This week we have launched OurNHS, a brand new section of openDemocracy dedicated to England's National Health Service (NHS). The Coalition's Health & Social Care Act 2012 formally ends the NHS as a free and comprehensive health service. OurNHS will be campaigning for its restoration. This introdu
Anyone familiar with the story of language in Elizabethan Ireland can only feel impatience – if not despair – at the latter-day triumphalism of works like Melvyn Bragg’s best-selling The Adventure of English.
Britain is at a fork in the road with a choice to make about what role it will play in the 21st century. Yet, David Cameron’s long-awaited speech about Europe is a miscalculation that will leave everyone frustrated.
Award winning author, Marcus Chown, summarises the reality of what has happened to the NHS, the quality of press coverage and why it is so important the public understand the truth beneath the packaging.
In the 1980s and 1990s, elite Anglo-American media sources cared more about Latin American abuses than those occurring anywhere else in the world. Why?
Like Greece, Spain and Germany before, Britain now faces a cathartic moment when she needs to decide what price it is worth paying to stay in the European Union. Coolheaded rationality must prevail over emotion in the debate that is about to begin.
The debate over the boundary review has overshadowed an imminent threat to British democracy. Proposed changes to the electoral register are likely to see voter numbers fall significantly. Who are these people? The young, the poor and the disadvantaged.
Is national citizenship still a valid organizational factor in the context of the crisis? A radical re-thinking of political citizenship, based on smaller entities such as Catalonia, Scotland or Flanders, may emerge as a reaction to growing imbalances.
While Germany and France were celebrating 50 years of European successes, David Cameron outlined a much more pessimistic vision of the future of the Union, further underlining, if proof were needed, fundamentally different approaches to the European project. Can these two perspectives ever be reco
Is the crucial change in the UK's position in the EU, that demands a referendum, really the need to extend UK doctors' working hours? And what of the EU – has it got a better story to tell?
Agnes Woolley examines the implications of the UK Government’s new rules on family migration and argues that if families are the building blocks of a secure and stable nation, then the right to family life must be upheld
Labour needs to re-think its position on Europe. Time to blow off the dust from Tom Nairn's unparalleled 1972 essay on Britain and what was then an infant EU.
