Kings Fund Chief Executive Niall Dickson commented yesterday that the 2009 Budget must be a ‘wake up call for the NHS’, forcing it to improve efficiency before spending cuts of £2.3 billion are introduced in 2011. But as a consequence...

And three pictures, which is the norm of the daily dose of the Day by Day cartoon, is obviously worth three thousand words. Today's certainly cannot be bettered by any number of superfluous words.

Another one of “Europe’s hours”, a phrase first used with reference to the war in former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the nineties, has come and gone with that foreign policy remains stubbornly non-common. Let’s forget about President Sarkozy’s great achievements. What he did was to abandon whatever plan his own foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, had signed with Pr...

As you may have read today – or heard our Campaign Director Mark Wallace discussing on the radio – each Regional Development Agency has cost British households £600 since 1999. Despite taking more and more from the taxpayer and yielding...

From today's Guardian: "Less than a fifth of the biofuel used on UK roads meets environmental standards intended to safeguard human rights and guarantee carbon savings, figures released today show. "The Renewable Fuels Agency says just 19% of the biofuel supplied under the government's new initiative to use biofuel to help tackle global warming met the green standard. For the r...

Thick gloves required We've blogged public sector pay many times, including the issue of those portly moggies snuggled up in Town Halls and quangos throughout the land. This week the TaxPayers' Alliance published the latest Town Hall Rich List. Despite...

This week on the Guardian website, we’ve found 515 jobs in local government on offer. You can see on the right the pay grades they offer, with only 2 over £100,000. It shows, week after week for you to see,...

Yesterday afternoon we got the final communique. Has The London Summit been a success? Have British taxpayers got good value for the huge expense and aggravation associated with hosting and securing the G20? The first thing to note is that...

A senior Conservative MP has come under fire for complaining about being made to pay an extra £15 a week for his gold-plated pension. Sir Nicholas Winterton, the Tory MP for Macclesfield, complained in the Commons that the rise in...

A council has been criticised for paying an agency £200,000 for its transport chief despite the post's salary only being £50,000. James Duncan makes a weekly commute from Scotland to carry out the job at Bournemouth council in Dorset. The...