Dr Crippen delivers a steady drip feed of episodes that demonstrate quite how ridiculous and dangerous hospital bureaucracy has become. This diary entry from yesterday was exemplary. Tuesday 27th March One of those irritating but glorious phone calls. I saw Mrs Jones, a middle aged lady, and heavy smoker, with an ominous lump in her… [Read More]
The year is 1780. A sailing ship is ploughing through heavy seas across the Atlantic, loaded almost to the gunwales with a cargo of human beings. They are chained together on narrow shelves, soaked in sweat, blood, vomit and excrement. In a smart London club, an elegant young graduate fresh from Cambridge is seated at… [Read More]
With great fanfare the BBC has launched a prime time documentary called The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom. It is the usual bravely radical, groundbreaking BBC stuff of course. In other words it is full of soft left clichés recycled from the heyday of collectivism, writes Graham Cunningham. I was reminded… [Read More]
Education secretary Alan Johnson’s announcement that school dropouts will be criminalized has met a mixed response. ‘Attendance orders’ will be slapped down on teenagers detailing a course that they should attend; teens who breach the order face a £50 fixed penalty or prosecution. As Alex Frean points out in The Times, criminalizing school non-attendance is… [Read More]
Today – in fact at this very moment – the EU-ACP (African-Caribbean-Pacific) Joint Parliamentary Assembly convenes in Brussels for their biannual plenary meeting. Talking shop or not, the Assembly has acquired an increasingly prominent role, particularly given the tensions surrounding the EU’s intention to end its preferential trade arrangements with ACP countries in favour of… [Read More]
According to The Times interpretation, splashed across their front page today, ‘middle-class pupils face losing out on university places if their parents have degrees and professional jobs,’ after the University and College Admissions Service [UCAS] announced land-mark changes to the university admissions system. Prospective students will now be asked to declare both whether their parents… [Read More]
Before long, many of us will be sitting on Adam Smith. The Bank of England has just launched a new £20 note bearing an image of the Scottish philosopher and inventor of economics, writes Dr Peter Heslam. It isn’t clear whether the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, had anything to do with the decision. He is… [Read More]
In a survey conducted last Thursday (8th March) at the annual Civitas Sixth Form Conference on the European Union, 68% of 16-18 year olds revealed that they would vote against ‘a Constitutional treaty that gives the EU legal personality’ (i.e. the power to make international agreements by itself, or on behalf of member states). Significantly,… [Read More]
‘Every school in England should set up a council so pupils can have a voice in the appointment of teachers and running the school, a Commons committee says,’ reports the BBC News website today under the headline ‘School councils a must, say MPs.’ Based on research done by London University’s Institute of Education [where, notably,… [Read More]
The NHS remains in crisis. More catastrophes barely make an impression on the British public. They no longer seem to make a difference: the NHS limps on with the efforts of the doctors and nurses that still treat medicine as a vocation. Some targets are hit, others are missed, and amid the crushing burden of… [Read More]