I quite enjoyed the bits I saw and read of ‘What the Romans Did for Us’. It was quite a list as I recall.

Central heating and siege weapons, bridges and fire engines, frescoes and fast food – what do all these things have in common? They were all introduced to Britain…..by the Romans.

‘What the Romans Did for Us’, Foreword, Adam Hart-Davis, Boxtree, 2000

We forget so easily don’t we who did what and why, so I thought, in the interest of balance, I’d try to remember what, in the last 13 years or so, the Tories have done for, I mean to, us. Why not join in? my list won’t be anything like complete. See what you can add and I’ll offer a Mars Bar to the winner, though, of course, Mars Bars aren’t anything like as big as they were thirteen years ago.

Some of the things on the list go all the way back to 2010 and the Tory/Lib Dem co-alition – what a treat that was. That means the average thirteen year old’s view of life will be of things steadily getting harder and less promising and it’s hard enough being an average thirteen year old without that.

Anyway, here’s my list in the order I thought of them rather than ranking by seriousness, chronology, the scale of the misery or the number of deaths caused. I’ve added a little detail and source links for those who like to check things or find out more but put the stand-alone list first for those only interested in the Mars Bar.

• Food banks
• Brexit
• Stoking racism/gaslighting migrants and refugees
• Bedroom tax
• Inflation
• Boris Johnson
• Liz Truss/economic meltdown
• Rees Mogg
• On-shore wind turbine ban
• Austerity
• Child poverty
• Public services and LA’s  underfunded
• Privatisation
• Covid mismanagement/excess deaths/fast-tracking mate’s PPE and other contracts
• NHS in crisis
• A wrecked social care system, failing residents, employees and bed-blocking the NHS
• Trashing vocational qualifications
• Packing the House of Lords with mates and chancers. (see above: Michelle Mone and PPE)
• Trashing of due process and standards of behaviour in political life
• Economic decline
• Politics of division
• Attacks on civil liberties/right to protest/human rights

Food banks

There are over 1,400 Trussell Trust food banks in the UK, in addition to at least 1,172 independent food banks. 

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8585/

Since 2010 the number of emergency food parcels distributed by Trussell Trust food banks has risen from just over 40,000 to well over one and a half million – an increase of 3,900% in just 9 years.

Food Bank Britain – Charityworks, 17 Jun 2019, https://www.charity-works.co.uk/food-bank-

Since food insecurity implies a nutritionally inadequate diet, it is a phenomenon of significant importance for public health. Poor dietary intake has been linked to a number of diseases and chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, some types of cancer, and osteoporosis [15, 16]. In addition, inadequate dietary intake during pregnancy and early childhood can increase the risk for birth defects, anaemia, low birth weight, preterm birth, and developmental risk.

‘Understanding the post-2010 increase in food bank use in England: new quasi-experimental analysis of the role of welfare policy.’, Filip Sosenko,, Glen Bramley & Arnab Bhattacharjee, https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/

Brexit

There are too many consequences to detail from travel restrictions and costs, a hammering of small businesses and declining exports, untypically high inflation, labour shortages to damaged science and higher education sectors so I’ll limit myself to the economic impact.

The UK-based Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) states that the long-term impact of Brexit will be worse for the UK economy than Covid-19. The OBR estimates that Brexit will reduce the UK’s potential GDP by 4% and the pandemic by a further 2%.

EU exports fall by 46% following UK exit from single market

UK-EU trade lags China and the US

UK FDI (Foreign direct investment) fell by 17% in 2020–21

Inflation hits 13-year high

Trade deals with third-party countries will have little impact

OBR: https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/features/two-years-brexit-uk-eu/OBR: https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/features/two-years-brexit-uk-eu/

Stoking racism/gaslighting migrants and refugees

So the plan here is to stoke fear and resentment among ‘Brits’, close down, or make difficult to access, almost all legal routes, declare that anyone not entering the country ‘legally’ is a criminal and deport them.

Caitlin Boswell, policy and advocacy manager for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) said: “The racism of the UK’s immigration system couldn’t be more clear, with this government drawing policies affecting people seeking safety along stark racial lines. At the same time, ministers are using unashamedly inflammatory and far-right language, whipping up hatred towards black and brown migrants.”

Mark Townsend Home Affairs Editor, Guardian, Sun 7 May 2023

Robert Jenrick has cartoon murals painted over at children’s asylum centre

Paintings were considered too welcoming at Kent centre for lone children arriving in UK,

Guardian 7 July 2023

Of course there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this nastiness. According to the Minister, the mural was not ‘age-appropriate’.

Bedroom tax

A really great idea; everyone knows the poor don’t need spare bedrooms and it’s only common sense to make them poorer if they don’t move to smaller hovels, sorry, homes. At its worst the tax made bereaved parents (no need any more for that extra bedroom) poorer. It didn’t encourage people to move, not least because of the shortage of suitable smaller properties.

In July 2014, a report was published by the DWP that said only one in twenty claimants affected by the change had downsized their property. A study published four months earlier had similar results.

The report also showed that there has been great demand for downsizing properties but there has been nowhere near sufficient supply of suitable sized housing.^[47]

The under-occupancy penalty (also known as the under occupation penalty, under-occupancy charge, under-occupation charge or size criteria)^[1] results from a provision of the British Welfare Reform Act 2012 whereby tenants living in public housing (also called council or social housing) with rooms deemed “spare” face a reduction in Housing Benefit, resulting in them being obliged to fund this reduction from their incomes or to face rent arrears and potential eviction by their landlord (be that the local authority or a housing association).

The under-occupancy penalty is more commonly referred to as the Bedroom Tax; especially by critics of the changes who argue that they amount to a tax because of the lack of social housing (or in some areas, any rented accommodation) for affected tenants to downsize to (and the refusal to accept the risk of taking in lodgers).

In 2016 it was announced that the penalty would be extended to pensioners. Caroline Abrahams of Age UK said: “Imposing the cap on older tenants will not only cause them anxiety and distress, it is also pointless given the lack of affordable housing options available to them”.^[2][3] It has not been applied to pensioners.^[4]

One bedroom is allowed for each of the following:

An adult couple; Each other person aged 16 and over; Two children of the same sex under 16; Two children who are under 10 regardless of sex; Any other child (other than a foster child whose main home is elsewhere); A non-resident carer (or group of carers) for a person in the house requiring overnight care; Where a room is required by a disabled child who is unable to share a bedroom

Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedroom_tax

Inflation

At least we’re good at something. The Bank of England has a 2% target for inflation, but like my own target for drinking less wine it is a tad tricky to achieve, perhaps because of the outrageous pay demands of food-bank using nurses.

The consumer price inflation in the United Kingdom held steady at 8.7 percent in May 2023, unchanged from the previous month’s 13-month low and above market expectations of 8.4 percent. The rate remained significantly higher than the Bank of England’s target of 2.0 percent, adding to concerns about its stickiness and placing additional pressure on policymakers to maintain the bank’s ongoing tightening campaign. Rising prices for air travel (31.4 percent vs 12.6 percent in April), recreational and cultural goods and services (6.7 percent vs 6.3 percent), and second-hand cars (3.9 percent vs 1.2 percent) were enough to offset falling fuel costs (-13.1 percent vs -8.9 percent) and slowing food inflation (18.3 percent vs 19.0 percent). The core inflation rate, which excludes volatile items such as energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, rose to 7.1 percent, the highest since March 1992. source: Office for National Statistics

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi

Core CPIH (excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco) rose by 6.5% in the 12 months to May 2023, up from 6.2% in April, and the highest rate for over 30 years; the CPIH goods annual rate eased from 10.0% to 9.7%, while the CPIH services annual rate rose from 6.0% to 6.3%.

Core CPI (excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco) rose by 7.1% in the 12 months to May 2023, up from 6.8% in April, and the highest rate since March 1992; the CPI goods annual rate eased from 10.0% to 9.7%, while the CPI services annual rate rose from 6.9% to 7.4%.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/consumerpriceinflation/may2023

There are many politicians I don’t admire. Here are three who I think have caused enormous damage to the country, its people and its reputation. Of course there are others including recent or still serving members of the government, though quite a few seem to be seeking gainful employment elsewhere.

Boris Johnson

A fantasist and liar who will make more money this year than most of us in twenty. Loved by the Tory Party until he crashed and burned (well got singed at least). They thought he was a winner following a Brexit election win after years of blaming the EU for any and everything and promising it would be a glorious new dawn once we’d stuffed Johny foreigner. No citation needed for this one. He will be the king over the water (his new house has a moat) until he ‘can’t be bovvered’. I gather he’s paid £21k an hour for whatever he does now.

Liz Truss/economic meltdown

Liz cost us all most or all of our pocket money with her fearless dash for growth.

Rarely has a budget caused such political and economic damage. Not even George Osborne’s “omnishambles” budget, when he was forced in 2012 to back down from the pasty tax, comes close.

Initially hailed by her supporters as “at last, a true, Tory budget”, the “mini” fiscal event included the biggest tax cuts since 1972, funded by a vast expansion in borrowing, and with only a vague attempt to argue it could be paid for by an unlikely economic boom.

Economists balked at the idea that £45bn of unfunded tax cuts for the rich could ever catalyse economic growth and pay for itself in the way the government argued. Not just critics from a supposed “anti-growth coalition”, but also from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and the IMF. With inflation at a 40-year high, rising recession risks and higher borrowing costs across advanced economies, it was a big gamble at the wrong moment.

The international reaction was swift and damning. The pound fell to its lowest-ever level against the dollar, while gilt prices collapsed. Over four days, long-dated government bond yields – which move inversely to prices – rose by more than the annual increase in 23 of the past 27 years.

The mini-budget that broke Britain – and Liz Truss, Richard PartingtonEconomics correspondent, The Guardian, Thu 20 Oct 2022, https://www.theguardian.com › business › oct › the-mi…

Here are a few more headlines from Liz’s tilt at fame (achieved) and (mis)fortune.

The inside story of Liz Truss’s disastrous 44 days in office,

Financial Times, https://www.ft.com › Economy › UK › Liz Truss

Jeremy Hunt does not accept Truss mini-budget caused long-term damage, Sky, https://news.sky.com › story › jeremy-hunt-does-not-a…

The mini-budget mistake that Liz Truss cannot fix, https://www.itv.com › news › the-mini-budget-mistake…

Rees Mogg

What can I say?

On-shore wind turbine ban

I’m writing this just after the hottest June on record in the UK as wild fires burn in Canada and elsewhere and the government’s own advisers, the Climate Change Committee have just warned that the UK is missing climate targets on nearly every front.

Lord Deben, the outgoing chair of the CCC, said the UK had “lost the leadership” on climate action shown at Cop26 in 2021 and done “a number of things” – such as greenlighting a new coal mine and new oil and gasfields in the North Sea – that were “utterly unacceptable”.

He said the committee’s confidence that the government would meet its shorter-term carbon-cutting goals by 2030 was even lower than last year, despite the publication of a new green strategy by ministers. “We’ve slipped behind, and other people have moved ahead,” he said. “This is not a report that suggests satisfactory progress.”

Fiona Eliot, Environment Editor, The Guardian, 28^th June 2023

Yet the Tories banned on-shore wind, arguably far less damaging to the environment than off-shore wind. If large parts of the world become too hot to sustain human life Conservative MPs will find stopping wind farms in their backyard a tad pyric; ‘not in my back yard/constituency’ won’t work with climate change.

Austerity

Can you remember ‘We’re all in it together’ and the move to get rid of ministerial cars and first class rail travel? Talk about hair shirts. I’ve not managed to find out how long it took to reinstate both but my guess is not as long as the queue at the benefits office. Austerity implemented by the extremely rich George Osborne was needed to pay off the debts caused by the 2008 financial crash rooted in reckless financial speculation and gambling by banks and chancers. Just like the post-office sub-postmasters scandal, ordinary people and public services felt the pain. Still, it was worth it to get the country’s finances on an even keel wasn’t it? Except that:

From 2010 to 2019, total gross government debt increased by £643 bn from £1.2 trillion to £1.8 trillion. UK debt since 1975.

Debt under Conservatives 2010-19, economicshelp.org,

https://www.economicshelp.org › blog › debt-under-con.Nov 2019.

Child poverty

This on its own would have finished any government not so long ago. Now we seem to have got used to it.

350,000 more children were pulled into relative poverty (after housing costs) in 2021-2022. That means 4.2 million children (29% of all UK children) were in poverty – up from 3.6 million in 2010-11. 45% of all children in poverty were in families with a youngest child aged under five.

CPAG Official child poverty statistics: 350,000 more children.23 Mar 2023

Public services and LA’s  underfunded

The pattern in UK political life and government since 1945 is of conservative governments cutting taxes and the funding of public services, privatising anything they can to raise cash for giveaways and letting a returned labour government, AKA ‘the party of high taxation in hoc to the union grandees’, rebuild public services during their term of office. Remember cuddly George Osborne’s ‘we’re all in it together’ claptrap, requiring austerity and then more austerity and a shrinking state. The country is still paying the price for their slash and burn approach to everything from public health to building regulations. Margaret Thatcher’s government used the North Sea oil revenues to fund tax give-aways (no sovereign wealth fund here!) and then began the movement to sell-off (at bargain prices) every public utility and asset around (see immediately below).

Privatisation

I’ve actually lost count of the number of privatisations. Macmillan called it ‘selling off the family silver’. It means that not much in the way of national assets is still owned by…well us. That makes us as a country, a tad lacking in collateral when we borrow. And we certainly do borrow. Privatisation was a sure-fire way of realising an asset (albeit at less than it was worth) and, of course, it could only be sold once). The cash raised was used as a short-term alternative to raising money through taxation – a vote winner for the party of low taxation.

Internal reports she (the chief excec.) commissioned repeatedly found the Post Office may have prosecuted completely innocent people and that the IT system was a mess. Vennells saw to it that no one was told about these conclusions, from the subpostmasters to parliament. She eventually left the Post Office with a CBE and £5m richer, failing upwards into some Cabinet Office business role and chairmanship of an NHS trust. Vennells has since gone to ground – but her giving evidence to the inquiry, when it finally comes, will be a momentous occasion.

‘After 20 years, here’s why the Post Office scandal is special: the cover-up is happening in plain sight’, Marina Hyde, Guardian, 18th July, 2023

Probation Services privatisation went equally well and a good deal of it had to be brought back into the public sector. The damage done to the service and to its employees has still not been recovered from.

Another (probation Officer) said: “I do not consider that we are in a position to protect the public, but we will be the scapegoats when tragedies happen.”

In their report Kirton and Guillaume said the privatisation had been carried out in the face of “massive opposition from criminal justice experts, senior probation leaders, the unions representing probation workers, and the workers themselves” and with “no meaningful consultation”.

It had created “conveyor belt” conditions in the privatised part of the service that meant officers were having to “compromise what they regarded as professional standards”.

Jamie Doward, Observer, 30 Jun 2019

And, as well as selling businesses and infrastructure, services have been privatised: Outsourcing has been extended into every possible area of government and public service. For example, Capita were ‘given’ the Army recruitment contract (no doubt because of their stellar record in other contracted work for government).

It also runs much criticised assessments of the eligibility of disabled people for personal independence payments on behalf of the Department for Work & Pensions. That business led to calls for an investigation last year after Channel Four caught one assessor on film dismissing a claimant’s “disability known as fat”.

The broadcaster’s Dispatches team sent a psychiatric nurse through Capita’s disability assessment training, where a senior staff member urged him to do “as many assessments a day as you can possibly manage”. Drag ’em in, get ’em rejected, and put another penny on the shareholders’ dividend.

James Moore, Independent, Thursday 02 March 2017 17:26

So how did army recruitment go?

Army and Capita must share blame for soldier recruitment. Capita admits that, at the time it bid for the contract it had been “chasing revenue”, being simply interested in booking additional contracts.

UK Parliament, https://committees.parliament.uk › committee › news, 1 Mar 2019 

I realise as I write this that it’s a ‘Magic Porridge Pot’ list – it keeps growing, makiing this a piece that will never be finished this side of an election. I’m going to say a little about two more items and leave the rest for any reader to comment on or add to, not least because the list seems to be growing faster than I’m writing.

Covid mismanagement/excess deaths/ fast-tracking mate’s PPE and other contracts

There are books written about all this so I’ll stick to snippets. How many excess deaths can be laid at the government’s door? It’s a tricky question. The main thing to bear in mind though is that there is a perfectly valid reason for what some have called a lack of preparedness and planning for an epidemic like Covid; it seems civil servants were required to spend their time planning for…..Brexit.

First a quick question: can you remember the seven Nightingale hospitals opened during the pandemic?

(They) had different purposes – with some mainly set up as critical care facilities and others designed to deliver step-down care for recovering patients (Figure 1). But the hospitals shared at least one common goal (listed on one of the hospitals’ own websites): ‘Bring hope’.

 And in the early days, the Nightingales did just that. Over March and April 2020, the consortia (including NHS, military and private sector experience) that built the Nightingales were rightly praised for rapidly converting conference and concert venues into places that could safely store and deliver oxygen to patients, support infection control and deliver complex critical care. Behind the scenes, a host of activity ensured the wider infrastructure that hospitals need would also be in place – from financing, to clinical governance processes, to ensuring there would be food and drink available to staff.

But over summer 2020, one issue came to define the narrative around the Nightingales – quite simply, they were not seeing many patients (Figure 2). And now, one year after they were built, many of the facilities are either being decommissioned or repurposed as mass vaccination centres or diagnostic centres.

But, in the end, the country has been left with relatively unused emergency facilities, hugely overworked existing facilities that were full of patients with Covid-19, and rising waits for routine care. The Nightingales have shown that in an emergency you can build ventilators, you can adapt buildings and you can manufacture personal protective equipment – but unfortunately, there is no magic NHS staffing tree to shake.

Was building the NHS Nightingale hospitals worth the money?, The Kings Fund, 5th May 2021

According to the Office for National Statistics, there have been about 170,000 excess deaths in England and Wales since the pandemic began. Most of these can be directly attributed to Covid-19 itself: after all, the virus’s name is scrawled on the death certificates of more than 212,000 UK citizens. Some of those who died may have been vulnerable or infirm, but in other circumstances years away from death. As the pandemic waned, we could have expected excess deaths to shift to below average levels over time. This has not happened.

Britain’s excess death rate is at a disastrous high – and the causes go far beyond Covid, Owen Jones, Guardian, 15 Jan 2023

Among comparator high-income countries (other than the US), only Spain and Italy had higher rates of excess mortality in the pandemic to mid-2021 than the UK.  Overall, England has experienced a larger fall in life expectancy than most comparator countries between pre-pandemic 2019 and 2021. 

In addition to its direct impact on overall mortality, the Covid-19 pandemic may have caused an increase in the number of people dying from other serious conditions, such as heart disease. The number of people seeking and receiving health care from GPs, accident and emergency and other health care services for other conditions fell significantly during the early waves of the pandemic. Routine and elective care, referrals and care for cancer and other outpatient referrals were also postponed or cancelled because of pressure on NHS services, leading to backlogs in diagnosis and treatment. It is too early to say what the full impact of the pandemic on the number of people dying from other conditions will be.

The number of people who died in care homes increased sharply in the first Covid-19 wave in 2020 peaking at more than three times the 2015–19 average (see Figure 3c), with about 27,000 excess deaths from mid-March to June 2020, comprising almost half (45 per cent) of all excess deaths nationally. The relatively large numbers of excess non-Covid-19 deaths in care homes in the first wave likely reflects the later roll out of testing in care homes compared with hospitals, and under-recording of Covid-19 as a cause of death among older people with pre-existing conditions. The impact of subsequent waves on the number of people dying in care home was more moderate with the introduction of stricter infection control measures.

The Kings Fund, March 2022

As is so often the case, attacks on the government’s handling of Covid are really unfair. Take, as an example, clearing old people with Covid out of hospitals and back to their care homes, without providing PEP to care home workers but while enforcing isolation through denying visits from relatives. All this while publicly stating (actually boasting) that ‘a protective ring’ had been put around care homes. As a result, shameful numbers of elderly people died alone while their relatives were prevented from visiting.

First of all, Matt Hancock never said it…..

During an appearance on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, 6 June, Health Secretary Matt Hancock denied claims that he had spoken about throwing a “protective ring” around care homes at the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis. 

Asked by Mr Marr if he regretted his use of the phrase “protective ring”, Mr Hancock said: “Well I said that much later, about what we were doing for the winter plan, and it’s been interpreted.”

https://fullfact.org/health/matt-hancock-protective-ring-care-homes/

Then, if he did, it was all a misunderstanding.

But Mr Hancock actually did use the phrase multiple times in May 2020, to describe action taken during the first wave of the pandemic. 

During a Downing Street press conference on 15 May, 2020, Mr Hancock said: “Right from the start, it’s been clear that this horrible virus affects older people most. So right from the start, we’ve tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes.”

Days later on 18 May 2020, when questioned on this wording, Mr Hancock told the House of Commons: “We absolutely did throw a protective ring around social care, not least with the £3.2 billion-worth of funding we put in right at the start, topped up with £600 million-worth of funding on Friday.” 

Ibid

A fast-track route to securing government contracts for a company and loads of dosh for its owner(s) simply because they were known to Conservative politicians (even if the company had only existed for a week and knew nothing about the business defined in the contract) – well, what’s wrong with that?

On the sunny spring evening of 7 May 2020, in the lethal first wave of the Covid pandemic, the Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, had themselves filmed for Instagram. Standing between the stone pillars at the front door of their mansion on the Isle of Man, they clapped for NHS staff, carers and other key workers, as they did weekly from different parts of their Ballakew estate.

“As always, Doug and myself would just like to say a massive thank you tonight to everyone … that are keeping the country going,” Lady Mone posted. “We appreciate each and every one of you.”

Two years later, officers from the National Crime Agency (NCA) were investigating PPE Medpro, a company that received more than £200m of government Covid contracts weeks after Mone referred it to ministers.

PPE Medpro and partners made as much as £100m profits
At least £70m from PPE Medpro contracts taken offshore
Small electronics firm behind supply of gowns for NHS
Jet, yacht and racehorse purchased after PPE deal
Tory peer and husband now selling yacht and properties
Mone takes leave of absence from Lords and may leave UK

David Conn and Paul Lewis, Guardian, Fri 9 Dec 2022 12.00 GMT

And, you’ll have noticed, I haven’t mentioned the Downing Street lockdown parties.

NHS in crisis

Ten years ago the NHS was meeting all its key performance targets from cancer treatment waiting timer to ambulance waiting times.

Underfunded for years, staff pay effectively cut for years, staff shortages, low morale, staff burnout, staff seeking other employment or emigrating, buildings in disrepair, record waiting lists (but surely our P.M. promised to cut waiting times and lists), poor health impacting on economic growth (lack of: see ONS report, Health, demographic and labour market influences on economic inactivity, UK: 2019 to 2022, Donald Houston, Jane Evans and Vahé Nafilyan, health.data@ons.gov.uk), falling life-expectancy, what’s not to like?

Finally, after long delays, we have from the government a workforce development plan. It’s great news; it won’t happen but it’s a good news headline grabber when very much needed. It comes from the party that abolished the nurse training bursary and failed to plan for a staffing crisis for 13 years, believing that the market would take care of recruitment – they did the same in teaching, committing themselves to the notion that schools would train their own teachers to fill vacancies (and removing the need for qualified teacher status for teachers in ‘free schools’). Wages were frozen or increased at well below cost of living rises. Result?

Department for Education survey finds that 40,000 – almost 9% of workforce – left state schools in 2021-22 before retirement.

Richard Adams Education editor, Guardian, Thu 8 Jun 2023 16.53 BST

First of all, Brexit’s £40 billion annual hit to tax revenues means less money is available to spend on our public services. We have spent around 20% less per person on health than similar European countries over the past decade. 

By now, we all know without a doubt that the extra £350 million a week promised to the NHS as a result of Brexit was a complete fabrication. If you missed it, please watch and share the European Movement’s latest video, exposing this lie:

Another issue is staffing. We can’t ignore the fact that numbers of nurses coming from the EEA fell dramatically after the referendum and have not recovered. Growing hostility to ‘foreigners’ also drove some to leave. The effect was a 28% reduction in nurses and health visitors on the UK register who qualified in the EEA, a net loss of over 10,000.

In other specialist fields, such as cardiac surgery and anaesthetics, the loss of recruitment from EU countries has been even more pronounced. In hospitals up and down the country, these EU colleagues are missed. 

Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health and Immediate Past President of the British Medical Association, European Movement UK, https://www.europeanmovement.co.uk/

A wrecked social care system, failing residents, employees and bed-blocking the NHS

When he became prime minister Boris Johnson insisted that he had a “clear plan” for solving the crisis in social care. However, he refused to offer any long-term solution to the social care crisis in his party’s subsequent general election manifesto. He did promise: to build cross-party consensus on a long-term solution for adult social care. The government promised to make a start on this within its first 100 days. After more than 1,000 days with no green paper most people gave up waiting.

Institute for Government, A parliamentary commission remains the best option to build lasting social care reform, Graham Atkins, 25 November,2019

Is social care sorted would you say?