Category: Health

The NHS data grab has finally really got the coverage it deserves and people power has won a stay of execution.

It turns out that the first catastrophic error that Johnson made when it came to dealing with the pandemic actually took place within days of his moving in to Number 10, in July 2019. It’s a story worth remembering – of a government not even intending to be prepared. The National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA) […]

If any question why we died,Tell them, because our fathers lied. So reads one of Rudyard Kipling’s Epitaphs of the War. Substitute “Matt Hancock” for “our fathers” and it could serve as an epitaph for the many thousands of vulnerable elderly people and hundreds of care home staff who were consigned to die in the […]

Many will be aware of the boiled frog analogy. The unfortunate creature is in a pan of cold water which is slowly, slowly being heated up. The frog adjusts his tolerance levels as the water changes from a pleasant coolness to a mildly uncomfortable and then increasingly uncomfortable warmth. Poor froggie stays put throughout, seemingly […]

Dominic Cummings’ testimony in front of the joint session of the Commons Health, and Science and Technology committees was brutal, shocking and damning of this government – and of Johnson and Hancock, in particular. In seven hours of evidence, the former chief advisor to Johnson laid bare a catalogue of delays, mistakes, falsehoods and stupidities […]

The weekend before the May election the front pages of certain Conservative-supporting newspapers were excitedly reporting that ‘Boris’ was about to announce that foreign holidays were coming back! What a boost to give people just before an election. Especially when you are hoping that the general public will forget the 128,000+ official Covid-19 deaths caused […]

In many ways, I have confined myself to my prison: the four walls inside this house that I call home being the bars on my life. The very thing that contains me is also my comfort blanket. Shouldn’t your home be your safe space? Shouldn’t that be where you always feel safe? What if that […]

Brexit was supposedly about “controlling our borders”. But when controlling our borders became a matter of life and death, Johnson’s government has proved pathetically inadequate.. There is as, far as we know, not yet any spread of the super-infectious Indian coronavirus variant in the South West. But this is unlikely to be the case for […]

We are reproducing this Twitter thread with the kind permission of investigative journalist and campaigner Stefan Simanowitz so that it can be read beyond the twittersphere. A year ago today, I broke the #CareHomeScandal The reason so many had died in care homes was because the government had INSTRUCTED hospitals to send people “who may […]

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe […]

Labour early day motion. More to follow. Motion text That this House expresses dismay at the Government’s White Paper, The Future of Health and Care, published on 11 February 2021 which rubber stamps the US care models for the UK; notes that the Bill is a Trojan horse for deregulated privatisation and that language on […]

EveryDoctor is a doctor-led campaigning organisation fighting for a better NHS for every doctor and every patient. They are currently taking the government to court over the PPE procurement scandal which, quite apart from the issue of the money involved, had lethal consequences for healthcare employees forced to work without adequate protection. Today they were […]

In August last year I explained why I was seeking information about NHS Property Services (NHSPS). The organisation ‒ landlord to many NHS properties in the south west and nationally ‒ introduced ‘market rents’ in April 2016, described by the British Medical Association in evidence to the House of Commons Health Committee as “unjustifiable and […]

“He often thought it deeply ironic that if a depressed person walked into his office and said the world was so grim that he could not face it, he had to treat him as a sick man. Actually, the patient was right. He saw the truth only too clearly. But he was sick, because he […]

They say history is written by the victors. But what happens when the victors of the Brexit referendum and the ‘Get Brexit Done’ election go on to preside over a series of unprecedented national calamities and scandals? And how might the history of the last couple of years look if subjected to Johnsonian levels of […]

Back in August of last year, we published an article by Mike Sheaff on NHS Property Services (NHSPS) and its aggressive policy on rents charged and eviction of tenants (GPs etc!) from NHSPS-owned properties. We have also carried a number of press releases from the campaigning body Save our Hospital Services (SOHS), including their fight […]

Update Following the recent announcement that twice weekly Lateral Flow Tests will be offered to everyone in England, it’s worth reiterating a couple of things. Firstly, Lateral Flow Tests are for people with no symptoms. If you have any Covid-19 symptoms it is really important you get a PCR test, and that you and your […]

“I kept saying ‘I’m in pain, I’m in pain’, but I was completely dismissed and fobbed off – no one looked at me,” says Tinuke Awe, “I was just left feeling like I didn’t matter, that no one really cared about me.”  In Britain, black women are almost five times more likely than white women to […]

It is not the worst decision taken by the current administration, but one that neatly encapsulates the insularity and arrogance of our over-centralised government: the powers that enable local authorities to function safely during the pandemic by holding meetings on-line will lapse on 7 May, and will not be renewed. The reason, to be blunt, […]

“Always look at both sides of the argument before you decide”, my father used to say in his wisdom when I was young. His life’s experience had taught him that: he had grown up as a young man who was categorised as an ‘enemy alien’ in 1939, yet who volunteered to join the British Army […]

It was a depressing, foregone conclusion that MPs would vote to renew the excessive powers granted to government under the Coronavirus Act 2020. Another dull afternoon in the Commons was in prospect, when suddenly the debate took a turn for the bizarre. An MP got up on his hind legs to give one of the […]

On 24 March, WCB ran the second of a series of Zoom Q&A events on hot political and socio-economic topics. In the wake of the publication of the Government’s white paper on the future of health and social care, the sale of GP practices to a US healthcare provider, privatisation of test and trace, the […]

On the anniversary of the first (late) lockdown, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Coronavirus took evidence on the mental health and general wellbeing of health workers. It should surprise no one to hear that it is not good. Nor will it be a surprise to learn that it is deteriorating as they are […]

Michael Rosen is calling for an inquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. He has asked people to share this piece widely. Please sign this petition, calling on the government to hold that vital inquiry. Feb 3 2020Boris Johnson – speech in Greenwich “And in that context, we are starting to hear some […]

Just over a year ago I was one of small group of volunteer walk leaders sharing thoughts about a new virus being talked about on the news in the UK. Some of us had just returned from visits abroad where warnings about Covid 19 and measures to limit its spread were already happening, in sharp […]

Good drama can hold up a mirror to the world and the real-life drama unfolding around the British royal family certainly does. What it shows reflects very badly on aspects of our culture, particularly the sheer toxicity of much of the tabloid press. Less obviously at the moment, it also has a serious message about […]

One of the areas where I keep coming across a lot of misinformation relates to testing ‒polymerase chain reaction (PCR), lateral flow tests (LFT), false positives, false negatives, and whether the inventor of PCR really said PCR shouldn’t be used to test for Covid-19! It is easy to get confused by the different molecular biology […]

Last month we hosted an event on soil fertility and the future of food, inspired by Robert Golden’s important film – This Good Earth. This month we are turning the spotlight, very appropriately, onto that hottest of topics: the future of healthcare in the UK. In the wake of the sale of GP practices to […]

40 per cent hike in salary for lockdown-breaker and UK-destroyer Dominic ‘I-need-an-eye-test Cummings. 13 per cent for Sunak’s HMRC civil servants (may be deserved…not the issue here); £37 billion set aside for Dido Harding’s Test and Trace…which cannot find one traveller who got off a plane from Brazil (and which is, anyway, downscaling its operations […]