Phil Taylor: Labour’s Austerity 3) The party’s £20 billion of NHS “cuts” – as it likes to call them
These savings were desperately needed to make Darling’s books balance. They were put in Labour’s 2010 manifesto.
Phil Taylor: Labour’s Austerity 2) How Darling planned to cut capital spending by more than half
His cuts were so shocking that, in his own Budget speech in June 2010, George Osborne said that there would be no further such reductions.
Phil Taylor: Labour’s Austerity 1) How Brown’s Government planned £94 billion of cuts
As the tenth anniversary of the 2010 election approaches, the author says that Labour’s own austerity record and plans were almost as tough as the Coalition’s.
Phil Taylor: The UN report on Britain’s ‘digital workhouse’ is built on naked misuse of statistics
Professor Philip Alston’s wilfully slanted conclusions have done a disservice both to those genuinely struggling with Universal Credit and those trying to fix it.
Phil Taylor: In its bid for bleakness, Labour’s broadcast is both glib and deceptive
Setting flimsy evidence and distorted statistics to a depressing soundtrack does nothing for their credibility.
Phil Taylor: The rise in rough sleeping has halted at last
The challenge is complex. New factors such as poor EU migrants and increasing drug use are driving it.
Phil Taylor: Fire deaths dropped 28 per cent last year – but don’t expect to hear that number being reported
The Grenfell Tower tragedy was a shocking exception to a trend of improvement in safety. Fire deaths are down below 250 a year, the second lowest on record.
Phil Taylor: The Labour MP going after the Grenfell inquiry judge has questions of her own to answer
Emma Dent Coad was a director of the company that runs Kensington and Chelsea’s council housing stock – with all the legal responsibilities that implies.
Phil Taylor: Much of what you have read about the causes of the Grenfell Tower disaster is unproven – or else plain wrong
Management of the block was not farmed out to some profiteering, Rachmanite landlord. It was run by a body on which tenants themselves were in a majority.
Phil Taylor: Patient satisfaction tells the true story of the Government’s NHS record
It’s no wonder Opposition campaigning on the health service isn’t cutting through when between 87 and 97 per cent of users would recommend it to friends and family.
Phil Taylor: Why we mustn’t have a National Care Service
It would simply replicate all the worst faults of the NHS and create a new set of problems.
Phil Taylor: Hunt is right about a seven day working NHS
This is a straight industrial dispute about pay, and high falutin rhetoric about patient safety, privatisation and all the rest is just that.
Phil Taylor: Integrate emergency services, but don’t try to get firemen to do councils’ work
Fire deaths are only a third of what they were in the 1980s.
Phil Taylor: Enough of the Bevan myth. Let’s hear it for Henry Willink, the Conservative who proposed the NHS
Hagiographies of the post-war Labour Government are misplaced.
Phil Taylor: The lessons from Ealing
Labour has been banging the NHS cuts drum for four years