Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 34

Simply throwing money at the NHS won’t solve all its problems | Simon Jenkins

Billions will be wasted as long as the health service remains hyper-centralised and disconnected from local authorities

Watch the news each day and you might regard Britain’s NHS as a black, swirling pit into which ever vaster sums of money constantly vanish. All it does is answer back with screams of hospitals near collapse, queueing ambulances outside hospitals, year-long waiting lists, postponed tests and staffing crises. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, obsessed with daily headlines, hurls billio...

Most Britons want assisted dying legalised. Why are MPs too cowardly to do it? | Simon Jenkins

A debate in the Lords this week exposes the Commons’ failure to answer calls for choice and dignity

What are MPs for? The assisted dying bill, to be debated on Friday in the House of Lords, ranks with past laws on divorce, abortion and sexuality in the canon of social liberalism. It is unfinished business of the 1960s.

The bill also lies at the heart of how a free democracy should regulate issues of life and death, with deep significance for millions of Britons at a time of their maximum pain and ...

Dedicated and tireless, David Amess was a paragon of a good constituency MP | Simon Jenkins

In a country of centralised power, he did all he could to make himself a man of Southend rather than simply Westminster

British politics rightly commemorates its own. David Amess, killed in his home constituency last week, was eulogised on Monday in the Commons and St Margaret’s church, Westminster, as what the prime minister called “one of the kindest, nicest, most gentle people in politics”. He was not a star of the parliamentary firmament, but rather that paragon: a “good constituency MP”. The...

The National Trust has needlessly provoked an ‘anti-woke’ campaign | Simon Jenkins

If the trust’s properties have slavery links, we should know. Yet to attack Churchill played into the hands of culture warriors

The National Trust has more members than all of Britain’s political parties put together. It is certain that those five and a half million members will agree on nothing. That is why the Trust’s leadership has long taken the view that, on any political issue that does not directly concern it, silence is the wisest policy.

These days, however, even the word “concern” is con...

Train or plane? The climate crisis is forcing us to rethink all long-distance travel | Simon Jenkins

Arguments about switching from one mode of transport to another miss the point – we ought to be travelling less

All domestic plane journeys in Britain should be banned and passengers told to take a train. So says the Campaign for Better Transport in its contribution to the climate emergency debate. Planes emit six times more CO2 per passenger mile than trains. The trouble is that plane tickets tend to be half the price of train ones. So tax planes, and subsidise trains.

So far, so simple. Planes a...

Boris Johnson’s Tory party conference speech – the panel verdict | Justine Greening and others

How was the prime minister’s keynote address received? Our experts give their view

Boris Johnson arrived in Manchester needing to move beyond the idea of “levelling up” and finding a way towards setting out a clear plan. He acknowledged that talent is spread evenly in Britain but opportunity is not. It is clear he has understood that levelling up is the greatest project any government can embark on.

Justine Greening was the Conservative MP for Putney from 2005 to 2019

Continue reading...

Tory ideals count for nothing in the kneejerk era of Boris Johnson | Simon Jenkins

Britain is no longer being run to any political programme, but according to its prime minister’s impulsive responses to events

Who would be a Tory ideologue? One minute you must favour a private-sector, low-tax, deregulated economy, basking in the glories of free trade. The next you must favour state spending, corporate taxes, regulated energy prices, trade barriers and restricted labour markets. One minute, queues at petrol stations are nothing to do with Brexit. The next they can be eased by Br...

Privatisation may be on its knees, but ministers can make a mess of the railways too | Simon Jenkins

Whoever owns the rail companies, they work best when they are under one management with no meddling

The collapse this week of Southeastern trains and the investigation of its accounts by the Serious Fraud Office signals the death knell of rail privatisation, after a quarter century of ideological turmoil, political interference and waste. Passengers have surged, until now. Trains have run, some of them on time. Subsidies have trebled in real terms. But the model is a shambles. Railways north, sou...

Care homes are desperately short of staff - why no emergency UK visas for them? | Simon Jenkins

As the government hastily arranges visas for truck drivers, its lack of regard for the care sector crisis is clear

Despite all the panic in government and at the petrol station forecourt, there is another urgent question: what about the care homes? The government is hastily attempting to give three-month visas to 5,000 foreign truck drivers to “save Christmas”. It is also allowing 5,000 visas for farm workers to gather in the winter harvest. But, in the face of widespread personnel shortages, the...

Ever-changing dialects keep English moving – but grammar is its north star | Simon Jenkins

Protesting that ‘bad’ grammar should not hold someone back will not stop it from doing so. Accuracy is in everyone’s interest

I say tomahto and you say tomayto. My wife says dahrling and I say my dear. We all speak differently, and some of us speak different. Does it really matter?

Things matter if people think they do. I remember being with a group of Manchester businessmen whose bitterest complaint was that London stole their brightest young people and carried them off south. And not just that. ...