ShiftingGrounds

The ongoing scandal about horsemeat found in a range of processed and pre-packaged foods has exposed some of the major fault lines in the UK’s food system. These come up periodically in food scares or panics (E-coli, BSE, Salmonella etc).

Today’s speech from Andy Burnham set out One Nation Labour’s alternative to the coalition’s vision of the NHS. Burnham turned the tables on the staple-Tory argument of cost effectiveness, lambasting the coalition’s top-down reforms as being costly and detrimental to both the NHS and patients.

Recently, care minister Norman Lamb gave an interview criticising family and neighbours for failing their elders, forcing them to live dismal and lonely lives.  He called for a “partnership between state and society” to build a “more decent, a less neglectful society”.

At Sundog Pictures, we’re passionately committed to tackling big and controversial topics in an accessible way.  We want to see change.

There is some feature of an economy that means it regulates the way in which goods and services of value move around a market: are exchanged and traded. This immediately presents us with a challenge. There are services of value that are performed every day – sometimes throughout our lives, for which individuals receive nothing.

When I first started writing for Shifting Grounds earlier this year, my first blogpost was on the danger that Andrew Lansley and the Health and Social Care Bill posed to the future of the NHS. Six months on, our most cherished institution is in grave peril.

Jamie Oliver. I probably don’t need to write anything else. Just mentioning his name should be enough to start a lengthy conversation. Or rant. Everyone’s heard of him. Some like to stick an expletive in the middle of his name. Many of us seem to have strong views about him, one way or another.

In 1999, Tony Blair made what was a quite remarkable commitment: to end child poverty in the UK.
It was one of the boldest and most ambitious pledges made during the whole New Labour era. It came after nearly 20 years of rising child poverty rates that saw almost 1 in 3 children living in poverty.

Last week, the government finally managed to push the controversial Health and Social Care Bill through parliament. The bill has provoked the ire of the Labour Party, a large swathe of the Liberal Democrats, a myriad of professional healthcare associations, and most importantly, the general public.

The Coalition are going to set a minimum price on alcohol. A small step in and of itself but emblematic of much more. Particularly for Labour. It had 13 years in office and there was never the inclination to put in place such legislation. Why?
It was drunk on what the free market could deliver. Intoxicated by big business.