The Critical Commentator

  Some days ago a woman's body was found in the River Wyre, near the village of St Michael's on Wyre, Lancashire and the family of the lady in question asked for their privacy to be respected. It was not. ...The family singled out ITV and Sky News which was the first to interview Ansell, [the partner of the dead lady] for making contact with them directly on Sunday night after police confirmed a body had been found, adding they had asked for privacy. "They again have taken it upon themselves to run stories about us to sell papers and increase their own profits," the statement said. "It is shameful they have acted in this way. Leave us alone now. Do the press and other media channels and so-called professionals not know when to stop? These are our lives and our children's lives... (Robin Vinter, Jamie Grierson, Josh Halliday, The Guardian, 2023) Beside the mainstream media there was the truly awful explosion of  Social Media intrusion. ... For 23 days, St Mich...

  La falaise, Fecamp, France Claude Monet (1840-1926) Photo Credit: Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums [CC BY-NC] To ease the burden on its hospitals, France, which has markedly higher levels of taxation to fund its public services than the UK, has invested heavily over the past decade in both outpatient clinics and what is known as "home hospitalisation": more than 7% of all patients formally admitted to hospital are now cared for at home, against 2% in 2006... In general, however, France's healthcare problems are less severe than those facing the NHS. According to OECD figures, France has 5.7 beds per 1,000 people compared to the UK's 2.4 and an OECD average of five... In France the waiting time for a hip replacement averages three to four months, while in England about 400,000 people are waiting more than 52 weeks for treatments such as hip or knee replacements. Patients with heart conditions are seen by a specialist within 28 days in Paris, with 70 the longest wait...

  The bosses of Britain's biggest companies will have made more money this year by 2pm today [Jan 5] than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year, according to analysis of pay gaps at a time of widespread strike action and a cost of living crisis. The High Pay Centre, a think tank that campaigns for fairer pay for workers, says that by early this afternoon - the third working day of the year - a FTSE 100 chief executive will have been paid more than a UK worker's annual salary, based on median average remuneration figures for both groups. FTSE 100 chief executives are paid £3.4m on average, which works out at 103 times the £33,000 average salary for full-time UK workers, according to Office for National Statistic figures. For He Had Great Possessions Amy Julia Drucker (1873-1951) Photo Credit: Ben Uri Collection [CC BY -NC-ND] The figures highlight how executive pay has increased dramatically following a dip during the pandemic, while ordinary workers are struggling ...

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 Conserv...

  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...

French Politicians, Royalist and Republican Flora Macdonald Reid (1860-1945) Photo Credit: Rochdale Arts & Heritage Service [CC BY-NC]   David Dimbleby has criticised the BBC for refusing to tackle sensitive topics relating to the royal family and questioned why Buckingham Palace is able to exert such control over the corporation. Dimbleby, for decades the face of the BBC at state events, said the broadcaster, "would not go near things like the power that the palace has to change taxation legislation" or whether it was right for the Duchy of Cornwall not to pay capital gains tax. "All those issues are never touched by the BBC because I think they feel their viewers will not like it - a visceral feeling," he told the Henley Literary Festival. "I think it is wrong and these things should be properly examined." ... Dimbleby ... said that he had been surprised to find the "degree of control that Buckingham Palace has over the image of the royal family...