With its track record of leveraging cultural power for US gain and barely concealed promotion of coup attempts, the US Agency for International Development will not be mourned among the US’s southern neighbours, write JOHN PERRY and ROGER D HARRIS
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
KEITH FLETT looks back 50 years to when the Iron Lady was elected Tory leader…
Social security is lagging further and further behind inflation and our government quite simply does not care, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
RAVISHAAN RAHEL MUTHIAH agues that much as social media are presently guilty of fanning hostilities, the roots of it lie with decades of xenophobic narratives peddled by politicians and the traditional media
ESTHER, from Nordic Model Now! explains how decriminalisation of prostitution, rendering it just another form of ‘work’, would undermine the Equality Act 2010
As a partial successor to the post-war Marshall Plan, USAid is not simply a humanitarian aid programme, but is involved in projecting US power as an instrument of foreign policy, argues NICK WRIGHT
Locals have been let down by procrastination over the upgrade to Ardrossan Harbour, says KATY CLARK MSP
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.
More from this author
The Labour Party, once the proud architect of our health service, has become its undertaker, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE
What we are seeing now in the policing of Gaza protests is a manifestation of an authoritarianism that the government intends to inflict on our country, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE
Instead of responding to changed circumstances by adjusting policy, Reeves is using fiscal ‘rules’ as an excuse to force government departments to make even deeper cuts than she had already flagged, says CLAUDIA WEBBE
While Starmer courts BlackRock and backs genocide, leading to despair and historically low voter turnout, the vultures of the new populist right circle Britain’s crumbling institutions, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
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ROS SITWELL reports from a conference held in light of the closure of the Gender Identity and Development Service for children and young people, which explored what went wrong at the service and the evidence base for care