HARBINGER

Herewith gleaned from  UKPublicSpending.co.uk    The facts such as they are - empirical data. Government Spending: the Details About 79 percent of public spending comes from the central government; About 21 percent is spent by local authorities. The  central government  is budgeted to spend £667.7 billion in FY 2020. Pension programs, including the state pension and civil service pensions, will cost about £161.1 billion; health care and the NHS will cost £143 billion; defence, including the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, will cost about £50.3 billion. Welfare, or Social Security, costs for the central government will come in at £71.4 billion, and central government education expenditures are budgeted at £44.6 billion. Interest on the national debt is estimated at £51.7 billion. We estimate  local authorities  will spend about £179.9 billion in FY 2020. The biggest expenditure is £54.8 billion for welfare. The...

Winter is here. And so the annual plethora of otiose ideological partisan cant and vacuous platitudes aka  the " NHS is in Crisis " discourse is once again under way. The answer to " will the NHS ever be out of a state of crisis?" appears after many decades to be; no. The only differences to be discerned amongst all the world's national health systems is the degree to which they are all in one way or another perceived to be " performing " or  functioning at a noticeably lower standard than any other arbitrarily chosen health system or systems to which they are compared at any point in time. For example ,the reputable body on such matters , The King's Fund posted online on June 8 2017,  ( herewith an extract gleaned )  from " How Does the NHS Compare Internationally ". " Although the UK has been at the forefront of the development of measures of health care quality (like the  national patient survey  programme) and the use of...

There's was a NHS Providers conference held on 8 November and it was all about the putative underfunding of the National Health Service.Well,there's something new! The NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens set his stall out pretty early ensuring that his tawdry,bombastic posturing was top of the agenda.And not necessarily the Conference's agenda but rather every news agenda. "Trust in democratic politics will not be strengthened if anyone now tries to argue you voted Brexit, partly for a better funded health service, but precisely because of Brexit you now can't have one." - Sir Simon Stevens , Chief Executive of NHS England The entire exercise in gargantuan,egotistical  virtue signalling by Stevens merits the epithet  Straw man :- straw man noun 1 . an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument. 2 . a person regarded as having no substance or ...