At the Labour party conference last week, Ed Milliband promised that, if elected in 2015, he would freeze energy prices for 20 months. This promise, worth around £120 per household, prompted cautious optimism from the left, who are focusing on the ‘price of living crisis’, and scorn from much of the centre and right.
After two terms in power, Norway’s centre-left red-green coalition were defeated in the elections this week, making way for a new conservative government. Erna Solberg’s Conservative Party won 96 out of 169 seats in parliament, and is looking to set up a right-wing coalition with the Christian Democrats, the Liberal Party and the Progress Party.
The need for democratisation and accountability has long been a topic of debate in the NHS, and such discussion has only grown since the introduction of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) earlier this year, in which GPs are expected to indirectly represent the interests of their patients in the commissioning process. In light of this, Anton… [Read More]
Without a universal census to provide a scale, sample surveys can only provide a proportion, not a total, whether the issue is schools, health or migration.
Over the weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservative Christian Democratic/Social Union (CDU/CSU) secured 41.5% of the vote in the German elections, but she fell short of a majority and her classical liberal allies the Free Democrats (FDP) failed to get into the Bundestag, meaning a minority government or a ‘grand coalition’ between Merkel… [Read More]
In his forthcoming Civitas publication, A Competitive Pound for a Stronger Economy, John Mills reiterates the case for an exchange rate target to boost British manufacturing and the economy as a whole. Some may object: is John’s case based purely on theoretical speculation? Is an exchange rate target the sort of issue that a select… [Read More]
UKIP supporters have probably had a week to forget, after Godfrey Bloom MEP referred to a room full of women looking to engage in politics as ‘sluts’, then refused to discuss the all-white cover of a UKIP brochure, and finally struck C4’s Michael Crick with said brochure. Bloom, who was UKIP’s defence spokesman, has attracted… [Read More]
The Greek government is considering placing a ban on Golden Dawn after a man affiliated with the far-right party admitted to murdering anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. The well-known left-wing rapper, who went by the stage name Killah P, was stabbed to death in Athens on Tuesday.
Output by size of the available workforce is a less ambivalent measure of economic success than GDP per worker, as it includes unemployment.
Today, Dr Christoph Lees and Dr Mark Slack of the Doctors’ Policy Research Group (DPRG) have written a comment piece about Professor Brian Jarman’s revelations last week about high mortality in NHS hospitals, according to his Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR). Their piece notes that Jarman’s statistics, which I also commented on yesterday for the… [Read More]