The recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq came at a heavy cost to Britain’s military capabilities. However, rather than replenish the forces with the equipment they needed, spending reviews in the last parliament saw defence expenditure so drastically reduced that the equipment used up in the campaigns cannot be replaced. These cuts have left all… [Read More]
Our country’s health system is highly reliant on overseas health workers who often stay less than a year, as well as agency staff who work on a temporary basis at extremely inflated costs. Many posts in unfavourable specialities such as emergency medicine are currently vacant and there is a severe and growing GP recruitment crisis.… [Read More]
Should secondary schools be allowed to select, and if so, on what basis? These questions have long been a battleground of the English education system and have too often yielded answers that reduce the issue to oversimplified dichotomies. The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools: A Debate gathers a diverse range of key thinkers… [Read More]
Human rights law has been hijacked in the UK by special interest groups seeking to advance their own rights above those of the rest of the population. The European convention has been repeatedly used in a way that weakens the government’s ability to defend the country from terrorism or to deal with illegal immigrants. But,… [Read More]
David Cameron has promised that, if re-elected in the 2015 general election, he will renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU before putting it to a referendum in 2017. But so far there has been little indication of what sort of deal he hopes to strike. In this timely and wide-ranging study of the UK’s position… [Read More]
It is hard to exaggerate the need for increased funding for the NHS. The health service is threatened by a funding gap which could be as large as £30 billion per year by 2020. Even if current yearly efficiency gains were doubled by 2020, it could still be looking at an annual funding gap of… [Read More]
The private rented sector, which has undergone a remarkable renaissance over the past two decades, is becoming increasingly central to considerations about the housing market and the benefits system. Four million homes are now privately rented in England, accounting for 18 per cent of all households. The sector has doubled in size since 1989 and… [Read More]
Crime is going down – officially. The trouble is that most people don’t believe it: they feel that society is becoming more crime-ridden. So what could explain the discrepancy between the claims made by politicians and the everyday experience of citizens? In this hard-hitting exposé, Rodger Patrick, former Chief Inspector of West Midlands Police, shows… [Read More]
Since 2002, more than 40 million criminal records checks have been carried out at a cost of nearly two billion pounds, yet there has never been any significant research showing the effectiveness of mass vetting in child protection terms. In June 2010, the Coalition government promised to ‘scale back’ criminal records checks to ‘common-sense proportions’,… [Read More]
‘Brexit’ – British exit from the European Union – is a distinct possibility. Although many argue that the economy of an independent Britain will be more successful on the whole, there are sectors in which people feel that they benefit from EU membership. These people are consequently strong critics of the Brexit movement. In Softening… [Read More]