The Critical Commentator

Scanda l Edgar Bundy (1862-1922) Photo Credit: Grundy Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-SA]    Supporters of the House of Lords often argue it is a chamber of all the talents, with a breadth and depth of expertise far beyond the Commons. But the Tory group in the Lords, as with the other parties, is heavily dominated by those with political connections. There are almost 100 Conservative ex-MPs, booted into what many speak of as a "retirement home" where they are guaranteed a £300-plus daily allowance for turning up, as well as 34 former special advisors and former party officials. More than half are politically connected, about  20% are hereditary peers and the remaining group is heavily skewed towards financiers and thinktanks. There are 184 non-party crossbenchers, many proposed by the House of Lords Appointments Commission, but they make up less than a quarter of the Lords. There are the 25 bishops - despite England and Wales being no longer majority Christian nations. One Conservativ

  An English Hospital Nurse in Full Uniform unknown artist Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] Ahead of an unprecedented week of strike action involving both nurses and ambulance workers, Mr Barclay [The Health Secretary] and the government continue to hide behind the fiction that the recommendation of the independent NHS pay review body - which suggested a pay increase of around 4% for nurses - must be the last word on the matter. "Ultimately, independent bodies are there for a reason," suggested the health secretary last week. "to take the politics out of this kind of stuff." As Mr Barclay will know, this is disingenuous nonsense. "Politics" - specifically the politics of austerity - led the current chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to reject a pay rise recommendation from the review body in 2014 as "unaffordable". Between 2010 and 2017, nurses' average earnings fell by 1.2% a year in real terms. This was not down to supposedly apoliti

  The Sick Child Edvard Munch ( 1863-1944) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] An obtuse government refuses to discuss pay as 100,000 nurses strike tomorrow in 53 English NHS organisations... Ambulance drivers follow next week - the most severe threat of all the strikes, as this struggling service already fails to reach people experiencing heart attacks and strokes. ... From now on, expect all such events to be blamed on strikes rather than the "decade of neglect" outlined in Monday's King's Fund report into NHS dilapidations caused by years of underfunding...  Everyone in the NHS I speak to echoes the certainty of Alastair Mclellan, the editor of the Health Service Journal, that "people have died needlessly due to the state of the NHS", but expect front pages about the first named case the Tory press can blame on the strikes. One human case is worth a welter of statistics... More nurses have quit this year than ever before, says the RCN [Royal College of Nursi