This man will say and do anything…and we mean ANYTHING… to save himself. In case you have not seen it, take a look at this: That’s appalling, right? But it is as nothing compared with abandoning all Covid mitigations and thereby throwing the most vulnerable under the bus to save his political skin. Please write […]
When I got Long Covid in March 2020. I was 38 and healthy. If you are anything like I was then, it is hard to understand how bad Long Covid is. I think that we all have an instinct to just… look away. But, please, it is important that you look. My own low-points: early […]
‘Thrown under the bus’ has turned out to be one of the most-needed, most-overused phrases of the last two years. Fishers, farmers, touring musicians, small businesses and our young have all been chucked under the Brexit bus. The NHS has been subject to a sustained crushing from the bus which carries the greedy ambitions of […]
Dear Sheryll Yet another lockdown party at Downing Street has been exposed. I have written to you several times in the past and I have never really got any satisfactory kind of answer as to what your feelings are about the rule-breaking parties that took place at Number 10 last year whilst millions of us […]
Dear Editor, I’m exhausted by the Covid pandemic. I think we all are. The ongoing worry that every little sniffle I get might be Delta or Omicron and that I might pass it on to my household and elderly relatives; the constant mental weighing up of how many people I should safely meet while cases […]
Words matter. Every second around 6,000 tweets are sent worldwide, equating to 500m a day – that’s 200bn tweets of 280 characters every year – you can watch it happening in real time at Internet Live Stats. It’s a lorra words. And 2021 was full of them. 2021 was the year of what was said […]
As a former banker is put in charge of NHS England, Sunak meets US healthcare giants in California, the health and social care bill opens the gates wide for private providers to grab more business and the poor staff are brought to their knees by the mismanagement of Covid, the NHS is under attack like […]
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has asked former teachers to return to schools hit by the Omicron wave. Cornwall-based Jane Stevenson explains why she’s not answering this call from a government that has shown no concern for the health and wellbeing of school staff or the children they teach. I am a qualified science teacher who […]
This would be a powerful piece on any day of publication but coinciding as it does with the anniversary of that law-breaking party in Downing Street and the very day that author Dr Pam Jarvis’s brother died it has additional heft and poignancy. My mother, who died in February, was born into a generation raised […]
Dear West Country Voices, All morning I’ve been reading posts by healthcare professionals who have been working long shifts and going the extra mile for months now. Metaphorically-speaking, they are physically and mentally on their knees, and now in a state of astonishment at learning prime minister Boris Johnson’s new plans at the same time […]
Dear West Country Voices, On June 10, 2016, Central Devon Tory MP Mel Stride wrote to a local newspaper and said about the £350m a week which Boris Johnson had promised the NHS after Brexit: ‘It’s a lie’. Enjoy the animated pigs flying over this misleading whopper’. Now he, all other Tory MPs and in […]
Matt wrote to us because he is profoundly angry over #partygate. He wondered whether he should take a deep breath and temper his outrage. We don’t think he should. He’s at the sharp end. We need to hear his voice. Johnson needs to hear his voice. We are sure you’ll agree. Ed There’s something that […]
I’m sorry to distract you from the kerfuffle over Downing St Christmas parties, and who paid for the redecoration of Boris Johnson’s flat etc, but there is something else which should concern us all. There is a massive crisis in social care in this country. We should all be aware of the possible implications for […]
Most people seem to think that Dido Harding’s test and trace programme (NHST&T but nothing to do with the NHS) is a disaster. I won’t go into the reasons why; you can read some of it in the House of Commons committee report. Instead, let’s just look at the costs. The government allocated a budget […]
This government has a history of bad timing. During Anti-Bullying Week in 2020, news broke that prime minister Boris Johnson had decided to ignore that his home secretary Priti Patel had been found to bully her staff, and not to sack her. Then during Parliament Week in November 2021 he tried to undermine the very […]
Last Christmas, I kept you apartBut the very next day, I partied awayThis year, to save donors from tearsI’ll give them all something special Once bitten and twice shyThat what they say, but it doesn’t applySleaze and corruption, so many storiesBut still you will keep on voting for Tories “Forgive me, forgive me” you all […]
Emma Monk takes a look at the ease with which Covid misinformation is created and spread and at the cognitive dissonance on display. Within days of scientists discovering a new Covid-19 variant, now called ‘Omicron’, the usual anti-science/anti-vax culprits were trying to find ways to cast doubt over it on social media. I made a […]
Social care may well prove to be Alexander Boris de Pfeffel’s Johnson’s Waterloo, and deservedly so. Out of the blue, less than a week before parliament was to vote on the matter, Number 10 tabled a new proposal (New Clause 49 to the Health and Care Bill) on the social care cap. It significantly watered […]
Dear Tobias I am now retired, but I worked in the NHS (as a nurse, then a health visitor) for 28 years, then for a further 20 years in an NHS-funded post in a university, in teaching and research. I have, therefore, seen and worked through very many changes and reorganisations in the NHS: often […]
Right then. The Health and Care Bill. You know about it right? It’s in the Commons on Monday and Tuesday. And it stinks. There is no assault on our country quite like an assault on the NHS. An NHS already on its knees. But that’s what this outrageous government wants to do with its Health […]
As NHS watchers are only too aware, there’s constant wrangling over NHS finances: it’s a bottomless pit; it’s mismanaged; it’s a huge amount; it’s not enough; will never be enough….Where to start with all of this? Let’s take a look… Does the UK spend on healthcare match that of comparable countries? Well, no. Neither as […]
During a BBC interview on 1 October 2021, Boris Johnson added insult to injury by using the phrase: “Never mind life expectancy or cancer outcomes – look at wage growth.” Clearly, the only metric he was interested in was economic. This is deeply offensive to cancer patients and their families, and shows a total lack […]
Dear Editor, I note, with much concern, that health minister Savid Javid has admitted that the Tory manifesto promise of an additional 6000 GPs, will not be met. It is suggested they had not taken retirements into account! I also note with some scepticism, that he appears to have failed to give any indication as […]
Fellow readers have surely heard about the Immensa scandal by now, which has affected us here in the South West. Their Wolverhampton laboratory was sending false negative Covid test results to people on an alarming scale from September to October. There have been lots of graphs and analyses about this scandal in the press: but […]
Here’s a collection of news stories that probably won’t be covered in any detail by the BBC or much of the mainstream media. We’ll try to put a selection together for you at least once a week. There’s no shortage of material with this government! Russian interference in our democracy: Remember the Russia report into […]
When we arrived in Spain recently, we commented that it felt reassuring to be arriving in a ‘grown-up country’. It struck us as soon as we started our drive south, immediately becoming aware of the fact that everyone was wearing face-masks, as required in indoor public places; a high number of people show the same […]
Back in July 2020, we ran a story (which you can read by clicking on the image above) in which, Mike Temple explained how Dr Cathy Gardner, from East Devon, a microbiologist with a doctorate in virology, had recently challenged the government in the High Court for not protecting elderly people in care homes, with […]
We appear to be living in strange times, where Covid-19 is running rife in the UK, yet the government and most of the press appear to have moved on from the pandemic! So I was initially pleased to see that the BBC was highlighting the fact that we are the ‘virus hotspot’ of Europe. Then, […]
The House of Commons and Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee have published their Report, Coronavirus: lessons learned to date, examining the initial UK response to the Covid pandemic. As the Committees report (and I reproduce this to give balance to what follows): Some initiatives were examples of global best practice, but […]
Just over two months since ‘Freedom Day’ and in many places it feels like Covid-19 is a distant memory. Masks have been abandoned, schools are ‘back to normal’, people are crowding back on tubes; meanwhile you still can’t go into a vet’s consulting room with your pet. So where exactly are we with regards to […]