Today’s post looks at the news that companies that have built NHS hospitals and associated services over the past six years have recorded pre-tax profits of £831 million, with a further £1 billion expected to be made in the next five years. These companies operate under what is known as the ‘private finance initiative’ (PFI), which can be directly traced back to John Major’s Conservative Government in 1992, and indirectly associated with the socially-defining period of Margaret Thatcher’s reign in the 1980s, a reign which is synonymous with the concept of privatisation. This almost absolute transference of service provision to the private sector, will be the focus of this post as we look at the effect that the initiative is having upon the service that the NHS can provide – assessing where the money that can go to the NHS actually ends up will be revealing, and perhaps is what should have been paraded on the side of that infamous bus . The issue of providing certain services t...

Today’s post focuses upon the battle between the leading energy firms in the U.K. and the Conservative Government who, in a move designed to show the Government’s focus upon the ‘ shared society ’, recently announced that, if successful in the upcoming general election, the party would establish price controls upon energy bills . For this post the focus will be on the details of the Conservative Party’s plans (which admittedly are not detailed at this stage) and what it may mean in the grander scheme of things: if the Tories deliver on the pledge it will signal a remarkable turnaround in approach, and if they do not (or if they dilute the effect) the result will be a clearer indication – if that is even necessary – that the notion of the ‘shared society’ is nothing more than a soundbite. In the run up to the general election in 2015, then Labour leader Ed Miliband announced a ‘ freeze ’ on energy bills, if he were to be elected, that would last for two years whilst the sector wa...