Darzi’s remedy for the NHS

Lord Darzi’s plan for the next 10 years of the National Health Service got a mixed reaction last week. Darzi suggested that hospitals and GPs be rated on measures ranging from clinical success rates to cleanliness and given extra funding according to their results. Trusts would publish “quality accounts”, which patients would use to choose where to receive treatment, and 270 “super surgeries” or polyclinics would open in England.

For Polly Toynbee in The Guardian it was “just what the doctor ordered”. Janet Daley in The Daily Telegraph was keen on the benefits of the polyclinics for workers. At the moment getting a routine blood test involved three half-days off work shut-tling between GP and hospital, she said. At a polyclinic you would “walk in between 8am and 8pm and have the whole procedure done on the spot”.

But writing in the Daily Mail Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist, said Darzi had ignored the basic problem of the NHS: that the “state healthcare monopoly can never meet the needs of the British people in the 21st century” because nobody would pay more tax to fund a better service.

He wanted everyone to be given a health insurance voucher to buy treatment wherever they wished.

Call to cut some flab from the BBC

As the National Health Service celebrated 60 years the Daily Mail turned its fire on another British institution – the BBC. “The BBC cannot go on as it is,” wrote Antony Jay, creator of Yes, Minister. “There is no longer a case for taking £4 billion a year from the public to produce programmes they do not want or can obtain free elsewhere.” He called for a drastic reduction in the corporation’s output. “I would suggest this is done by forcing the BBC to concentrate solely on one mainstream terrestrial channel and one radio station.”

Sassenachs fall for the ‘stroppy Scot’

From “stroppy Scot” to national hero, last week we almost forgave our best British tennis player for his surly petulance – and quipping “anyone but England” when asked which football team he’d support in the World Cup. Andy Murray’s gladiatorial five-set fightback against Frenchman Richard Gasquet (5-7, 3-6, 7-6, 6-2, 6-4) wowed Roger Alton in The Spectator: “stunning, thrilling, epic, heart-pumping . . .” he wrote, “the great Scot has turned himself into a thorough crowd pleaser”. Liz Hunt in The Daily Telegraph was less enamoured. “Too aggressive, too surly, too focused, too hairy and utterly charmless,” she wrote, of Murray’s “Popeye” biceps-flaunting gesture. However, for Jane Shilling, in The Times, it wasn’t Murray’s attitude, but ours that was the problem. Why did it matter if we found him hard to like? “‘Loser’ is the playground taunt for those who lack the common touch,” she noted. “But maybe it is we, the charm-obsessed mob, who are the real losers.”

Anglicans face up to armageddon

Theo Hobson of The Spectator has no doubt about the outcome of the troubles facing the Anglican Church. “We are witnessing the end times of the Church of England,” he writes.

The church, holding its annual synod this weekend and divided over homosexuality and women bishops, faces what some are calling the greatest crisis since the Reformation. And Hobson says the conservatives have the upper hand. “Why would they want to form a new, breakaway church? They no more want to split from the main Church than new Labour wanted to split from the Labour party in the mid1990s. They want to run it.”

George Walden in The Times says Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is not revealing his true position over homosexuality. “The ethical course can only be to stand up for what we must assume he believes – the full enfranchisement of homosexuals in the church.”

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