Tag Archives: England

Shocking delays at English A&E departments are endangering lives

Making them wait and wait: This was a corridor in an English hospital’s Accident & Emergency department in early 2017 – and now the situation is worse.

You know how Tory prime ministers from David Cameron onwards have loved to tell us their increasingly-privatised English health system is so much better than those in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland?

(But most particularly Wales?)

Well, it turns out NHS England hasn’t been that good after all – and is worsening at an alarming rate.

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Here’s The Guardian:

A record 420,000 patients had to wait more than 12 hours in A&E last year, analysis has shown.

The latest NHS England figures revealed a 20% increase on 2022 in people facing lengthy delays after a decision to admit them to hospital from the emergency department.

In 2023, 419,560 people – or one in 15 A&E patients – faced “trolley waits” of 12 hours or more, according to the Liberal Democrats, who compiled the analysis. It marks by far the highest number since records began in 2011, and amounts to an average of 1,150 patients a day.

The party also pointed to a postcode lottery, with almost half of patients of some trusts, such as the North Middlesex university hospital trust, waiting more than half a day.

Significant waits in A&E have been linked to excess deaths and increased harm to patients, as their condition could deteriorate before they are admitted or given a bed on a ward.

The Department of Health and Social Care has claimed it is already cutting A&E waits and ambulance response times – but if its figures are as disappointing as its claimed increase in hospital beds, then the improvement will be nowhere near enough.

A spokesperson told the Graun that the DHSE was “on track” to deliver an extra 5,000 permanently-staffed hospital beds this winter. But since the Tories took over NHS England in 2010, they have taken out of active service 17,767 beds.

That’s the problem, right there. If there aren’t enough permanent staff to bring the full, nearly 18,000, beds back on line, that’s because the Tories have been discouraging people from training with exorbitant fees, or discouraging them from staying with contemptuous pay offers.

And what about this, from the same newspaper, a couple of months ago?

NHS bosses are using misleading figures to hide dangerously poor performance by A&E units in England against the four-hour treatment target, emergency department doctors claim.

Some A&Es treat and admit, transfer or discharge as few as one in three patients within four hours, although the NHS constitution says they should deal with 95% of arrivals within that timeframe.

How well or poorly A&Es are doing in meeting the 95% target is not in the public domain because the data that NHS England publishes is for NHS trusts overall, not individual hospitals.

That means official figures are an aggregate of performance at sometimes two A&Es run by the same trust or include data for any walk-in centres, minor injuries units or urgent treatment centres that a trust also operates. Forty-eight trusts have two A&Es and many also run at least one of the latter.

So the DHSE has been lying to us about the performance of individual A&E units in England.

And then successive prime ministers have spouted DHSE figures at us during PMQs every Wednesday.

Is it too much to ask for a breakdown of performance at every individual A&E unit in England – to ascertain the genuine facts about them? In an election year, I fear it may be.

Source: Record 420,000 patients in England had ‘more than 12 hour wait’ in A&E last year | NHS | The Guardian


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Health inequalities ‘caused a million early deaths in England in last decade’

Flowers for the dead: this was for victims of the DWP-led cull of sick and disabled people – just a fraction of the million who died between 2011 and 2019.

The National Health Service – and the government – are supposed to ensure that everybody gets the same level of health care, everywhere in the UK, right?

Explain this:

More than 1 million people in England died prematurely in the decade after 2011 owing to a combination of poverty, austerity and Covid, according to “shocking” research by one of the UK’s leading public health experts.

The figures are revealed in a study by the Institute of Health Equity at University College London led by Sir Michael Marmot. They demonstrate the extent to which stark economic and social inequalities are leading to poorer people dying early from cancer, heart problems and other diseases.

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Using Office for National Statistics figures, the report’s author, Prof Peter Goldblatt, looked at the life expectancy of people across England who do not live in the wealthiest 10% of areas.

The report, titled Health Inequalities, Lives Cut Short, found that between 2011 and 2019, 1,062,334 people died earlier than they would have done if they lived in areas where the richest 10% of the population reside. A further 151,615 premature deaths were recorded in 2020, although this number was higher than expected because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This next part is particularly disturbing:

Of these deaths, Goldblatt directly attributed 148,000 to austerity measures implemented by the coalition government from 2010 by comparing them with levels seen earlier.

In other words, the Coalition Conservative/Liberal Democrat government of 2010-15 is directly responsible for the deaths of 148,000 people.

When are the arrests going to happen? When will the prosecutions and imprisonments take place?

Yeah, that’s right – they won’t.

And the reason they won’t is that the current UK government is the most corrupt in the history of the nation.

Source: Health inequalities ‘caused 1m early deaths in England in last decade’ | Inequality | The Guardian


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More than 1,000 English homes are flooded – because of Tory complacency?

Stormy weather: much of northern Europe has been battered by storms and heavy rainfall.

More than 1,000 homes in England have been flooded – and it could be argued that this is because the Conservative government doesn’t care about damage to your property.

According to the BBC, the flooding follows the arrival in the UK of Storm Henk, and a week of heavy rainfall.

At the time of writing there are more than 250 flood warnings and 275 flood alerts in place across England.

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UK prime minister “Rishi-Washy” Sunak defied reality by saying people should be reassured by the response to flooding in badly hit areas.

He said: “Hundreds of high volume pumps are in practice right now making a difference, and it is important that people follow the advice that has been given in local areas where there are flood warnings that have been given.”

He added: “The Environment Agency have people on the ground everywhere, and absolutely recognise the urgency of what is happening and they are responding appropriately and with all due haste.”

But he was criticised by the Liberal Democrats, who said he should be “meeting people affected by this annual carnage, then he might do something about it”.

“Annual carnage” just about sums it up. And the Liberal Democrats can’t complain because they did nothing about it when they were in a coalition government with the Tories.

This Site has been reporting on the more-or-less annual floods since 2012 (Vox Political was established in December 2011, so you can see that this is a regular problem that successive governments have done nothing to end).

It is government that is at fault, also – for allowing housing estates to be built on flood plains, in full knowledge that they will flood, filling homes with water and rendering residents’ belongings unusable, and for failing to install appropriate flood defences on rivers and other waterways.

The number of existing flood defences that are in disrepair has tripled since 2018. Who knows what the figure since 2012 might be?

This year there is the added issue of raw sewage that the government has allowed its privatised water companies to pump directly into rivers.

With high rainfall, these firms are unable to process drainwater properly and pumps much of it directly into the rivers, meaning more sewage is likely to have got into the environment and possibly – through flooding – into people’s homes.

Or am I mistaken about that?

Feargal Sharkey suggests I’m not:

The floods have affected cities, towns and villages across England. Take a look at some of the havoc that has been wreaked by Tory greed and incompetence:


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Interest rates stay high so you’ll carry on paying more for less

The Bank of England: it’s keeping prices high.

Any questions?

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These new inflation figures should be awkward for the Tories

Inflation has dropped to 6.8 per cent – but this is not an endorsement of Conservative government policy.

The Tories have spent months claiming that they cannot pay the money they deserve to public sector workers (including the junior doctors who were on strike over the weekend) because it would worse inflation – but today’s fall comes alongside an increase in average pay.

Looking at the small print, we see that none of this pay rise has gone to people who actually need it; instead it has further fattened the bloated bank accounts of high-paid company executives and other friends of the Conservative government.

But that doesn’t matter; wages have increased and inflation still came down. The Tory lie has been exposed as – in the language of Peter Stefanovic – bollocks:

The clip includes a few other interesting take-outs:

Workers in the UK are £11,000 a year worse-off.

2022 was the worst year for wage growth in almost half a century.

Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008.

So it is impossible for public sector wages – or any other wages paid to employees – to have had anything to do with inflation figures.

In fact, according to the extremely non-socialist International Monetary Fund, the largest contributor to Europe’s inflation over the past two years was rising corporate profits cause by companies increasing their prices by more than the costs of imported energy. Look at your own energy bill over the past few years and compare the increases with the costs of energy and you will see the factual accuracy in this.

Increases in private sector wages may increase the price of goods – because companies would factor those rises into their prices.

There is evidence of this in the new figures: strip away the cuts in energy and food costs and core inflation is one per cent higher.

But that doesn’t happen in the public sector where, for example, healthcare is free at the point of use.

And the public sector labour force is only 17 per cent of the total workforce, meaning its pay increases have a lower effect than anything happening with the 83 per cent in the private sector.

Of course, prices are still increasing, meaning that people will blame that on increasing wages and demand another interest rate rise from the Bank of England to curb spending by the little people (you and me, as opposed to the big bosses who have actually received the pay boosts).

I struggle to grasp the point of such a move as it is more likely to cause a recession than stabilise the economy. The precipitous rise in interest rates set by the Bank has not affected inflation at all, and conventional wisdom suggests we will not see the result until 18 months after the first one was imposed. With inflation already coming down of its own accord – as was widely predicted by people like economist Richard Murphy – this could be disastrous.

So when the Tories come out with outrageous nonsense like this…

… I am glad to see responses that put it into the proper perspective, like this:

Sadly, the message is unlikely to get through to the general public, thanks to the biased priorities of our right-wing social media platforms. Look at the number of views the Tory propaganda has received, in comparison with those collected by Clare’s response.

Finally: at least someone out there can laugh about it. Read this:

Sadly for the story, even though the Royals are technically working in the public sector, they are right at the top of it, so their pay rise comes in as equivalent to those of the fatcat company execs.

Still, I don’t see anyone talking about the inflationary effect of this massive increase, so it adds to the evidence that public sector pay does not affect inflation and the Tories have been feeding us bullsh*t since the public sector strikes started, if not before.

Try to remember this amid the barrage of inadequate and misleading reporting by the BBC and the rest of the Tory media.


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Squirm, Barclay! Health sec skewered over delay in clearing legionella-hit prison barge

The denial machine: puppet Steve Barclay (front) doesn’t have a brain of his own and can only repeat the nonsense he’s been told by Tory HQ, with his boss Rishi Sunak behind him, pulling his strings.

The absolute state of this.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay squirms as the BBC’s Sally Nugent points out that the Home Office was informed on August 7 that the prison barge for asylum-seekers, Bibby Stockholm, was infected with legionella.

People were sent on board the following day. It wasn’t until August 10 that the decision was made to clear the vessel of human inhabitants and decontaminate it.

Don’t you love the nervous tic that gives Barclay away – his repetition of the word “precaution” or “precautionary”. It’s likely to have been part of a speech he’d been told to rehearse beforehand, and when he was pressed on the subject he had nothing else to say.

As Ms Nugent said, he’s the Health Secretary; he should know how dangerous legionella is and how important it is to act urgently if it is discovered.

Ms Nugent has also won praise after she “eviscerated” the Tory Health Secretary for lying about waiting lists:

Metro published the full exchange:

The politician replied: ‘What really matters is patients waiting for treatment. Commitment to getting waiting times down. We’re making big progress on the longest waits. In England we’ve virtually eliminated waits of over 18 months, whereas in Wales for example, there’s over 70,000 waiting more than 18 months.

‘In fact, many of your listeners will be surprised to learn that there’s four times as many patients waiting over a year for treatment in Wales compared to in England, and that’s despite Keir Starmer saying that Wales is the blueprint for what we would do in England.’

However, as the politician was finishing what he was saying, Sally interjected, stressing that the figures comparing waiting times in England and Wales required further context.

‘Can I just stop you there, because actually those… – can I please just stop you there for a moment, because the figures are actually collated in a different way, so that’s not particularly relevant. We also know that long waiting times are falling every month in Wales. They’ve actually more than halved in the last year,’ she stated.

However, the MP disagreed, adding: ‘No, people waiting more than 18 months in Wales is over 70,000 there. There’s over 30,000 waiting more than two years.’

Yet again, Sally pointed out the difference in the statistics’ relevance, telling the programme’s guest and their viewers: ‘They include more referrals in their statistics than England does, so they’re not really comparable figures, are they?’

The news provider also published reactions from the social media, with one person describing the interview as a “metaphorical evisceration” and another saying Ms Nugent “skewered him”.

But you wouldn’t know that from the propaganda clip put out by the Conservatives’ press office, that just regurgitates the lies and cuts out all of Ms Nugent’s contradictions – her only comment in the Tory clip is, “Yes”. Take a look if you can stomach it:

What a rotten liar.

And how sad that there are people who will swallow this pigswill gratefully.


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Tory NHS fail: they want to scrap most cancer treatment targets

Steve Barclay: if there is a problem with cancer in the English NHS, he is the tumour that needs to be removed.

How will Rishi Sunak be able to complain about the Welsh NHS now?

And is this just a shabby bid to boost private cancer treatments?

The Tory government reckons it is being advised by clinicians and cancer charities to scrap six out of nine treatment targets – but two such charities have objected to the plan, just in the BBC’s article announcing it!

The head of the Radiotherapy UK charity said she is “deeply worried”.

Pat Price, who is also an oncologist and visiting professor at Imperial College London, said… “the clear and simple truth is that we are not investing enough in cancer treatment capacity”.

Naser Turabi, Cancer Research UK’s director of evidence and implementation, said… “Despite the best efforts of NHS staff, it’s incredibly worrying that cancer waiting times in England are once again amongst the worst on record.”

He blamed the missed targets on “years of underinvestment” by the government and called for more cancer staff and a clear strategy.

“Without bold action, more people will miss out on lifesaving services,” he said.

We have seen recently that restrictions on NHS services – such as those that are likely to be imposed if treatment targets are scrapped – tend to “nudge”* people into taking private treatment, even if they can’t afford it.

Personally, This Writer thinks Barclay is simply putting more patients between a rock and a hard place: what difference is there between waiting for help that may not arrive in time and putting up with a private ‘specialist’ dancing around you, waving his beads and rattles?

*Remember the Tory “nudge unit” that was attached to 10 Downing Street under David Cameron before it was privatised, and recommended ways of… shall we say “persuading”?… people to do things they would not consider in the normal scheme of things? Clearly, making it impossible for patients to get life-saving treatment in time is a way of “persuading” people to fork out extra cash for private treatment that they would not otherwise have considered and should not need.


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Is the Bank of England trying to force the UK into austerity? Why?

The Bank of England: don’t believe its claims about inflation.

If the Bank is trying to force the government into austerity by selling government debt at a loss, isn’t that political interference?

And isn’t anyone – of any political organisation – going to ask the obvious questions about it?


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Thornberry squirms when asked if Bank of England’s anti-inflation ideas are any good

Emily Thornberry: in this image, she’s making a gesture that, no doubt, she would like to make to whoever asked her to defend the Bank of England, its governor, and its interest rate rise.

Don’t have any sympathy for Emily Thornberry while you watch the clip below; she knows the situation very well and she could always quit if she had the required principles.

She knows that raising interest rates won’t bring inflation down – in fact, it is likely to prop inflation up instead.

She knows raising interest rates won’t ease the bureaucratic costs caused by Brexit, or stop profiteering by energy companies or firms in food supply chains.

And she knows that all businesses will just add the extra costs of higher interest rates into their bills, making consumers – you and me – foot the bill.

Some of them will go bust as a result, because people will decide not to pay their inflated prices, and this is likely to tip the UK into recession.

That, of course, is the last thing the UK needs right now.

All of this is known by Emily Thornberry, but she also knows that Labour policy is to agree that the neoliberal Tories and the neoliberal Bank of England are doing the right thing, even though she also knows that they really aren’t.

So we get to see performances like this:

Cracks are starting to show in the Labour Party’s right-wing facade.


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Up goes the interest rate – down goes the economy

The Bank of England: its interest rate rise will not reduce inflation but increase it.

The Bank of England has raised the UK’s base rate of interest on money lent by financial organisations to five per cent, in line with expectations after the government failed to bring down inflation.

The inflation rate remained at 8.7 per cent in May, due to Brexit, profiteering by firms including energy companies and businesses in food supply chains, and… interest rate rises that have pushed up the cost of money.

The higher interest rate is intended to give mortgage-holders less to spend – but in fact it means we all have less because businesses now factor interest rate rises into the prices they charge us.

It means that, in order to stop prices from rising, the Bank of England has pushed prices even further up.

The very rich will be able to cope with it, of course; they have more money in the first place. And they must have become rich somehow, meaning they’ll be able to make more money anyway.

(They’re probably the people who’ve factored the interest rate rise into their prices and will therefore take more money from us, especially if they have a share in energy firms, water companies or mortgage lenders).

Smaller businesses will go to the wall, of course. They aren’t selling items that are absolutely essential and in a country where wages have been artificially restricted to 2005 (or even turn-of-the-century) levels, people will cut non-essentials out of their spending.

The result: recession. And it’s a recession that could have been avoided if we didn’t have a gang of lunatic idiots running the nation’s finances.


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