Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from February 2, 2025

England's National Health Service: ‘It's Incredibly Embarassing’

“The surgeon and former Labour health minister found England had spent almost £37bn less than peer countries on health assets and infrastructure since the 2010s. Twenty per cent of the NHS estate predates the founding of the service more than 75 years ago, and some of NUH’s facilities date back to the Victorian era .” In 2022 healthcare expenditure in Germany and France was equivalent to 12.6% and 11.9%, respectively. In 2023, the UK spent 8.9% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on public healthcare.  This is a decrease from 2020 and 2021, when the UK spent 10.1% of its GDP on healthcare.
Post a Comment
Read more

Forgotten Swedes Found a Scapegoat

“The system abandoned him long before he picked up a gun. But he did not turn his anger toward those who had cast him aside. He turned it toward those who looked different, spoke differently, those who had come seeking refuge in a country that had once promised safety The political class, unwilling to face the deeper economic roots of social decay, has allowed xenophobia to become the easy answer .”
Post a Comment
Read more

Britain’s Recent Riots Revisited

A reply to Richard Seymour “ The word ‘austerity’ does not appear in Seymour’s piece; ‘region’ features only once, even though practically all the riots took place in areas hit hard by Cameron’s cutbacks, many of them counted among the poorest in Northen Europe. If a Korschian outlook can lapse into lazy apologism, there is also a species of anti-economism which risks obscuring the social terrain and thereby relinquishing the prospect of changing it. To understand the flammable situation at which the pyromaniac far right has taken aim, we need less mass psychology and more political economy . “In focussing on the ‘perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity’, for instance, Seymour neglects how economic factors underpin the peculiarly schizoid status of immigration in British public life. “Today’s neo-Powellism is an attempt to rhetorically manage and contain this contradiction at the heart of British financialization: an economy dependent on cheap labour for its meagre growth r...
Post a Comment
Read more

Germany's Reckoning With Its Past is No Longer a Model

“[O]ver time, Holocaust memory in Germany progressively transformed into a policy of unconditional support for Israel. What was once an example of historical reckoning has become a framework that, in my view, contributes to the erasure of critical perspectives and enables actions that contradict the very principles of justice and accountability that this memory was meant to uphold. “The focus on the Holocaust, while important, has overshadowed or minimized the memory of colonialism, creating a tension that became more apparent after October 7. “This ‘aporetic’ memory politics is the premise for ignoring the colonial dimension of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. In the German and Western European discourse, Netanyahu is depicted as the representative of the Jews as victims. Therefore, Palestinians are not a dispossessed people, but a new embodiment of antisemitism. “Germany is today complicit in the genocide in Gaza, just like France, Italy, and the UK. However, Germany’s ...
Post a Comment
Read more