Blog
Right to Religion in a Secular World
By Stanley Brodie QC
The practice of Christianity in the United Kingdom is one of the cornerstones of our society. Its triumph is that it has created the tolerant framework within which other religions may flourish and be practised. Humanity needs faith to enable it to cope with the problems of living - and dying. Freedom to practise one's religion is a fundamental right in this country.
The Best and Worst Times for the NHS
The Lansley Bill may not be perfect, but it recognises what the direction of travel must be: towards a mixed market solution. If the health service is to catch up with the systems we now envy, it's time to move, says Tony Hockley, author of A Premium on Patients: Funding the Future of the NHS.
Now is a very bad time to embark on major reform of the NHS. Sadly there is also no better time ahead. Delay will only make the need more urgent.
The years of plenty for the NHS are behind us, and the price must now be paid for the failure to combine a once-in-a-lifetime NHS funding surge with essential health system reform.
Since the 1980s the new direction of travel for the NHS has been clear: towards a mixed market that would see it rejoin the mainstream of health systems across the developed world. In an era of fiscal austerity, rising possibilities for healthcare, and longer-living and better-informed citizens, the flexibility and honesty of any health system will be crucial to its success. The NHS scores poorly on both counts. A quarter century on from the Griffiths “management reforms”, the English health service is still a rigid centralised and politicised bureaucracy. Even now the Health Secretary feels the need to dictate the specifics of what service providers must do in providing care to patients. NHS professionals are reduced to mere functionaries, leading to a steady flow of stories of neglect in the most basic care of vulnerable patients, as real responsibility remains with in Whitehall.
Should The Fate of Abu Qatada Be Determined by European or British Law?
By Stanley Brodie QC, author of The Cost to Justice: Government Policy and the Magistrates Courts
Over ten years ago I and others expressed the belief that the incorporation into our law of the European Convention on Human Rights was neither necessary nor desirable. The existing rights of Englishmen, in accordance with the Common Law, had seemed good enough to protect fundamental rights.
The rights to liberty, a fair trial, freedom of speech, freedom to practise one's religion, the protection of one's life and property, and to equality before the law, have hardly ever been in doubt under our laws. Nor was there any real political or public dissatisfaction which called for the Human Rights Act and the European Convention to be made part of English Law. The HRA was nothing more than a political gambit from the Labour Government designed to give the inaccurate impression to the electorate that it was getting rights it did not already enjoy. At the time we forecast that the Act and the Convention would give rise to uncertainties and frivolous litigation. No one foresaw that Convention rights would be as grotesquely misapplied and misused as they have been.
Social Institutions and the Law of Contract Under Attack
The Treatment of Stephen Hester and Fred Goodwin - Has Populist Politics Gone Too Far?
By John Marenbon, author of Politeia's Populism and Democracy: Politics in the Public Interest
Decent people will have reacted with dismay to the measures recently taken by a populist government against two individual citizens who have the misfortune to be bankers: the stripping of a knighthood from one, ostensibly by a committee of officials, but with the clear encouragement of the three main political parties; the denial to another of his contractually agreed remuneration, supposedly by his own choice but in fact only when government and opposition attitudes had made any other decision impossible. But is this dismay any more than an aesthetic reaction to what, the politicians’ defenders may see, is the necessary ugliness of governing in a mass democracy? It is hardly a tragedy, after all, if a very rich man becomes rather less rich than he had expected, or someone loses a title that it was already hard to use without irony.
What Price for Fiscal Union? Blogpost 30/1/12
This week Europe’s leaders move a step closer to financial union, with plans to centralise budget control for the Eurozone in a new fiscal compact. This means that in future tax and public spending decisions would be finalised centrally. Individual Eurozone parliaments would no longer be sovereign when it comes to tax and spending policy. No prizes for guessing this is a ‘made in Germany’ plan with a little help from the French. If Germany is to pay bail-out bills, its voters want tighter control of budgets in the bail-out countries.
Though the Eurozone leaders have indicated they’ll sign up to the final treaty, will their people support them? The initial signs are that they will not. Working people have taken their battle against budget cuts to the streets, from Athens to Dublin. At Monday’s summit, public transport in Brussels was paralysed by a strike. The Greeks, who have served as guinea pigs for the centrally-set budget, are rebelling. The second bail-out is conditional not just on the stringent terms set centrally, but on Greece agreeing to a Burssels ‘budget commissioner’ to run its troubled finances. But Greek Ministers are warning that sovereignty is a red line not to be crossed. They refuse to be told by someone else how to spend their own money.
