Last year (16/6/23) I blogged about the fact, and dwelt on the ramifications of, the intrusion of private providers into the NHS, not least via general practice. I focused on Operose, formed in 2020 when its American parent company Centene Corporation brought together its UK subsidiaries, The Practice Group and Simply Health. In a nutshell,… Read More »
I have long adopted Chomsky’s formula: capital buys power to make policy. I was interested therefore to read a new report ‘Politics for Sale: Analysing Twenty-One years of UK Political Donations’ by Tom Mills and colleagues. The report draws on official data from the Electoral Commission plus data from Companies House, Wikidata and the Parliamentary… Read More »
In what amounts to a fairly prolific series of blogs condemning the Conservative assault on the English National health Service (NHS), I have bemoaned their clandestine advance planning, their ideological subversion, the calculated politics of austerity from 2010-2020, and the two Health and Social Care Acts of 2012 and 2022 (the first of which left… Read More »
Gordon Brown has much to answer for, but he was not Blair. Politicians’ autobiographies can be expected to comprise a litany of excuses. I’ve just read his My Life, Our Times, in which he seems surprised that he could not accomplish more of what – I think – he genuinely wanted to accomplish. I’m with… Read More »
Another quick explanation of the technical phrase ‘greedy bastards’ might be in order here: in my published writings and my blogs this denotes those transnational (Bauman calls them ‘nomads’) ‘capital monopolists’ (financiers, major shareholders, CEOs of multinational corporations etc) who buy power from leading national politicians to make policy in their own interests, namely, the… Read More »
This is my 400th blog, another milestone of sorts. In the past I’ve ruminated on the pluses and minuses of blogging, but I’ve little new to add, so here’s a quick one on the companion rewards of buying power by donating to the Conservative Party. You get cultural kudos as well as favourable policy shifts.… Read More »
There are times when it is appropriate, even necessary, to be angry and to shout out. I’m presently in a local café trying hard to restrain myself. I have two immediate sources of irritation (and many more lurking around). These are: (1) the reviewers’ reasons for calling for a second set of revisions to our… Read More »
We have written a paper on the salience of ‘muckraking sociology’ in the era of COVID which has (1) been rejected by a mainstream sociology journal, in part because it apparently doesn’t publish ‘polemical pieces’, and (2) returned to us with a request for a second set of revisions by a specialist health sociology journal,… Read More »
The issue of the legitimacy or otherwise of lobbying government has arisen once more with Cameron’s championing of Greensill Capital. As the ‘crisis’ unfolds, new information is forthcoming daily, so this blog will inevitably be somewhat time-bound. But the issue is indeed critical in that it reflects what C W Mills called the ‘higher immorality’… Read More »
The Queen’s position in various ‘rich lists’ may have slipped of late but she – and the monarchy more generally – remain exceptionally wealthy. In this contribution to my ‘greedy bastards’ series I draw on recent research into ‘The Firm’ published in Sociological Review and entitled ‘The Corporate power of the British monarchy: capital(ism), wealth… Read More »