None of the parties have a credible plan to fix the social care crisis November 29, 2019 Every day, 1.4m elderly people are left unwashed, unsupported, and without the care they need — because our social care system is broken. “Crisis” is an overused term, but in this instance, it’s no exaggeration. And people are increasingly aware of this. Recent polling commissioned by Deloitte and Reform revealed that social care is the [...]
DEBATE: Is Extinction Rebellion’s target of net-zero emissions by 2025 economically viable? November 29, 2019 Is Extinction Rebellion’s target of net-zero emissions by 2025 economically viable? Zion Lights, a science communicator and editor of Extinction Rebellion newspaper The Hourglass, says YES. It’s an odd question — if we don’t achieve net-zero emissions sooner than the current target of 2050, we risk committing ourselves to potential economic collapse. Bank of England governor [...]
Ban MPs from second jobs? We should be encouraging them November 28, 2019 New governments seldom seek to discourage employment. Ministries live and die by their ability to get people into work. Yet in one sector, the Labour party has made a manifesto promise of reducing jobs — by banning members of parliament from taking paid work outside the House. Really, this is the wrong way around. Parliamentarians [...]
I would kill to be CEO of… Royal Mail November 28, 2019 Royal Mail has been struggling for a while. Shares are far below their 2013 floatation price, the company has fallen out of the FTSE 100, and it continues to face challenges as the decline in letter-sending accelerates. With that said, the business has managed to post a significant uplift in both half-year revenues and profits. [...]
Debate: Is Labour right to warn over US interest in the NHS, uncovered in the leaked trade talk papers? November 28, 2019 Debate: Is Labour right to warn over US interest in the NHS, uncovered in the leaked trade talk papers? Yes — Heidi Chow is a pharmaceuticals campaigner at Global Justice Now The leaked Trump trade papers are genuinely shocking. They confirm that drug prices and the NHS really are on the table in these talks [...]
It may be popular, but scrapping hospital parking charges would be a total disaster November 28, 2019 Amid myriad headline-grabbing proposals, you might have missed Labour’s promise to scrap hospital parking charges. This is exactly the kind of local, community-based policy that is likely to win votes — but it is a mistake. They might not be popular, but these car parking charges are actually a good thing. First, the charges bring [...]
NHS stunt reveals how desperate Labour is November 28, 2019 Labour’s unconventional relationship with the media took another couple of twists yesterday. First up, shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner failed to conceal his irritation when a reporter from ITV asked a question about Labour’s antisemitism problem. He snapped: “Do you have a question about the issue we’re discussing, or was that just an opportune moment [...]
Time for us all to get motoring on combatting climate change November 28, 2019 The polling firm YouGov has been tracking views on the environment for nearly a decade. For most of that time, the subject ranked pretty low in terms of voter priorities. But this election marks a big change. Figures from July show that more than one in four voters (27 per cent) rank the environment as [...]
The Tories are on track to win a majority — if only they knew what to do with it November 28, 2019 Much of this week’s election buzz has focused on the release of Wednesday night’s polling figures. The hotly-anticipated YouGov MRP model, which accurately predicted a huge parliament in 2017, is currently forecasting a majority for the Conservatives of nearly 70 seats. There has been a fair amount of commentary about the Conservatives’ nervousness over these [...]
After TSB’s outage, let’s force banks to ring fence an IT budget November 27, 2019 Banking outages cause unacceptable pain for customers and are occurring with increased regularity. Digital banking is essential to our economy and ongoing failures are both unacceptable and preventable. Last week an independent report concluded that the board of TSB “lacked common sense” when it moved 1.9m customers onto a new system in 2018 that had [...]