To be on Incapacity Benefit you have to have been deemed unfit for work by your GP. Then, after several months on Income Support, you move on to Incapacity Benefit.
In case anyone needs reminding, your GP is a qualified doctor with your full medical history in front of them. Hard to think of anyone better [...]

When walking around Holborn a few months ago, I stumbled across the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. At first, I assumed it was some kind of comedy quack money-fleecing outfit. Then I noticed the NHS signs on the door, and decided that it had probably been founded by Victorian herbalists and subsequently turned into a proper [...]

Some figures I heard at a conference last week.
NHS costs are growing an an annual rate of about 6%, largely due to several years of generous wage settlements and increasingly pricey drugs.
This hasn’t been that big a problem because, for most of the last decade, NHS funding has been growing at a rate of about [...]

One word absolutely not on the lips of political hacks, not even Tory political hacks, is… Abortion. Not this week, not any week. It’s impolite conversation inside the beltway.
But a post here last year (picked apart here) attracted over 250 comments. Just publishing the word is pure Google-juice. Everyone in the real world has an [...]

Some of you may have been wondering why I don’t appear to have been writing much for The Sharpener in the last few months. It’s because I’ve been working on a new project, and unlike so many of the other new projects that get mentioned here, this one doesn’t involve sitting at a desk typing. [...]

I blog partly because I like to write, partly because I’m arrogant enough to believe people will read what I write and like it, and partly for interactivity. I’m not a professional writer (no cheap cracks please…), so I like to play around with writing and words without being too constrained by any conventions of [...]