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
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League tables are a weapon for NHS privatisation
The Stafford Hospital scandal’s false mortality statistics led to devastating service cuts despite evidence disproving the whole debacle, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE, warning of similar threats under Labour’s new plans for league tables
UNFAIRLY TARGETED: A support group protests before the publication of the final report about the future of services at the hospital, December 2013
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
HEALTH SECRETARY Wes Streeting’s plan to introduce hospital league tables is deeply damaging, counterproductive and will ultimately be used as a means of closing hospitals.
At the beginning of the Tory-led coalition government, under David Cameron, the Tories and the media latched onto the so-called “Stafford Hospital scandal” that emerged from an inquiry ordered by Andy Burnham in 2009 into claims of poor care.
The Daily Mail made a lurid claim that up to 1,200 people had died avoidably at the hospital between 2005-08, and this idea was eagerly promoted by Cameron and co as an opportunity to attack the previous Labour government’s record on the NHS.
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With Reform UK surging and Labour determined not to offer anything different from the status quo, a clear opportunity opens for the left, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE
Behind Starmer’s headline-grabbing abolition of NHS England lies a ruthless drive to centralise control so that cuts of £6.6 billion can be made — even if it means reducing cancer services and clinical staff, writes JOHN LISTER
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
The Labour Party, once the proud architect of our health service, has become its undertaker, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE