UK v USA – the basic healthcare facts
It’s worth noting in this US vs the NHS row is that the US has just about the highest healthcare spending in the world – 2nd highest by percentage of GDP, first by overall cost – largely because it’s among the most expensive. Time for some numbers – all freely available via Google.
I hold no brief for the NHS (and unlike most LibCon contributors tend to lean towards part-privatisation of its services), I’m just interested in the facts, so feel free to correct me if I’ve got some of the maths or figures wrong.
Of the c.15% of GDP the US spends on healthcare annually (that’s about $2.2 trillion*), around 50% is spent by the government (around $1.1 trillion). By contrast, the UK spends around 8% of its GDP on healthcare, with the Department of Health’s budget for the NHS (England**) in 2008/9 around £94 billion (about $155 billion).
The English NHS cares for 49 million people (100% of the population of England); US public healthcare currently covers about 83 million (around 28% of the US population).
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A face and a name come to light
Is she as you imagined her? The slackened jaw; the furrowed brow; the baffled, vacant expression. Does she fit the image you had of the callous, ‘sex-obsessed slob‘ who puffed smoke, glugged booze and watched porn whilst her boyfriend & lodger tortured her son to death?
Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t matter. It won’t bring Peter Connelly back, won’t prevent further abuses from happening, won’t stop other helpless little boys & girls from being murdered by the people in their care. All it satisfies is some short-lived curiosity for a face & a name.
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But where will they send me?
As if it wasn’t bad enough that despite being a British citizen I’m apparently incapable of ever passing the British Citizenship test (numerous goes at the various online versions have ended in complete and humiliating failure), now it looks like the knuckledraggers who post on the white-nationalist-fascist-scum Stormfront forums want to have me deported.
During a recent discussion over there about the Norwich North by-election one of its more evolved members, that is, a Nazi who can not only use a keyboard to spout bile on the Internet but who can even add links and shit too, decided to post my piece about the lies the BNP had been printing in their election leaflets: The BNP’s lies in Norwich North. On top of that, said Nazi also decided to post a piccie of my good self to illustrate the article, one that he nabbed off my Facebook profile.
Now after a minor panic about how the hell he’d got hold of a photo I’ve only ever used on Facebook, and after taking some advice from friends about Internet security (cheers Sunny), I decided to remove my FB profile from public view.
I hadn’t actually realised that doing that would have a knock-on effect anywhere else, but I’m delighted and amused to report that this action has led to my photo on the Stormfront forum being replaced by a generic faceless avatar.
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The Tories don’t know their Adam Smith
On Sunday morning the Telegraph brazenly declared that “The Conservatives are studying plans to increase VAT to 20 per cent if they win power at the next election as part of an ‘emergency’ package to pull Britain out of the red”.
But within hours this was being denied. Reuters reported a Tory spokeswoman saying: “There are absolutely no plans for such a rise and there’s never been any discussion about it.”
What to make of it all? It could be that the Tories do want to put VAT up to 20%…but want to keep this possible vote-loser quiet ahead of an election. Alternatively, the Tories themselves may be divided: some want a VAT rise, some don’t.
In either case, the Conservatives should be dissuaded from putting up VAT. I’ve written before about why VAT is an undesirable regressive tax. But such arguments are likely to have less traction with those on the political right.
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Harriet Harman’s ‘feminist blitzkrieg’
Abusive husbands were left furious today after a “controversial” new drive to reduce domestic violence against troublesome women was unveiled by chief feminazi Harriet Harman.
Under the contentious scheme, children as young as five will be taught that time-honoured traditions of men beating their wives when they take too long doing the dishes or refuse sex because they ‘have a headache’, are no longer acceptable in today’s politically correct, ultra-feminised society.
Shockingly, boys will be indoctrinated that their female friends are ‘people’ with “human rights” too, and just because girls are weak and over-sensitive doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to punish them for disobedience.
But imaginary critics warned that ministers are cramming the already over-stuffed National Curriculum with silly lessons that should be taught in the home, and schools should teach proper subjects like maths and fox-hunting instead of focusing on the supposed rights of nagging women.
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Force the Tories into a sexism debate
I see that John Prescott has criticised Harriet Harman’s comments on women being needed at the top of Labour leadership. But if he had any political sense he’d support the opening up of the debate because it will inevitably put Tories on the back foot.
David Cameron, as we all know, is very anxious to promote women within the Conservative Party. He needs to, as part of his re-branding efforts. For that reason CCHQ has adopted unprecedented powers over candidate shortlists. That power was then exercised in the candidate selection process in Dudley North, leading to some internal fighting.
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Harman’s foot-in-mouth feminism
Harriet Harman is right to suggest that having the top jobs in the Labour party filled exclusively by men is a terrible and outdated idea, as it would be for any political party. But her reasoning is flawed and ridiculous.
She explains her objection to “a men only team of leadership” by suggesting that “men cannot be left to run things on their own”. Which is, of course, entirely untrue, not to mention lazily misandrist.
Men can be left to run things on their own – indeed, they managed to run central government all by themselves for a number of centuries without setting the Commons on fire or leaving the Civil Service strewn with empty kegs, takeaway pizza-boxes and porn.
What Harman totally fails to do is to make a case for why we should not be satisfied with having men in sole charge of government, even if they’re competent.
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Tories remain confused on tax credits
The Tory right is, yet again, showing its ignorance of the income distribution and tax system. The Speccie’s leader says:
Mr Cameron has been criticised for telling Mr Marr that he would remove tax credits for households which earn more than £50,000 a year. This…would hit 130,000 families immediately and unsettle many more. It is a proposal that would undoubtedly hurt Middle Britain. Considered in isolation, this would indeed be an objectionable and vindictive proposal.
The first flaw here is an albeit mild version of the middle England/Britain error – the notion that the well-off are just ordinary folk. In truth, a two parent household with two children and earnings of £50,000 a year is better off than almost two-thirds of the population.
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Irony still exists, despite Jeremy Clarkson
Trying to understand what we find funny by dissecting comedy routines is roughly as effective as trying to do so by dissecting the brains of Jim Davidson fans. And slightly less funny. Charlie Brooker wrote a good, but not very funny, column to this effect on Monday.
In the same Guardian comedy special, Brian Logan wrote a bad, and not very funny, column about the ‘new offenders’ of comedy. It’s made worse by the fact that his initial thesis that sexism and racism are back, wearing an Irony Cloak that makes their attackers manifest themselves as Humourless Sandal Wearers, isn’t a bad one at all.
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Why we should say no to Red Toryism
Sunny recently wrote of the danger posed by Red Toryism to the left, following a Compass debate on Left and Right Communitarianism.
He argued that the left was unable to produce an effective counter-argument to Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism. He’s not alone in thinking that the left is in a state of intellectual disarray. It’s a symptom of the collapse of the New Labour project and the vacuum it has left behind it.
This intellectual predicament is nothing new. The Labour Party originally emerged out of Liberalism and developed its own socially conservative brand of communitarian politics – Labourism. It was never distinct enough nor intellectually confident enough to break ideologically with Liberalism. At the heart of Labour remains an unresolved conflictual relationship between Liberalism and communitarianism. This dilemma has tended to dominate the left more widely and kept various forms of socialism on the periphery.
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Workplace occupations: good for the left
I am just about old enough to remember the last time the British working class had the self-confidence to occupy workplaces threatened with closure. The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of 1971 was a major news story at the time, and may have done as much as anything to reverse Ted Heath’s tentative stab at Selsdon Man premature Thatcherism.
It was only later – when I became a Trot – that I learned the history of a tactic that, by definition, challenges the rights of the employing class to ownership and control of the means of production.
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Uninformed criticism of Child Poverty bill
The government will be introducing a child poverty bill, which aims by 2020 to ensure that no children are growing up in relative poverty.
Grassroots Tories have attacked this plan, because they claim it is mathematically impossible to achieve this. They combine this with amusing jokes about how the government is full of maths clowns, before going a bit quiet when it turns out that it is, in fact, they who are the maths clowns.
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Is James Purnell using Sen?
Amartya Sen and his capabilities model is all the rage in cabinet, and ex-cabinet. Gordon Brown’s read all about it, Liam Byrne’s been quoting Sen in the Guardian, and now James Purnell’s been using him as the basis for his attempt to portray himself as a leading left thinker, ready to lead Labour and the left out of the electoral wilderness with his new best think-tank mate Jon Cruddas.
So what are we to make of the adoption of a piece of thinking which dates from the 1970s, and set out most famously in Sen’s seminal 1979 Tanner Lecture ‘Equality of What’? Like Stuart at Next Left, I’m not a little worried about how Sen’s being used and abused.
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Purnell: What might have been
As James Purnell launches his new think tank project, having seemingly learned nothing from his undistinguished ministerial career, it seems an appropriate moment to look at how things might have been so different.
So let me present, from Paskini’s alternative history files:
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Gang culture, territory & fear
Nothing brings Britain’s social problems into focus like seeing them on your doorstep. What might seem abstract when described in Home Office documents or reported from unfamiliar places becomes a lot more intimate when it’s set somewhere you know: full of landmarks you’ve visited, people you might’ve met, folks who speak with the same accent or walk the same streets as you.
So when I read Mark Townsend’s report on the rise of gun & gang culture around the Burngreave & Pitsmoor areas of Sheffield, I was always going to react to it differently than if it’d been set in somewhere like Manchester, Liverpool or the North East. I can’t claim to know these neighbourhoods intimately, but my emotional attachment to the city means I probably can’t react as impartially or dispassionately as I would if it were set somewhere else.
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Obama and gays – No Change?
A few days ago, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the NAACP , Barack Obama stood before a room packed with African American supporters and reflected on how far the civil rights movement – and the country as a whole – had come in such a short century:
From the beginning, these founders understood how change would come — just as King and all the civil rights giants did later. They understood that unjust laws needed to be overturned; that legislation needed to be passed; and that Presidents needed to be pressured into action. They knew that the stain of slavery and the sin of segregation had to be lifted in the courtroom, and in the legislature, and in the hearts and the minds of Americans. They also knew that here, in America, change would have to come from the people.
Hypocrisy and the Conservative family fetish
The Family – what does it mean, this ephemeral concept that makes Tory policymakers so very moist and excited? It doesn’t mean any old bunch of people bound together by blood and love. Ian Duncan Smith’s vision of The Family as propounded in his new policy paper, Every Family Matters, is the relatively recent kitsched-out 1950s incarnation of the nuclear heterosexual brood: you know, one man and one woman bound in holy wedlock, living together with their genetic offspring, him in the office, her in the kitchen.
Well, that rules out my family for a start, and probably yours too. And yet Tory wallahs – not even in power yet but already slavering to sink their teeth into Labour’s social reforms – get all gooey over The Family. All you need to do is have a shyster mention ‘ordinary families’, as distinguished from the rest of us scum, and Tory spinsters start wetting their little knickers.
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Fit to work, but can’t work
The FT reports:
More than two-thirds of applicants for sickness benefits are being rejected under a new testing regime, casting doubt on the validity of 2.6m existing claimants deemed unfit for work. According to data seen by several welfare industry figures, up to 90 per cent of applicants are being judged able to work in some regions and placed on unemployment rolls rather than long-term ill-health benefits.
Time to spit out those strawberries?
If you watched Ken Loach’s recent film It’s A Free World then this will sound eerily familiar. Busloads of Eastern European migrants lured into England with promises of a fast buck, savings and accomodation, only to discover slave labour.
Today’s Independent investigation focuses on the biggest fruit growers and suppliers to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, a company called S&A that, already back in 2005, grabbed a few headlines (though not enough) over ridiculous working conditions.
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The government prevented me from stopping tax avoidance
The need for a general anti-tax avoidance principle (GANTIP) to be enshrined in the British finance system is now overwhelming.
The totality of tax avoided by super-rich individuals and big corporations has been estimated by independent research at some £25bn a year, and even by the Treasury at up to £13bn a year.
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» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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