The Wardman Wire

You are browsing the archives of 2008 August.

Just a few days ago I wrote about the rules under which donations are made to political parties, and now the amounts that parties received in donations in the last quarter has been revealed.
Between them they received £10.7m, split down as follows:

Conservatives: £5.6m

Labour: £3.8m

Liberal Democrats: £945,192

This is up from £8.1m last quarter, with the Lib [...]

I probably missed this, but I can’t find a reference.

Why does Nick Robinson’s Newslog never have any comments in the first half of the month?

This applies to April, May, June and July this year.

Nick’s posts in the second half of each month get hundreds of comments, but none at all in the first half of the month.

What is going on?

This is Simon Sarmiento’s fifth and final Guest Column on the Wardman Wire, while David Keen is on holiday from the blog. This week Simon examines a critical appreciation of the National Health Service.

This is my last guest column for the month of August. I want first to draw attention to a recent critique of the National Health Service, which a member of my family who works in the NHS pointed me to recently.

The author is a distinguished American health expert, Professor Donald M. Berwick of Harvard. He’s a pediatrician but also Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. And he is also President and CEO of a not-for-profit organization called the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. It was in this capacity that he spoke in July to a big gathering of NHS staff at Wembley called NHS Live. You can watch his speech, as actually delivered. You can read what looks like the prepared text here, and an edited version was published in the British Medical Journal.

He had some very positive things to say about our Health Service, and he also had some very sound advice for its improvement. We in Britain tend to complain a lot about NHS shortcomings; this should give us a better perspective on how fortunate we are.

Just imagine: You are Gordon Brown. You have spent £167 million on advertising, £29 million on PR and sponsorship and £12 million on “strategic consultancy”, totalling nearly £400m on spin in the past year.
What would you expect to be getting for it?
A positive personal rating? A poll boost? A donations rise?
Instead you get terrible poll [...]

A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.
Welcome to this week’s Think-tank Roundup. Perhaps still a little on the thin side this week as silly season draws to a close but you’ll still find worthwhile stuff on the Russia-Georgia conflict, Climate Change, Middle East negotiations from the negotiators [...]

I did a few pro-Mansfield buttons yesterday, and Tom Pegg from the Local Paper - the Chad - has demanded one of Richard Bacon, who is now a presenter on Radio 5.

Since I found a good Creative Commons photo of Richard Bacon on Flick-r (courtesy James Cridland), here you go, Tom:

The only fly in the ointment will be if he detests Mansfield. If so, we’ll set Alan Meale MP on him.