In an article for The Fraser Institute, we argue the lessons for Canada from the NHS reform programme are less that competition in health care has failed, but rather that market-based health care reforms in the UK have been crippled by the government’s unwillingness to stop directing the service from the centre. The reform programme as a whole has been 'a botched job driven by political imperative, constant reconfiguration, and central diktat'.

Yesterday was the first day of the month in which children return to school after the summer holidays. (Cue for cheers or boos depending on age.)

Along with the start of the new school year, yesterday also saw the launch of a new anti-faith school initiative.

Named the Accord Coalition, what distinguishes this new organisation from all other lobby groups campaigning for the same end is that its membership includes several prominent religious figures and groups. It is not just the usual group of virulently anti-religious suspects such as Polly Toynbee, Phillip Pullman and A.C.Grayling, although all of these belong to it.

Continue reading "Accord May Have Come Into Being, But Is Still Lacking in Reality Nonetheless" »

Chris Heaton-Harris, Conservative MEP and member of the Audit Committee of the European Parliament, has published a ‘rough guide to the EU budget’. The brief guide tries to make sense of the draft budgets for both the European Commission and European Parliament in 2009 and queries how MEPs can be expected to ‘tame the beast’, writes Laura Kelleher.

Continue reading "Budget and the Beast" »

Dr Ruth Lupton of the Institute of Education has taken the Conservative’s recent education report, A Failed Generation, to task for using dodgy statistics to claim that the education gap between rich and poor has widened on New Labour’s watch. Her criticisms are powerful but not exactly an overwhelming indictment of the report. One of its claims was based on a statistic on SATS mistakenly provided by the DCSF suggesting, helpfully, that results of repeated information requests from government departments are not especially accurate.

Continue reading "“And in the twilight zone, trees are purple (not blue, as Gove claims!)”" »

To claim, as some leading Tories recently have, that ours is a broken society involves their making two tacit assertions. One is about human societies in general; the other about ours in particular.

Continue reading "Why things can still be very bad today despite there being so much to celebrate" »