Miliband’s 48-hour GP promise will simply increase demand

Published by ConservativeHome

Ed Miliband GP“This week I set out new plans to improve services for patients, guaranteeing a same day GP appointment for anyone who needs one and within 48 hours or anyone who wants one. This will save hundreds of millions within the NHS by taking the pressure off hospital services and help ensure it there for the next generation as it was for ours.”

So writes Ed Miliband on this site during a local and European election campaign, when Primary Health Care has nothing to do with either, except, perhaps, the Working Time Directive, which MEPs are powerless to change. Unfortunately, Miliband makes the same silly mistakes as all the other politicians who prefer sound-bites to evidence-based policy and refuse to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Continue reading

Share

Art tells us more about the First World War than any politician’s speech

Published by ConservativeHome

s end 3I had the fortune and great privilege when I was at school of appearing in productions of both R.C Sherriff’s Journey’s End and Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War!. Both, in very different ways, had a profound effect on my understanding and appreciation of the First World War, not least because my maternal grandfather (Gramps) – a veteran of both world wars – was conscripted to see me do battle in both productions. I can still remember meeting him in the school hall afterwards: I was eager for a pat on the back and words of praise, but all I got was watery eyes behind a damp hanky. There was I, the schoolboy, frolicking in the trenches of Flanders and waltzing to ‘Après la Guerre’ with Lady Haig. And there was Gramps, the veteran, for whom this was very real biography, and whose friends and colleagues were machine-gunned, gassed and buried on the Somme.

Journey’s End and Oh, What a Lovely War! are poles apart in their apprehension of the First World War. Sherriff’s 1928 play is an intimate, respectful tragedy about heroes, virtues, leadership and sacrifice. It speaks profoundly to pacifists and Just War advocates alike. Littlewood’s 1963 musical is an epic, irreverent romp through fluffy parodies and black-humoured allegory. It speaks volumes to cynics and sceptics without demeaning the memory of doomed youth. Sherriff wept with his fallen comrades, knee-deep in the muddy trenches of Passchendaele; Littlewood skipped with her pierrots, to an imagined dance of slaughter, bravura and vulgarity. Continue reading

Share