Year: 2004

Choice will be healthy for the NHS

We are, as a nation, spending a great deal more to get a small improvement in the service, because there are too few incentives to guarantee value for money. Sound familiar? The resistance to consumer choice in healthcare rests on the argument that only the informed and the assertive would benefit. But in a system that permits choice, there is an incentive for more and more people to become informed and assertive (and even those who don’t, benefit from the power of those who do).

Featured News

Transformers: More than Meets the Eye

The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...

Law of the Labour Back Benches

Some say “modernisation” is an empty term. It is not. It means creating left-of-centre policies that allow more effective responses to the changes transforming contemporary societies. The Nordic social democrats, and new Labour in Britain, have been in the vanguard of such modernisation.

Murderous London is like old New York

It was James Q Wilson’s now legendary “broken windows” hypothesis which stated that when a neighbourhood, or a city, had become rundown and uncared-for – when its buildings and trains were covered in graffiti, its streets strewn with rubbish, and its youth allowed to indulge in flagrant displays of delinquent bravado – a climate was created in which serious crimes such as murder and robbery could run amok.