Hysnaps Politics, Gaming, Music and Mental Health
Politics, Gaming, Music, Mental Health And other stuff.. Updated when Able
Because I Thought I Knew, And Apparently I Didn’t
Right, cards on the table:
When someone mentions “the ECHR”, most of us picture… well, something vaguely European and annoying.
A foreign court. Bureaucrats. Deportation arguments. Cats. All that stuff.
Turns out the real story is a bit different.
So this is just me walking through it, and you can wander with me and decide what you think.
The Fire Service: The Public Service Britain Forgot to Break — And Why It Quietly Succeeded
For the last quarter-century, almost every major public service in Britain has been pulled apart and stitched back together again.
The NHS endured wave after wave of restructuring.
Schools ricocheted from LEAs to academies to trusts.
Probation was privatised, then un-privatised.
Policing became a casualty of political formulae no one understands.
But one service — almost by accident — avoided the chaos.
The Fire and Rescue Service.
No internal markets.
No academisation.
No “transformational frameworks”.
No outsourcing lobby hovering over the budget line.
And while everything else was in flux, the fire service quietly did something astonishing:
Lets Rethink HealthCare: Doctors, Demand, and the Cost of Not Planning.
We’re often told the NHS struggles because demand is unpredictable, people don’t want to be doctors anymore, or because training more staff is simply too expensive.
None of that is really true.
Demand has been rising for decades, driven by an ageing population and more complex care. Medicine remains hugely oversubscribed. And the cost of training enough doctors turns out to be similar to the economic value we currently lose by relying on a highly mobile workforce.
This post walks through how we got here, why the system quietly locked itself into dependence on overseas recruitment, what it would actually cost to fix both the future demand and the inherited deficit — and whether a redesigned model could still be working 50 years from now.
It turns out the NHS doesn’t have a money problem.
It has a planning problem.
Ok so I ended the last post saying I wasn’t going to do this –
But I then got interested in investigating a few possibilities – so here we are.
WHAT A STABLE, MODERN, NON-FRAGMENTED NHS SHOULD LOOK LIKE FOR THE NEXT 30 YEARS
Other countries rearrange their health systems about as often as they repaint post boxes.
We rebuild ours like a kitchen remodel every election cycle.
So let’s explore systems that actually work — and what they teach us.
AND WHAT THE UK COULD LEARN
The UK is not alone in running a universal health system.
But it is almost unique in constantly rebuilding its health architecture.
Other countries rearrange their health systems about as often as they repaint post boxes.
We rebuild ours like a kitchen remodel every election cycle.
So let’s explore systems that actually work — and what they teach us.
STRUCTURE, ECONOMICS AND INCENTIVES
In Part I we saw how the internal market emerged.
Part II explains why it never achieved what its architects intended.
The answer lies not in ideology, but in economics and structure.
There’s a line often attributed to the Roman army:
“The only constant is change.”
If that doesn’t describe the NHS, nothing does.
And during the 1990s, when yet another restructure rolled in, someone in a Birmingham hospital taped a follow-up note to the management accounts department wall: (this was in a time before email – yes ask your historians there was such a time)
“Due to further cuts, the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off.”
Dark humour, yes — but also a quiet acknowledgement that the NHS experiences more structural churn than almost any other health system on earth.
To understand why the NHS looks the way it does today, and why Birmingham is a perfect case study, we have to go back to the beginning of the internal market era.
Who Pays for a World-Class Education System? A Fairness Test Using Real Households
One of the things that always irritates me about discussions on tax is how abstract they are.
“Raise £100 billion.”
“Shift 5% of GDP.”
“Broaden the base and lower the rate.”
Lovely phrases. Very neat.
Totally useless if you’re trying to understand what it means for actual people.
So, let’s stop talking in quintiles and deciles and fiscal multipliers for a moment.
Let’s talk about real households — the kinds of people you meet in the supermarket queue, in the staffroom, in the café, or at the school gate.
Because if we’re going to build a school system that treats every child the way private schools treat theirs — small classes, stable buildings, real enrichment, proper SEN support — then yes, we need to raise about £100 billion a year in new revenue.
The question is:
Who pays how much? And is that fair?
I’m going to answer that the way life actually works: through stories.
Who really pays for faith schools in the UK?
A deep dive into school funding, religion, and census data reveals a quiet mismatch between who our education system serves — and the assumptions it still makes. The numbers tell a more interesting story than the arguments ever do.
International Comparison Credibility Check
So now we’ve built a detailed, bottom-up picture of what a private-level state system would cost: roughly £130bn a year in recurring spending plus £30–40bn over seven years in capital upgrades.
Big numbers.
But the real question is:
Does any of this sound credible when compared to high-performing countries?
Or have we accidentally reinvented unicorn economics?
Spoiler: the numbers make perfect sense. In fact, our final system looks almost identical to the Nordics.
