I read The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better whilst watching the last two seasons of The Wire and so Chris Grayling’s claims last week that parts of the UK were beginning to resemble the Baltimore portrayed in that TV series did cause me to smile wryly. Grayling’s prescription for [...]
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Aug 21
Equality Matters
By Duncan Brack
This article was originally published in Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century. We are grateful to Duncan for allowing us to reproduce this article. Visit the Methuen website to purchase the latest edition of this book for the discount price of £10.
The Liberal Democrats exist to build and [...]
Aug 18
Better a localist NHS than a nationalist one
Yesterday, Health Secretary Andy Burnham wrote an article for the Guardian aiming to set out the clear blue water between Labour and the Conservatives on the National Health Service. In doing so, he inadvertantly demonstrated quite how vapid Labour’s vision for the NHS really is. It was summed up in one sentence:
For Labour, [...]
Aug 18
Reforming the NHS : A Local and Democratic Voice
By Richard S. Grayson
This article was originally published in Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century. We are grateful to Richard for allowing us to reproduce this article. Visit the Methuen website to purchase the latest edition of this book for the discount price of £10.
The democratic deficit in the NHS
Of [...]
Aug 16
A compelling case for a high pay commission? [Vince Cable]
Writing on Comment is Free today, Vince Cable argues:
There is now a compelling case for a high pay commission to measure the claims of top earners that their rewards are justified and necessary, even if they offend natural justice and our sense of fairness.
Britain increasingly resembles one of those developing countries whose economy and society [...]
Aug 12
We love the NHS
The debate in the us about healthcare seems to be getting increasingly insane, with Obama being compared to Hitler, Sarah Palin spreading lies about “death panels” and assorted nonsense. A repeat of the debate in the early 1990s when the Clintons attempted to introduce healthcare reforms of their own was to be expected, but [...]
Aug 12
Celebrating 100 years of liberals fighting the ‘taxpayers’ alliance’
Yesterday, obscure fact fans, was the 98th anniversary of the first Parliament Act*. The Parliament Act 1911 came about because of Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill’s 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ which proposed paying for, among other things, the first state pension with a rise in taxation aimed mostly at the most wealthy – and in [...]
Aug 09
There is nothing random about local control of public services
Both Sunder Katwala and Grant Shapps are quite wrong: not only is local variation a price more than worth paying for local control, but it would end the phenomena of postcode lotteries.
“Postcode lottery” is a cliché, and a peculiarly British one. Why is it, for example, that the only references on Google to “zip [...]
Aug 05
Steve Webb MP to respond to Jon Cruddas at Compass Summer Lecture
Steve Webb MP will be amongst those responding to Jon Cruddas at the Compass Summer Lecture on the future of Social Democracy.
On the one hand with the crisis of capitalism and the systemic failure of free markets, coupled with the election of Barack Obama in the United States, centre-left politics is getting far more interesting [...]
