This is not, in fact, an Irish bailout. It's a bailout of the European (including British) banks that lent a lot of money to the Irish government and Irish banks. If European governments want to bail out their banks, let them do so directly and openly - not via the subterfuge of country bailouts. Then they should face the music: How is it that two years after the great financial crisis, European banks make so-called systemically dangerous sovereign bets, earn nice yields, and then get bailed out again and again?
As she said time and again if even she, with her public profile, reputation for straight talking and acute knowledge of the mechanics of nursing and medicine could not get the treatment she was entitled to, what hope was there for others?"Let the haunting begin", said her widower, as though Cameron were responsible for the deplorable standards of care in the NHS after a decade of having money fire-hosed at it. For that matter why, given her "acute knowledge of the mechanics of nursing and medicine", did it come as a shock to Claire herself that the NHS treats the dying elderly as "bed blockers"?
Surely the essentials of nursing care are what every patient deserves and should get? The NHS should get this right all of the time. Lack of help with eating and drinking. Lack of help with personal hygiene. Lack of help with toileting needs. It is clear from the stories we hear on our Helpline that too many patients are being badly let down. It’s a scandal and it’s outrageous that has been persisting for years. Families are left with a life sentence of grief, with no lessons learnt and the same failings continuing.
There is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure. It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous. We then mistakenly define ourselves as being distinctive from our opponents because we are morally superior rather than because we have different diagnoses and solutions. It is lazy, wrong and politically dangerous.Shame he did not realize that self-evident fact when his mob was in power. What he says has characterised the so-called "progressives" from their Fabian beginnings in the 19th century. They have always been Pharisees and, regrettably, a recantation by someone marginalised for putting party before country is not going to change anything.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘the public interest’, as defined in these discussions, has very little to do with the living, breathing public. The higher valuation given to the highbrow tittle-tattle spouted by Wikileaks in contrast to the lowbrow tittle-tattle spouted by the News of the World is really a question of taste, of preference, even of snobbery (‘our gossip is worthier than yours!’), yet it gets dressed up in the pseudo-democratic lingo of the public interest. What these journalists and editors really mean when they talk about ‘the public interest’ is what they think is good for the public – what they have decreed, in their closed-off meetings using some narrow legalistic definitions, to be edifying and respectable enough for publication.
Crab bucket, thought Glenda as they hurried towards the Night Kitchen. That's how it works. . . Practically everything my Mum ever told me, that's crab bucket. Practically everything I've ever told Juliet, that's crab bucket, too. . . It's so nice and warm on the inside that you forget there's an outside. The worst of it is, the crab that mostly keeps you down is you.
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