The NHS is a highly centralised organisation. During the Covid crisis, policy decisions have been made at the top and then passed down. There has been little scope for showing initiative at a local level. This dates back to when the NHS was set up in the late
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One of the most depressing aspects of the decade of the 2010s, well before Covid-19 struck, was the apparently very slow growth in productivity. This is not a mere ivory tower issue. It is only through increasing productivity that rises in living standards can be sustained. Productivity
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Let’s start the New Year with a very positive point. The speed of scientific innovation seems to be accelerating sharply. And it is innovation which ultimately drives our health, wealth and well-being. The types of problems which have previously taken years or even decades to solve are
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Imagine. No, not the silly childish song by John Lennon. Imagine there were no vaccines available. What would Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health, do? He might ask people to pay more attention to the scientific advice. But the plain fact is that the credibility
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Christmas is a time to be charitable. So let’s spare a thought for those who fought against the referendum result. Unlike the great unwashed, who simply didn’t understand the issues they were voting on, they had all been expensively educated at the right sort of schools and
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The development of the vaccines has changed many things. It has even influenced the opinion of the Prince of Lockdown himself, health secretary Matt Hancock. Life, he pronounced at the weekend, would be back to normal by the spring and the “blasted regulations” abolished. But one thing
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Just over 200 years ago, the finances of the British government looked even more parlous than they do today. Since the mid-1790s, the country had been engaged in a titanic struggle with Napoleon’s France. To pay for the conflict, the government had borrowed on a massive scale.
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The vaccines seem to be coming thick and fast. The task now is to ensure that enough people get them to keep the virus under control. The first issue is one of logistics. The track record of the UK’s health bureaucracy during the crisis has not been
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The various new vaccines announced over the past two weeks give real hope of a return to normal life. Of course, many practical questions remain. How will these vaccines be delivered? Do they stop the transmission or simply the symptoms of the virus? Exactly how effective will
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Justice secretary Robert Buckland last week blamed the public for England’s new lockdown. In particular, the fault was with people failing to self-isolate properly. Of course, in a purely technical sense Buckland is right. The virus spreads by contact with an infected person. If people do not
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