 2006, and by the Medical Protection Society (MPS) from 120 in 2002, to 182 last year.… [Read More]
Cameron gave a much publicised – as well as much satirised by the newspapers’ cartoonists – speech on Tuesday. School discipline was the theme in, as the Times Education Supplement puts it, ‘a speech designed to appeal to traditional Tory values’. Appealing to Conservative values was something more than one commentator considered rather urgent, with… [Read More]
Reports released this week by the King’s Fund on Agenda for Change, by the
Passing a lesser-known London park this morning, it was pleasing to see a neat phalanx of young men raising the Union Jack – writes Peter Smith. Rather than joining their peers for a ‘night on the tiles’ to mark the end of school, these young men – teenage boys, if you will – are members… [Read More]
To mark next month’s sixtieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan, earlier this month the BBC Asian Network commissioned a poll of 500 young British citizens of south Asian extraction, aged between 16 and 34. A control group was also polled about the same matters made up of 235 young whites of comparable… [Read More]
Although only just out of the spotlight of the endless reports on the recent ICG mandate (and no, this is not yet another spiel on the dry subject of the EU constitution), Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s nationalist Polish government is again railing against the rulings of EU authorities. While a dispute over the construction of a bypass… [Read More]