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The chronic Chronicle - a local paper I won't buy again

Over the last few weeks Viv and I have been making our way through the box set of the  Danish TV series Badehotellet (‘Seaside Hotel’). Much of it is set in the 1930s when politics in the country immediately to their south was dominated by Herr Hitler, and Danes found that they sometimes needed to be careful, for the Danish government, eager not to cause damage to their economy, had adopted a somewhat pragmatic approach to things in Germany, and even Danish people could be in trouble for saying or doing something that would displease the Fuhrer or his followers. One scene refers to a homosexual being beaten up, another to a Jew being sent to a concentration camp.  Our current crop of politicians - or at least most of them - would believe it ridiculous, but both Viv and I felt there to be some unpleasant similarities between the way peoples' lives were controlled in 1930s Denmark, and the way they are in the United Kingdom today; both seem to be a couple of steps away from tot...
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The NHS Consultation, part 3: Your ideas for change

  The Labour Government has launched a consultation on the NHS.  This is the third of three blogs documenting my responses to this consultation. My ideas are as follows, structured in line with the consultation requirements. Organise the NHS as a franchise, not a charitable trust dishing out money to whoever asks for it The current structure of the NHS is rooted in the first half of the twentieth century, and in turn from Victorian days, when individual hospitals were built in towns with funding obtained from various wealthy benefactors. Each hospital was an independent entity, there was no coordinated service.This is largely still how it works, except the ‘wealthy benefactor’ is the government. Government is funding many hospitals and other projects up and down the country, without seeing them to be properly structured or co-ordinated, i.e. that the funding is put to the best possible use. The NHS should be more of a franchised organisation, like a network of motor dealer...
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