As the government quietly upgrades the role of Britain’s special forces, their growing global footprint and near-total exemption from democratic oversight should alarm us all, says ROGER McKENZIE
Latest editorial
The year-round NHS winter crisis is intentional
The only solution that will genuinely fix the NHS is to restore it to a single, national service free to all and in genuine public ownership, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
By pressuring Mexico to halt oil shipments, Washington is escalating its blockade of Cuba into a direct bid for economic collapse and regime change, argues SEVIM DAGDELEN
A society that grows accustomed to ‘undesirable’ people also grows accustomed to undesirable deaths. Minneapolis serves as a wake-up call, including for our own refugee policies, writes MARC VANDEPITTE
Recent research pushes back the date of the earliest cave art by several thousand years. ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT look into the science applied
As Labour plans a centralised National Police Service, the resignation of a chief constable over the Maccabi football ban reveals how policing, technology and narrative management converge when public order and class power are at stake, says NICK WRIGHT
Sudan’s paramilitary attacked a Chadian military garrison, killing seven soldiers and prompting the government to issue a “final warning. PAVAN KULKARNI reports
AS USUAL at this time of year, the headlines are full of the so-called “winter crisis” in the NHS, with talk of “pressures” and “demand” recited almost unchallenged as the cause of the disaster.
But it is vital to be clear that the NHS is not merely collapsing, it is in a state of induced collapse. When the Conservative government came into power in 2010, a healthy NHS quickly went into such decline that what were at first regular “winter crises” became year-round crisis and then collapse.
Public satisfaction with our health service went into freefall, from a record high of over 70 per cent in 2010 to the current day reality of 36 per cent between 2020 and 2021 and arguably even far less now.
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When privatisation is already so deeply embedded in the NHS, we can’t just blindly argue for ‘more funding’ to solve its problems, explain ESTHER GILES, NICO CSERGO, BRIAN GIBBONS and RATHI GUHADASAN
Labour is deliberately continuing Tory policies that cost us £38 billion more than they save while driving illness rates higher — despite the evidence that previous sanctions doubled suicide attempts, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
Diverting public funding to grow private-sector ‘spare capacity,’ actively undermines the funding and staff available to the NHS and results in a worse service, write JOHN PUNTIS and TONY O’SULLIVAN
The Labour Party, once the proud architect of our health service, has become its undertaker, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE