Watch: Fox News craziness on health-care
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This is your war on drugs
On 16th February 2002, Valentina Rosendo Cantú was washing her clothes in a stream near her home in Caxitepec, Mexico, when six soldiers approached. Seemingly too busy for pleasantries, the men started barking questions at her: Who was she? Where was she from? Had she seen the people they were looking for? Did she recognise the names on the list they thrust in front of her?
Her answers weren’t good enough, so one soldier pulled a gun and threatened to shoot. Another punched her so hard that she passed out. When she came to, two men tore off her underwear and raped her, one after the other. She was sixteen years old.
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Cameron forced to slam Dan Hannan again
Tory leader David Cameron was today forced to issue an even stronger rebuttal of MEP Daniel Hannan despite yesterday’s statement.
On Sky News Adam Boulton asks why Cameron boots out certain MPs for not toeing the party line but says nothing about Hannan:
But he remains a Conservative member of the European parliament – a prominent member of the awkward squad eager to embarrass Cameron’s hopes of rebranding his party.
When he was re-elected MEP Hannan and his fellow electee, Nigel Farage of UKIP, used most of their victory speeches to praise one another.
Can or should Cameron kick Hannan out? After all he booted out Edward Macmillan Scott MEP for not toeing the party line.
Tory MP caught ignoring Minimum Wage laws?
I’ve just been alerted to a blog post on Interns Anonymous posted today.
Phillip Hammond MP is the Conservative MP for Runnymede and Weybridge and shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. He is advertising an unpaid job on the W4MP website. According to the blog:
National Minimum Wage Law states that if you work set hours, doing set tasks that other members of staff rely on and expect you to do then you should be paid basic minimum wage. Except if you are a full time student. As the role advertises for a “recent graduate” then this exception need not apply.
They contacted Hammond to ask about this. According to them, the response was:
I would regard it as an abuse of taxpayer funding to pay for something that is available for nothing and which other Members are obtaining for nothing. I therefore have no intention of changing my present arrangements.
Only two weeks ago a major report slammed social immobility and warned that increasingly only upper middle class and above children were able to enter certain professions due to the unpaid intern system. If true, then Hammond would not only be feeding into this system but actually flouting Minimum Wage Laws.
A Guardian report a few weeks old said this practice by MPs may be breaking the rules. Looks like Hammond has been caught out (if the email is true).
Why Hannan is wrong about Singapore too
So, in the last couple of days I think we’ve safely established that Daniel Hannan is a complete and utter twat.
That said, the full extent of Hannan’s outright twattery only becomes fully apparent when you examine the background to his assertion that the NHS should be replaced with a Singapore-style system of personal health accounts because…
The Singapore system produces better outcomes than ours for half the price.
Taken at face value on a comparison of key health indicators and taking into account the relative proportion of GDP spent on healthcare in the UK and Singapore that’s perfectly true but it rather ignores a very important and somewhat unusual feature of the Singaporean system, one that makes it very different from healthcare systems in both Britain and the US.
When it comes to providing healthcare to its citizens, both the supply and the price of healthcare in Singapore is actively regulation by the Singaporean government, in both the public and the private sector in order to control costs and avoid the kind of significant inflationary pressures that pretty much every other healthcare system in the world has had to deal with.
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Watch: Prescott’s video for Americans on Hannan
Former deputy prime minister John Prescott has made a video for Americans on healthcare, attacking Dan Hannan MEP.
Damn French and Germans
France and Germany have both respectively pulled out of recession, by a whopping 0.3%. Keeping in mind that these are preliminary figures, which could yet be revised in either direction, this can either prove everything or absolutely nothing.
Those predisposed (like myself) to further stimulus measures will note that both France and Germany have had far larger such packages than we have, although both also had more room for manoeuvre than we did in terms of borrowing and less personal debt to consider.
Neither was as predisposed and reliant on the financial sector as we were, although there’s certainly an argument that Germany is too reliant on its own manufacturing base, although it seems for now as if it’s just that base which has helped it pull clear. Vince Cable is also pushing this argument.
Then there’s the Conservatives (such as George Osborne) who are quite naturally crowing about how Gordon Brown was telling us all about how well placed we were and how we’d be one of the first out.
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UK v USA – the basic healthcare facts
It’s worth noting in this US vs the NHS row is that the US has just about the highest healthcare spending in the world – 2nd highest by percentage of GDP, first by overall cost – largely because it’s among the most expensive. Time for some numbers – all freely available via Google.
I hold no brief for the NHS (and unlike most LibCon contributors tend to lean towards part-privatisation of its services), I’m just interested in the facts, so feel free to correct me if I’ve got some of the maths or figures wrong.
Of the c.15% of GDP the US spends on healthcare annually (that’s about $2.2 trillion*), around 50% is spent by the government (around $1.1 trillion). By contrast, the UK spends around 8% of its GDP on healthcare, with the Department of Health’s budget for the NHS (England**) in 2008/9 around £94 billion (about $155 billion).
The English NHS cares for 49 million people (100% of the population of England); US public healthcare currently covers about 83 million (around 28% of the US population).
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Watch: C4 report on healthcare battle
Denying the right to opt out of religion
The Archbishop of Wales has come out against people being able to opt out of religious services at school.
Barry Morgan thinks that prayer offers pupils the opportunity of “recognition, affirmation and celebration of shared values”, and people should not be allowed to opt out of our shared values, particularly if they don’t share them.
He made the statements as Wales followed England in allowing over 16s to opt of religious service as part of their school day. I should point out that if you’re under 16 you’re still forced to sit through prayers, et al, even if you have firm convictions in another direction, like atheism.
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