Hundreds protested against the US-Israel attacks on Iran in Parliament Square on Saturday, fearing a wider conflagration and horrified by the targeting of young schoolchildren, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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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
LUKE FLETCHER outlines Plaid Cymru bold plans for wide-ranging policy consultations with trade unions in Wales
With this attack on Iran, Trump and Netanyahu are taking a reckless leap toward escalation. The region is balancing on the brink of a major war that could undermine the global economy and nuclear security, says MARC VANDEPITTE
Liverpool Trades Council has unveiled a ‘People’s Budget’ to fight £56m cuts and council tax rises. DEAN YOUNG reports
As Washington and Tel Aviv escalate their assault on Iran, the rhetoric of ‘great power’ politics masks a faltering empire resorting to familiar regime-change tactics, says JOHN McINALLY
Labour’s by-election defeat tells a story Scotland has known since 2008. A party that assumes loyalty while offering little more than managed decline will eventually discover that voters always have somewhere else to turn, says MATT KERR
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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