Sarah Williams

The creation of the NHS on this day in 1948 was not just one of the greatest achievements in our history but also a massive stride forward in the provision and distribution of public healthcare. It was the first time anywhere in the world that completely free healthcare had been made available to all regardless of ability to pay and it is that element that remains jealously observed by nations such as the USA today.

Before the NHS, public health provision was patchy at best and was determined to a great extent by your ability to pay, where you lived and whether you were a man or a woman or a child. While poor workers were given free healthcare, their wives and children were generally not, reflecting the fact that the priority was not the patient, but the patient’s productivity within the labour market.

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Tim Page

Today’s papers dedicate many column inches to the news that more than 1,400 jobs are to be cut at Bombardier, the UK’s last train manufacturing plant, in Derby. These job losses come after Bombardier lost the £3bn contract to supply 1,200 carriages for the Thameslink route, a contract that was won by Siemens of Germany. The Guardian quotes Bombardier as saying that the loss of the Thameslink contract made a near 50% cut in the workforce “inevitable”.

I could write more about the companies involved, but I would prefer to concentrate on the failures of policy that led to today’s decision, in the hope that next time we will be better prepared. But for the record, Siemens employs about 16,000 people in the UK, many of them trade unionists, and makes an major contribution to the economy. What is written below is in no way a criticism of Siemens or its workers, in the UK, in Germany or anywhere else. This is a systemic failure that neither Labour nor Conservative Governments have tackled, namely a failure to institute policies that allow UK procurement policy to support British industry.

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Richard Exell

Estimating differences in public and private sector pay, today’s report from the Office for National Statistics is bound to be picked up by the pundits who regularly denounce public sector workers because they’ll love the headline: “7.8% pay difference between sectors.”  What they’re less likely to tell you is that this is because low paid workers do better in the public sector, higher qualified workers are actually 5.7% worse off.

They’ll be wrong, what the figures show is that the public sector manages to get closer to a fair deal for lower paid workers than the private sector and is a recipe for reduced inequality. It also suggests the social advantages of having a highly-unionised workforce.

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Richard Exell

I’ve just been reading a story in the Telegraph with the same headline as this post, but how’s this for the sub-head:

Retired civil servants drawing gold-plated taxpayer funded pensions now outnumber those employed in the civil service for the first time.

The rules of serious journalism seem to be changing – it used to be that one way you could tell the broadsheets from the red-tops was that phrases like “gold-plated taxpayer funded pensions” were reserved for commentaries and editorials.

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• The unaccountable super-quango at the heart of NHS reforms
  Richard Blogger writes on False Economy it has become clear that the National Commissioning Board will become far more significant for the NHS than the White Paper originally suggested. Instead of devolving power, Andrew Lansley has centralised it into an unaccountable quango.
• Adopt a Peer for the NHS’ birthday
  As the NHS turns 63, help let Peers know that we have real expectations of them when their turn comes to debate the Health and Social Care Bill. Use this online tool to adopt a Peer and write to them or send a birthday e-card to get their attention.

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Richard Exell

Manufacturing looks a lot weaker after today’s Purchasing Managers’ Index results. For the last eighteen months, manufacturing (and especially manufacturing exports) have been the only bright element in the economic picture, but the UK Manufacturing PMI published by Markit Economic Research is not at all hopeful. Markit says the Index has seen a “steep deterioration” since the period of strong growth earlier in the year.

The Index is based on monthly reports from purchasing managers – the people responsible for buying in the materials and goods and services a company needs, so they’re the first to tell whether business is growing or slowing down. Figures for new orders provide one component of the Index, and this is particularly gloomy as it fell for the second month running; Markit say this reflects:

“an ongoing weakness of domestic demand, but also a worrying near-stagnation of new export orders.”

The new orders results give a feel for what the near future looks like, so it doesn’t seem likely that this is just a blip. Taken with the rather poor results for Business Investment earlier this week, this is all quite depressing.

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Philip Pearson

Our woodlands are expanding, our energy use fell steeply last year because of the recession, and the government now raises £41.4 billion from environmental taxes, according to the latest Environmental Accounts. These stats provide a reality check on government’s green agenda.  They measure changes to the use of our natural resources – and how much tax government raises as we do so.  Green taxes are mean to shift the tax burden from good to “bad” activities like carbon emissions. They raised £1.9 billion more than in 2009 and more than double the amount received in 1993. So good are we at managing our scarce resources?

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