Politics at Westminster | BREAKING: UKIP

The Mitcher said:
Brown was a better chancellor than he was a Prime Minister, but he did strike me as someone to trust more than Cameron and Clegg though, and I say that lightly, its more of the lesser of three evils.
Click to expand...

Brown was a terrible chancellor. How you can rack up so much debt in a time of unprecedented economic prosperity is beyond me.
 
Chorley1974 said:
Brown was a terrible chancellor. How you can rack up so much debt in a time of unprecedented economic prosperity is beyond me.
Click to expand...
Brown wasn't so bad. He got the call right in persuading Blair away from the Euro and did well in boosting regional development. He also did very well after the crash and the stimulus stopped the recession dropping into a huge depression.

His biggest mistake was probably the timing of the gold sell-off and obviously failing to regulate the financial sector, along with every other country.
 
Chorley1974 said:
Brown was a terrible chancellor. How you can rack up so much debt in a time of unprecedented economic prosperity is beyond me.
Click to expand...
Thatcher's government did the same during their own so called miracle which put millions out of work, plus peter is spot on.
 
peterstorey said:
Lord Rimshott making an utter clunt of himself - with previous of betraying the Labour movement, he then stabs Clegg in the back and as exit speech sticks one in Vince Cable. Woddakunt.
Click to expand...

Anyone else think peterstorey sounds like he writes for Private Eye?
 
MikeUpNorth said:
Brown wasn't so bad. He got the call right in persuading Blair away from the Euro and did well in boosting regional development. He also did very well after the crash and the stimulus stopped the recession dropping into a huge depression.

His biggest mistake was probably the timing of the gold sell-off and obviously failing to regulate the financial sector, along with every other country.
Click to expand...

The gold, the unsustainable public spending, the growth really being based entirely on consumer spending, and not bothering to bank any surplus were the main weak spots IMO. Maybe terrible was too strong a word, he was dealt a great hand in many respects but I don't feel there was much prudence in spend, spend, spend.
 
Chorley1974 said:
The gold, the unsustainable public spending, the growth really being based entirely on consumer spending, and not bothering to bank any surplus were the main weak spots IMO. Maybe terrible was too strong a word, he was dealt a great hand in many respects but I don't feel there was much prudence in spend, spend, spend.
Click to expand...

The deficit was bearly 3% for most his years as chancellor which was no worse than the Tories
 
Crono said:
It's to peter but you quoted me? What's wrong with me for assuming you were addressing me?

Fu*k off :lol:
Click to expand...
You said if he was a private eye author, so I just said it jokingly and as a compliment. You're being incredibly arsey.
 
"Next week on Question Time: Godzilla, Alan Carr, a packet of crisps, Shakin' Stevens, Nigel Farage & Fred the Red."
 
NHS chief Simon Stevens: We need cottage hospitals

Simon Stevens, the new chief executive of NHS England, says more patients should be treated in their own communities

By Laura Donnelly, Health Editor
29 May 2014

The NHS must stop closing cottage-style hospitals and return to treating more patients in their local communities, the new head of the health service has said in his first interview.

In a marked reversal of current policy, Simon Stevens said the NHS must expand its local services because too many patients are being robbed of “dignity and compassion”.

Mr Stevens warned that British hospitals have become among the worst in western Europe at caring for local populations, because too many services have been stripped out and centralised.

He said Britain must learn from countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States, which have pioneered ways of bolstering community care around small hospitals to meet the needs of their populations.

“A number of other countries have found it possible to run viable local hospitals serving smaller communities than sometimes we think are sustainable in the NHS,” Mr Stevens said in an interview with The Telegraph.

“Most of western Europe has hospitals which are able to serve their local communities, without everything having to be centralised,” he added.

Mr Stevens, a former health adviser to Tony Blair, said spiralling numbers of elderly patients are ending up in hospital unnecessarily, because they had not been given care which could have kept them at home.

In an interview ahead of a major speech next week, outlining his plans for the health service, he said:

Businesses should financially reward employees for losing weight and adopting healthy lifestyles;

The NHS needs to abandon a fixation with “mass centralisation” and instead invest in community services to care for the elderly;

The waiting targets which Labour introduced became “an impediment to care” in too many cases;

The European Working Time Directive damaged health care in the NHS, making it harder to keep small hospitals open;

Mr Stevens, took up the post last month, after 11 years working for private health care firms in Europe, the US and South America.

On Wednesday he will make a major speech to the NHS Confederation’s conference in Liverpool, outlining new models of care to build community services around small hospitals and meet the needs of an ageing population. He told The Telegraph: “The single most important question facing us is how do we best support older people? Two thirds of hospital patients are over retirement age.”

Too often such patients suffered failings in care, because systems were not designed around their needs, he said.

“You cannot have a modern health service that is not treating older patients with dignity and compassion, supporting them at home and ensuring targeted prevention [of ill health],” he said.

Vulnerable patients are frequently ending up in hospital because they had not received basic help when they needed it, resulting in falls and other avoidable incidents, he suggested. “I look at the fact there’s been a 124 per cent increase in the number of people admitted to hospital for less than two days over the last 14 years, and that tells me we haven’t got it right, supporting people at the time they need it,” he said.

The system of care outside hospitals is too complex, with too much duplication and too many gaps for patients to fall through, he suggests. “There is a big opportunity to reorganise that so it meets the needs of those at home. At the moment it is too complicated and too fragmented. If you were starting from scratch you would not design community services like that.”

Next week he will outline new models of healthcare which will be introduced to bolster small hospitals, which could see hospitals taking over the running of some GP services, and more close working between specialist and community care.

He said the NHS could learn a lot from some elderly care provided in the United States, where companies had taken steps to ensure community services and hospital specialists worked as one team.

Mr Stevens said that for more than a decade the NHS had fallen victim to a “steady push towards centralisation” resulting in fewer hospitals, largely as a result of the way the European Working Time Directive had been interpreted by the European Court of Justice. Other EU members had adapted far better to its rules limiting doctors’ working hours, particularly in rural settings, he said.

He said the NHS needed to learn from innovation around the world.

“Sweden for example has in some ways better working between health and social care than we have,” he said. “The Dutch have interesting ways of organising maternity services, with more choice and more midwife-led care.”

He also called on businesses in the UK to financially reward employees for losing weight and adopting healthy lifestyles. He spoke of how he put on weight while living in the US, but lost almost three stone after being spurred into action by a company scheme which offered financial rewards to staff who reduced their Body Mass Index. Mr Stevens said he intended to encourage employers in Britain to introduce similar perks to “nudge” staff towards a more healthy lifestyle.

He said the NHS could also learn from the way the US had introduced electronic hospital records, which had been a “huge misfire” in this country, with a £12bn central scheme eventually abandoned.

Mr Stevens was adviser to two health secretaries under Labour, Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn, from 1997 to 2001, before advising Tony Blair for three years. During that time they drew up Labour’s flagship health policies – waiting targets, foundation trusts, contracts with the private sector, many of which became controversial.

He defended the role played by targets in improving care for millions of patients but said that in a number of “important cases” including the Mid Staffs scandal, they became “an impediment, not a driver of high quality care.”

In 2004 he became President of UnitedHealth Europe, and become vice president of the group, based in the US.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h...-Simon-Stevens-We-need-cottage-hospitals.html
Click to expand...



This is one of the main reasons why Labour's spiel on the NHS is viewed with a deal of cynicism hereabouts, people will ll hear Ed and co claim to be the guardians of healthcare and scoff at the audacity i shouldn't wonder.

I can understand why there might have been a desire to further enhance the capabilities of our better teaching hospitals for instance, however as it turned out the policy was simply depriving communities of essential services at an increasing rate.
 
Last edited:
Nick 0208 Ldn said:
This is one of the main reasons why Labour's spiel on the NHS is viewed with a deal of cynicism hereabouts, people will ll hear Ed and co claim to be the guardians of healthcare and scoff at the audacity i shouldn't wonder.
Click to expand...
An audacious amount of audacity holding up US heathcare as an exemplar. But of course 'Mr Stevens, took up the post last month, after 11 years working for private health care firms in Europe, the US and South America'.
 
peterstorey said:
An audacious amount of audacity holding up US heathcare as an exemplar. But of course 'Mr Stevens, took up the post last month, after 11 years working for private health care firms in Europe, the US and South America'.
Click to expand...

Is that you agreeing or disagreeing with his concerns about the centralisation of healthcare?
 
peterstorey said:
Unlikely, your conservative basis on show as usual.
Click to expand...

It wasn't the case throughout the segment, merely for that part of it. They were talking about the release of this American soldier from Taliban captivity; Jones kept manipulating the discussion to enable him to have a dig at broader US policy and boost his ego, it was a bit off i thought.
 
Redlambs said:
I'm not surprised our moral guardians in here completely ignored what's going on in Tower Hamlets. It may be simplistic to say if that was Ukip doing all that then it'd have been banged on about in here, but no less true.
Click to expand...

Oh if it was UKIP then yeah that would be true because it would be all over the news. There's not much the "moral guardians" can do is as this a local issue rather than a national one as it's the Labour candidate that got shafted the most. Clearly the Electoral Commision isn't doing its job here at all.
 
Anyone watching QT? The lady from the 'Stop the War' campaign is having an absolute shocker
 
Mozza said:
I don't think so, she was right in pointing out that the Birmingham Schools report was overblown
Click to expand...

Hmm we disagree on that point then. I don't even feel that's what she was saying though, she got herself in a right muddle saying there were 'clearly problems' and then being unable to articulate what those were beyond the vague 'governance issues'.
 
Silva said:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics...-peer-put-on-database-of-extremists-by-police

There aught to be a thorough investigation of the Met police, stories like this come out too often.
Click to expand...

Not surprising at all. Any time I've needed the police (Luckily not that many) they been very helpful and I respect them a lot for the help they've give. It's sadly as a organisation it's been clear their been corrupt for a very long long time(Another story that came out a few days ago http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-27803860 )
 
You must log in or register to reply here.