Day: July 4, 2023

Deeply loved but wracked by crisis, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) on Wednesday marks 75 years since it was founded as the Western world’s first universal, free health care system.

In a secular age, the NHS is the closest thing Britain has to a national religion — devoutly cherished, with levels of public support higher than the royal family or any other British institution.

It was founded three years after World War II by a pioneering Labour government on the principle that everyone should access top-quality health care funded by general taxation, free at the point of care.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose parents were an NHS doctor and a pharmacist, paid tribute last week as he outlined a 15-year plan aimed at recruiting hundreds of thousands of new health staff.

“For every minute of every day of every one of those 75 years, the NHS has been kept going by the millions of people who’ve worked for it. To them on behalf of a grateful nation, I want to say: thank you,” he said.

“I feel a powerful sense of responsibility to make sure that their legacy endures. And to make sure the NHS is there for our children and grandchildren, just as it was there for us.”

Like Sunak’s parents, immigrant staff were pivotal to the NHS’s early growth, helping to remake the face of Britain itself in the decades after the war.

Its centrality to national life was underscored in a memorable dance sequence featuring NHS staff and patients during the opening of the London Olympics in 2012.

Justin Bieber remixed his hit “Holy” with an NHS choir for Christmas 2020, in a year when the public, clapping on their doorsteps, paid tribute to medics battling the Covid pandemic.

Sickly state

Sunak’s new workforce plan, however, is recognition that the NHS is under unprecedented strain following the pandemic, even though the government spends nearly 12% of its budget on healthcare — by far its single biggest item.

Demoralized doctors and nurses have been striking for better pay, an ageing and unfit population needs ever-more complex treatment, cancers go undiagnosed for lack of scanners, and hospitals are crumbling.

Sumi Manirajan, deputy chair of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee, accused Sunak’s Conservative government of failing to value doctors.

“And what that leads to is doctors leaving the country, going abroad, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and actually it’s the public that loses out,” she told AFP at a protest rally by striking doctors.

“The government [ministers], they may use private health care but the ordinary citizen in the UK uses the NHS, relies on the NHS.”

In a report for the 75th anniversary, the King’s Fund charity compared the health systems of 19 similar countries and found Britain’s in a sickly state.

It cited data showing the UK performed worst in fatality rates for strokes and second worst for heart attacks.

The UK has a “strikingly low number of both nurses and doctors per person compared to its peers” and four times fewer hospital and intensive care beds than Germany, the report said.

But opinion polls show scant support in Britain for radical reform such as switching to a mixed model of funding, with patients paying via insurance for some of their treatment, as is the norm elsewhere.

Fully 93% of more than 3,000 respondents believe the NHS should remain free at the point of care, based on general taxation, according to the annual British Social Attitudes Survey last year.

But the authoritative survey also found a record 51% were dissatisfied with their quality of care, especially with waiting times for appointments to see general practitioners and hospital doctors.

Terminal decline?

Sunak has been resisting the medics’ pay demands as he battles to get soaring UK inflation under control, while insisting his government is investing “record sums” in the NHS.

But the service needs to be modernized via better use of digital technology including artificial intelligence, he said on Friday.

Sunak argued that his workforce plan would make the NHS fit “for decades to come.” But some on the front lines give a far gloomier prognosis.

“Right now, as a functional, universal public service, the NHS is failing,” geriatrics consultant David Oliver wrote in The BMJ, a medical journal.

He warned: “It may not quite be in end-of-life care, or about to have its financial or political life support removed, but without immediate action and longer-term thinking it won’t see its 85th birthday.”
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Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week.

Zuckerberg’s Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as “Threads, an Instagram app”, available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is “expected” this Thursday.

The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run “sanely” irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight.

Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has fired thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a “verified” account.

On the weekend, he limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many.

He said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped “extreme levels” of data to train their models.

But commentators have poured scorn on that idea and marketing experts say he has massively alienated both his user base and the advertisers he needs to get profits rolling.

In another move that shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, would be limited to verified accounts next month.

John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that plenty of people wanted to quit Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given them a technical reason to leave too.

And he added that Musk’s decision to sack thousands of workers meant it had long been expected that the site would become “technically unusable”.

‘Remarkably bad’

Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less reliant on advertising and boost income from subscriptions.

Yet he chose advertising specialist Linda Yaccarino as his chief executive recently, and she has spoken of going into “hand-to-hand combat” to win back advertisers.

“How do you tell Twitter advertisers that your most engaged free users potentially will never see their ads because of data caps on their usage,” tweeted Justin Taylor, a former marketing executive at Twitter.

Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, said the weekend’s chaos had been “remarkably bad” for both users and advertisers.

“Advertisers depend on reach and engagement yet Twitter is currently decimating both,” he told AFP.

He said Twitter had “moved from stable to startup” and Yaccarino, who remained silent over the weekend, would struggle to restore its credibility, leaving the door open to Twitter’s rivals to suck up any cash from advertisers.

‘Open secret’

The technical reasons Musk gave for limiting the views of users immediately brought a backlash.

Many social media users speculated that Musk had simply failed to pay the bill for his servers.

French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI firms were more likely to train their models on books and media articles than social network content, which “is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes and lacking in context”.

Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter’s head of security weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that data scraping had caused such performance problems that users needed to be forced to log in “doesn’t pass the sniff test”.

“Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access,” he wrote on the Bluesky social network — another Twitter rival.

“We knew about it. It was fine.”

 
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London’s expansion of a fiercely debated scheme that charges the most polluting vehicles in the city should be blocked, local authorities bringing a legal challenge over the plan argued on Tuesday.

The British capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) levies a $16 daily charge on drivers of non-compliant vehicles, in order to tackle pollution and improve air quality.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan last year decided to extend the scheme to cover almost all of the Greater London area, encompassing an extra five million people in leafier and less-connected outer boroughs, from the end of next month.

The decision has pitched Khan and health campaigners against those who say they cannot tolerate another economic hit at a time of soaring living costs.

Khan, who is running for a third four-year term in the 2024 London mayoral election, has said he is determined to face down his critics.

But his plan, which echoes hundreds of others in place in traffic-choked cities across Europe, came under challenge at London’s High Court on Tuesday as five local authorities argued the decision to expand ULEZ into their areas was unlawful.

London’s transport authority – Transport for London (TfL) – had launched a public consultation on the plan, which said 91% of vehicles driven in outer London would not be affected.

However, the local authorities’ lawyers argue that TfL provided no detail on how it calculated the 91% figure, which they say was fundamental to justifying the expansion.

The local authorities are also challenging Khan’s decision to not extend a 110 million pound scrappage scheme to those living just outside the expanded ULEZ. The scheme subsidises the cost of buying a replacement vehicle for those affected.

Lawyers representing Khan and TfL argued in court filings that TfL provided sufficient information for the consultation and said that extending the scrappage scheme beyond London was rejected in order to target those directly affected.
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U.S. President Joe Biden says he wants every American to have access to high-speed internet. VOA’s Julie Taboh has our story about the United States’ more than $40 billion-dollar investment to expand the service.
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