A new dawn has broken, has it not?
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Tony Blair, 1997.
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Professor David Kerr, government NHS advisor, says Labour have “lost the plot” on patient care
Professor David Kerr, a renowned oncologist who led efforts to cut waiting and give hospitals greater independence, said that the Tories now offered the best chance for the NHS, which had been driven into a “whirl of thoughtless tick-box exercises”.
Professor Kerr, a lifelong Labour supporter who campaigned with Tony Blair in the 2001 general election, told The Times that the key principles of giving patients a better choice of health services and a better understanding of how they were performing had been “driven into the sand”.
“To say that we have run out of steam, I would say definitely, definitely yes,” Professor Kerr said. “We have got lost in the blizzard of increasingly irrelevant targets. The position now is disenfranchising, dull and disconnected. That is the clinical reality.”
The Times
Gordon Brown breaks promise over free prescriptions for chronically ill
The prime minister made the pledge to people with conditions such as asthma, heart disease, diabetes and depression in his speech at the Labour party conference in September 2008. Instead of implementing the change for all those patients, it is now expected to be included in the party’s manifesto.
Both groups have expressed concern that a major review of prescription charges by Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, has not been published by ministers. The report, which is expected to call for charges to be dropped for millions, was supposed to come out before Christmas.
Guardian, National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society
According to the Department of Health website:
The review will report to the Minister for Public Health and the Secretary of State for Health in Autumn 2009.
The Brown Bottom - how Gordon Brown, against Bank of England advice, lost at least £2billion of taxpayer money
In 1999, Gordon Brown took the decision to sell half of the United Kingdom’s gold reserves into the bottom of the market - where gold was at its lowest price in 20 years.
Over 17 auctions, the gold was sold between 1999 and 2002.
Shortly after the sales, the price of gold soared. Gold is now worth approximately three times more than what it was at the time of the sale (Guardian).
Not only was the decision to sell the gold questioned, the auction method added insult to injury. The auctions and amount of gold to be sold were pre-announced, meaning investors sold their gold in anticipation of being able to buy even cheaper gold (the more that gets sold into the market, the lower the price is, due to supply and demand) (Market Oracle).
Gordon Brown was warned against the gold sale and the chosen auction method by the Bank of England, among other experts (The Times).
The sale was so infamous that the phrase ‘Brown Bottom’ was coined to describe the event and is recognised internationally (Wikipedia).
The Treasury has been fighting requests for information about the decision to sell the gold, and advice received (The Times).
Brown offloaded the gold at a 20-year low in the market — now nicknamed the “Brown Bottom” by dealers. The 17 auctions achieved prices for the gold of between $256 and $296 an ounce, with an average of $275. Since then gold has risen sharply in value and stood yesterday at $685. This year, some top investment banks have predicted, it could even rise above the all-time high of $850.
Gathered around a table in one of the Bank of England’s grand meeting rooms, the select group of Britain’s top gold traders could not believe what they were being told.
Gordon Brown had decided to sell off more than half of the country’s centuries-old gold reserves and the chancellor was intending to announce his plan later that day.
“The timing of the decision was ludicrous. We told them you are going to push the gold price down before you sell,” said Peter Fava, then head of precious metal dealing at HSBC who was present at the meeting. “We thought it was a disastrous decision; we couldn’t understand it. We brought up a lot of potential problems at the meeting.”
Lord Burns, then permanent secretary at the Treasury, also recalls no significant discussion over the selling of gold during his period heading the department between 1991 and 1998.
One senior Bank official said: “There was certainly no debate about the gold price or where it was going. The Bank were not asked to provide that sort of advice.”
The Times
Further reading:
Channel 4’s FactCheck finds Gordon Brown misrepresenting statistics (again), this time on police time
“Police have got to spend 80 per cent of their time now on the streets”.
Gordon Brown
On the broader issue, Home Offices figures revealed in a parliamentary answer show time spent “on patrol” by police officers dropped to just 13.8 per cent, although this figure does not include when officers respond to an incident.
Labour told us tonight that “what the Prime Minister was referring to was that with Labour every community now has a neighbourhood police team committed to spending at least 80 per cent of their time on the beat or visibly working in their neighbourhood.”
When Brown says “on the streets”, that’s exactly what people will expect. Not only did he repeat the misleading claim banned by the ASA. But the 80 per cent target is at present nowhere near being met. So he gets a FactCheck caution.
Channel Four’s FactCheck
