I have often of late been tempted – and given way to temptation in the privacy of my home – to spew hatred at the ego-fixated narcissist Johnson and his wooden ventriloquist’s dummy Starmer. It feels like a fully warranted but somehow demeaning emotion. But is it? I am reading China Mieville’s excellent A Spectre,… Read More »
In what amounts to a fairly prolific series of blogs condemning the Conservative assault on the English National health Service (NHS), I have bemoaned their clandestine advance planning, their ideological subversion, the calculated politics of austerity from 2010-2020, and the two Health and Social Care Acts of 2012 and 2022 (the first of which left… Read More »
Given time to dwell on the pros and cons of an academic career several themes occur as of significance, hence the obscure quasi-mathematical title of this autobiographical blog. Serendipity suggests events that crop up fortuitously and incur advantage; reflexivity denotes active agency; happenstance brings contingency to mind; career and cv are more straightforward. I will… Read More »
I am encouraged of late to remind myself of the longstanding literature on the doctor-patient relationship. For many decades I travelled with bands of students and doctors from Parsons, Freidson and active versus passive relations to more recent ideals of reciprocity, concordance and so on. But things have changed, at least in England, as at… Read More »
Two themes that have run through my blogs over many years have been: (i) the Tories have long been intent on killing off the NHS and bringing in private providers, and (ii) Lansley’s wordy and often misunderstood Health and Social Care Act of 2012 opened the door for later moves to this end. COVID provided… Read More »
This will doubtless be a shorter blog than usual, principally because I neither know quite what to say, let alone how to say it. I usually find words come readily enough so it’s a relatively novel experience. The topic is The Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class by the Working Class Collective. This was a… Read More »
This is a quick blog on Andrew Lobaczewski’s notion of ‘pathocracy’ and draws liberally on Steve Taylor’s summary account in Psychology Today (2019). Arising out of his own experience of suffering under the Nazi occupation of Poland, he was motivated to develop a field of study he termed ‘ponerology’, or the investigation of human evil.… Read More »
For approximately two decades I have formulated and commended a ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH for short). This was done with health inequalities in mind. It asserts that health inequalities in Britain, and indeed in kindred societies, are in large part an unintended consequence of the strategic, profit-seeking and often predatory behaviours of a hard core… Read More »
My rate of production of blogs has dropped off of late. This is probably in part because my attention has been diverted by COVID, but it’s also a function of the fact that I have been writing my book on critical realism and sport. I may be tiring more quickly too, but let’s not go… Read More »
Gordon Brown has much to answer for, but he was not Blair. Politicians’ autobiographies can be expected to comprise a litany of excuses. I’ve just read his My Life, Our Times, in which he seems surprised that he could not accomplish more of what – I think – he genuinely wanted to accomplish. I’m with… Read More »