When the NHS was founded after the Second World War, the country was in approximately £27 billion worth of debt. The Labour Party had been voted into power by a working class that was determined not to be poor anymore. The NHS and other social welfare reforms were demands that were conceded under widespread popular […]
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I was the consultant on call and had an enthusiastic medical student with me when I first met George in an ambulance that had been parked outside A&E for ten hours. He had mild dementia and had developed severe chest pain at 2 PM the night before. His wife had desperately called for an ambulance. […]
In the summer of 2022, the largest strike wave in three decades swept the UK. Public services, battered and bruised by over a decade of austerity, were on their knees — and those staffing them were on the brink too. From the beginning, NHS workers were at the forefront, with first cleaners and porters, and then […]
Over the course of a forty-year career, Michael Marmot has changed how the public, politicians, and academics think about health. The professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London (UCL) and director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity has led research that challenges the orthodox view that lifestyle choices predominantly determine good […]
In the UK today, it’s hard to avoid the sense that everything is falling apart. Rents and bills are soaring, real wages are falling, and public services are crumbling. Homelessness and violent crime are on the rise, while public spaces are falling into disrepair. And all of this is taking place in the context of […]
This summer marks the seventy- fifth anniversary of the NHS. Fittingly, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his ministers have celebrated the occasion by proposing new legislation to compel more NHS organisations to increase the numbers of NHS-funded patients sent to private hospitals. Private hospitals have been getting much less NHS money than was expected when […]
Michael Rosen is one of Britain’s most beloved public figures. A writer and poet, his We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is a fixture of childhood for millions. He also served as Children’s Laureate from 2007 to 2009 and has, for decades, been an outspoken socialist. But in recent years, he has also become one […]
‘What is to be squeezed out next year?’ Aneurin Bevan asked on resigning from the cabinet in 1951, after Clement Attlee’s government opted to cut £13 million from the health budget amid the escalating Korean War. Is it the upper half? When that has been squeezed out and the same principle holds good, what do […]
In 1951, the government’s Crown Film Unit released the film Life in Her Hands. Starring Kathleen Byron, best known for her role as a nun in Black Narcissus (1946), Life in Her Hands was an ambitious hour-long recruitment film, designed to attract women to the nursing profession. It was part of a wider national recruitment […]
This issue of Tribune was co-commissioned by Francesca Newton, our online editor, and it will be her last before departing to new opportunities. Francesca made her mark as a Tribune writer with her denunciations of the government’s hatchet job on civil liberties. Her 2020 articles on the Overseas Operations and Spy Cops Bills were our […]
‘Next week, the British Government will launch the greatest experiment in social reform ever embarked upon by the British nation.’ The formation of the National Health Service (NHS), instituted by the post-war Labour government seventy-five years ago today, was characterised at the time by Tribune as a providential moment. ‘The Great Experiment’ to which the […]
In the years since the National Health Service (NHS) was inaugurated on 5 July 1948, a comforting myth has emerged about its creation. As the NHS — variously described as a national religion and an institution akin to royalty — has taken its place among the pantheon of British institutions, establishment scribes have tried to paint it […]
Crooked Timber was inaccessible yesterday, due to a dns issue, but here’s another picture of Alexanderplatz:
How can you legally fly a plane designed in 1910?
It’s gonna be a summer Next week I head north to Chicago for Netroots Nation. Hopes for cooler, tamer weather to the north are just that. Axios: Torrential rains flooded Chicago’s streets and forced NASCAR officials to postpone a race through the city, as the National Weather Service issued hazardous weather alerts for over 110 million Americans during the extended July Fourth holiday weekend. State of play: Chicago train services were suspended, buses were temporarily rerouted and Illinois State Police said parts of Interstate highways 55 and 290 were shut due to flooding, per WLS-TV. The National Weather Service (a branch of the Commerce Department that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promises to eliminate as president) reports: Meanwhile, the heat wave across the South will be less oppressive today, before confining southward even more on Independence Day. Nevertheless, heat indices could approach 105-110 degrees with high temperatures into the mid-90s, which can be dangerous if spending an extended amount of time outdoors.
Numbers reveal the escalating violence and resistance in occupied Palestine, shedding light on the urgent questions of a major revolt and why Israeli attempts to crush Palestinian resistance continue to fail.
The post The Armed Revolt: Why Israel Cannot Crush the Resistance in Palestine appeared first on MintPress News.
Unfortunately, assumption uncertainty reduces the status of deductions and statistical computations to exercises in hypothetical reasoning – they provide best-case scenarios of what we could infer from specific data. Even more unfortunate, however, is that this exercise is deceptive to the extent it ignores or misrepresents available information, and makes hidden assumptions that are unsupported […]
The Israeli military recently conducted its first aerial drone strike in nearly 20 years, marking an alarming shift in state violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The post With Drone Strike, the Occupied West Bank Could Turn Into War-Ravaged Gaza appeared first on MintPress News.
In science, courage is to follow the motto of enlightenment and Kant’s dictum — Sapere Aude! To use your understanding, have the courage to think for yourself and question ‘received opinion,’ authority or orthodoxy. In our daily lives, courage is the capability to confront fear, as when in front of the powerful and mighty, not […]
Lowkey catches up with Associate Editor of Electronic Intifada Asa Winstanley to discuss his new book: Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn.
The post How the UK Deep State Took Down Jeremy Corbyn, with Asa Winstanley appeared first on MintPress News.
It’s over a week since the Economist put up my and Cosma Shalizi’s piece on shoggoths and machine learning, so I think it’s fair game to provide an extended remix of the argument (which also repurposes some of the longer essay that the Economist article boiled down). Our piece was inspired by a recurrent meme in […]
Southern Baptists double down on decline “No one could accuse the Baptists of excessive cheeriness,” David Siders begins in his Politico report from the Southern Baptist Convention conclave in New Orleans: “We are living in dark and perilous times in America,” read the billing for a night with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “as our culture descends into a spiritual abyss …” It is a stark change of mood for hundreds of pastors and church members from their Trump-years triumphalism. The U.S. has been both steadily secularizing and religiously diversifying for decades. This leaves Southern Baptists, once dominant in a region of churches on every streetcorner, unsettled at their declining ability to dictate local culture. Evangelicals of whom Southern Baptists are a fraction, saw Trump, the “thrice-married former casino owner” with his “two Corinthians” pandering as an imperfect champion. At least he was pandering. “Great again” for them meant more than white dominance. He represented renewal of their religious and cultural dominance. Since then, Siders explains, all seems to have gone to Hell.