Author Archives: Sid Cumberland

Sid Cumberland

Opinion: It wasn’t in anybody’s manifesto, was it?

By Sid Cumberland | Wed 28th March 2012 - 12:25 pm

I haven’t read the Health and Social Care Bill (soon to be Act). More pages than a Harry Potter novel, and qualified by a thousand amendments, I’m not sure reading it would throw much light on my darkness. However, there are aspects of the bill I am aware of.

I know, for instance, that the NHS Bill was in no one’s manifesto, and I know there wasn’t the slightest hint of its major elements in the coalition agreement. The government has absolutely no mandate for NHS reform at all. It all seemed so clear … and then I made a foolish …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 23 Comments
Sid Cumberland

Opinion: How democratic are doctor politicians?

By Sid Cumberland | Mon 26th March 2012 - 3:24 pm

A group of 240 doctors recently threatened to stand against leading members of the government in the next election, in protest at the NHS Bill (Now the Health and Social Care Act). They are ‘shocked at the failure of the democratic process and the facilitating role played by the Liberal Democrats in the passage of this bill’. They follow the example of Richard Taylor MP, a consultant physician who won his Wyre Forest seat from a junior health minister in 2001, campaigning against the closure of the …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 62 Comments
Sid Cumberland

Has our police force been ‘completely transformed’ by the Lawrence case?

By Sid Cumberland | Fri 6th January 2012 - 1:15 pm
Like the summer riots, the Stephen Lawrence case provides us with yet another attitudinal Rorschach test; we screw our eyes up, peer closely, and conclude that what we have seen is just what we expected. At least, that’s my view, after hearing Paul Dacre’s astonishing self-congratulation on Tuesday.

For him, the verdict was ‘a glorious day’ for the Lawrences, the police, British justice, politicians, British newspapers (especially, of course, the Daily Mail, without whose ‘relentless campaigning’ none of this would have happened).

For me, it was a good day; but it was also a reminder of

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , and | 3 Comments
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