The Guardian view on public service queues: a grim symbol of chronic underinvestment | Editorial

Conservatives fretting about “the nanny state” have failed to see people’s desperate need for compassionate government

The capacity to form an orderly queue is sometimes held up as an admirable quality of the British character, perhaps from historical association with rationing and stoical patience in wartime. But the queue is also an emblem of failure. A famous political advert that helped propel Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 depicted a line of people waiting to be seen by an unemployment office under the slogan “Labour isn’t working”. Now it is Conservative government that plainly isn’t working, and the queue is for public services. Many people were appalled, but perhaps not surprised, by scenes of queues that lasted three days this week as would-be patients tried to register at a new NHS dental surgery in Bristol.

On Wednesday, Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, announced an emergency funding package, offering dentists £50 for every new NHS patient taken on. The British Dental Association dismisses this as “rearranging the deckchairs”. Labour, which identified dentistry as an area of critical concern at the start of the year, promises a more substantial expansion of provision.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/z4NMuqm

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tadej Pogacar completes emphatic debut victory at the Giro d’Italia

Dominant Pogacar wins by biggest margin since 1965 Tim Merlier outsprints Jonathan Milan to take final stage Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar emphatically won the Giro d’Italia on his debut when he retained his unassailable overall lead after the 21st and final stage in Rome on Sunday, winning by the biggest overall margin since 1965. The 25-year-old UAE Team Emirates rider had been in the leader’s pink jersey since winning stage two, the first of his six stage successes, and finished the ceremonial 125km flat run on Sunday safely in the bunch as Tim Merlier won the stage. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/fYFnoe3
Read more

Two years after Buffalo mass shooting, an art exhibit focuses on the victims

A few months after 14 May 2022, a curator sought out three local artists. The resulting exhibition, Before and After Again, is thought to be the first of its kind Two years ago, a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, and opened fire in a grocery store in the city’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhood, killing 10 people and injuring three. Though the Tops Friendly Markets where the racist mass shooting took place has been remodeled, and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on 14 May 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is forever changed. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mqu1LFv
Read more

£1 Thursdays review – nightclubbing, sex talk and big decisions

Finborough theatre, London A mix of sweet observations about female friendship and cheeky brazenness about sex, Kat Rose-Martin’s play finds two young women at a crossroads in their lives In the cold air outside a sticky nightclub in Bradford, 17-year-olds Stacey and Jen are at a crossroads. In one direction lies the world they know: the family stress, the looming exams, the pumping pop beats at the club where they’ll reliably pull boys from school. In the other direction lies an uncertain path, and questions of who they are apart from one another, whether they could be the first in their families to go to university, and how to afford it if they do. Constantly on their minds, while they’re drunkenly dancing the nights away, is where they’ll end up, and what to do if they are the ones left behind. Thoughtful if not revelatory, £1 Thursdays covers an uneasy period of big decisions in these characters’ lives, as the gap between them widens. Monique Ashe-Palmer (Six) is ebullient as St
Read more