Martin Waller worked for The Times as a financial writer for some three decades. He is now retired and living in Suffolk
The ever-compliant Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have floated the idea that, under a “major NHS drive” to be announced this week, GPs will be “named and shamed” if they fail to offer enough face-to-face appointments at some later date.
It is not hard to understand why people here are having fewer babies. The Foundation quotes an OECD estimate that the typical working couple in the UK spend 22 per cent of their income on full-time childcare, about double the average rate for Western economies.
Late last year the UK agreed that, despite Brexit, it was still a participant to the ECHR. Now the government would like to go back on that pledge, replacing it with an ill-defined British Bill of Rights.
Brexit truly is a cult, and the true believers cannot walk away. The Dear Leader can never be wrong. The purity of our faith will see us through. The Emperor’s garments are of the finest quality.
The rail industry is already, de facto, in UK government hands. Last September, in the face of the pandemic, the government accepted that the system was irretrievably broken and announced the planned end of the franchise system
I wrote here the other day how the current government is operating by Eye-Catching Initiatives, things it says will happen which give the impression that action is being taken but which never come to anything. And having it reported by a compliant media.
Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, is in trouble for describing the Tories, in a fringe event at the party conference in Brighton, as “scum”. She has defended it as the sort of language used by people like her, brought up desperately poor on a Stockport housing estate.
One of Boris Johnson’s more eye-catching initiatives, a bridge or tunnel connecting Scotland and Northern Ireland, has been quietly laid to rest this week. The plan would have got around the problems Brexit has caused for trade across the Irish Sea, but the Treasury has apparently decided it is too expensive. Or stupid. Or something.
To express an opinion that you will not find much here or elsewhere in the media, I think the appointment of Nadine Dorries as Culture Secretary is a masterstroke. Boris Johnson could not better have signalled his and his Cabinet’s utter contempt for those on the other side of a culture war they have largely created and inflamed.
There are more than half a million children in the UK who are destitute, and in some parts of the country half of all children live in relative poverty.