Brian Rushton Doctorpreneurs

Brian Rushton,

THE National Health Service (NHS) faces a funding crisis: already short of money, it said it will find £22 billion ($35 billion) in efficiency savings by 2020. But as emergency services creak and politicians shudder at the thought of closing more hospitals, within the system lies an untapped source of wealth.

The government first came up with the idea of making money from NHS employees’ inventions in 2002. More than a million people, it realised, were spending their days thinking about better ways to treat people. Innovation might save money, and hospitals could help their staff sell their ideas in exchange for a share in the profits. To make the plan work, the government allowed hospital trusts to buy shares in companies set up to develop an invention.   

American hospitals have made vast sums from such arrangements: in 2014 Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston made $68.9m in licensing fees. But the British model is a less healthy specimen. According to Harry Quilter-Pinner at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think-tank, British hospitals are often baffled as to how they are supposed to make any profits at all.

Although in theory the NHS is keen to exploit innovation, in practice the path is often blocked. One problem is that there is no clear process for pitching an idea: doctors who do must tout their wares...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Seismic

Brian Rushton,

Fracktious

IN AMERICA shale-gas extraction has been creating jobs and transforming energy markets. In Britain, by contrast, the shale-gas revolution promised by the prime minister, David Cameron, has run up against a familiar foe: NIMBYism.

On June 29th crowds of people who do not want fracking, the process by which shale gas is extracted, gathered outside the offices of Lancashire County Council. Most of them expected the council’s development-control committee—more used to analysing planning-permission applications than geology—to accept an application by Cuadrilla, an energy company, to start fracking in north-west England. The council’s own legal and planning departments had advised them to approve it.

But the councillors surprised everyone by voting nine to three, with two abstentions, to reject the application, citing not geology but “unacceptable noise impact” and “adverse urbanising effect on the landscape”. Protesters rejoiced with some noise impact of their own. Daisy Sands, a Greenpeace campaigner, called the decision “a Waterloo for the fracking industry”.

Fracking in Britain...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton The bat and the daffodil

Brian Rushton,

Anyone for cricket?

ON July 8th England plays the first Test of a new Ashes series against Australia—in Cardiff. The Welsh capital often hosts England matches, but that is as close as Wales gets to international cricket. It is the only nation in the British Isles not to have a recognised national team (even the Isle of Man and Guernsey do), and the best Welsh cricketers, such as the Ashes-winning fast bowler Simon Jones, therefore play for England.

If Matthew Ford gets his way, however, that could change. The 31-year-old from Montgomeryshire leads the campaign to create a Welsh national team. He petitioned the country’s National Assembly two years ago, and in its last general election manifesto Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, backed the idea. Bethan Jenkins, Plaid Cymru’s spokeswoman for sport, argues that Wales could follow the leads of Scotland, which severed its links with the England team in 1992 and Ireland, which joined the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 1993 and has since beaten several front-rank teams, including the West Indies earlier this year. Indeed, Ireland (with a population of 6.4m)...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Petrolhead revisited

Brian Rushton,

AS youthful music fans headed to Glastonbury for the last weekend in June, older and more well-heeled festival-goers keyed a different destination into their satnavs. The Goodwood Festival of Speed, held annually since 1993 in the grounds of a stately home in West Sussex, is petrolhead heaven. Hundreds of racing cars spanning the decades are on display and noisily burn rubber on the “hill climb” course, a racetrack. But alongside the supercars and classic vehicles are more humdrum machines, for Goodwood has inadvertently assumed the role of hosting Britain’s national motor show.

Cavernous venues in London, at Olympia and Earl’s Court, and later Birmingham, used to host the more traditional event in the mould of the big international shows staged in Geneva or Detroit. But the last of these biannual gatherings took place in London’s Docklands in 2008. The next was a victim of belt-tightening in the wake of the financial crisis, and although only Germans buy more cars in Europe and production in the UK is set to hit a record high in 2017 an “official” British motor show has failed to get back on the road. One reason for this is that...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton The Brexit ramp

Brian Rushton,

THE moment had been over two years in the making. Under pressure from his backbenchers, in 2013 David Cameron, the prime minister, had promised that he would reform Britain’s membership of the EU and put the outcome to an in-out referendum if he won another term in office. Fresh from his general election triumph, on June 25th he duly arrived in Brussels to present his wish list to the European Council. But fellow heads of government did not share the prime minister’s sense of occasion. Clashes over Greece and Europe’s migration crisis forced him to shorten his talk to ten minutes. Only Charles Michel, the Belgian premier, deigned to respond to it. Meanwhile François Hollande, France’s president, reportedly nipped to the toilet.

Mr Cameron is attacking on two fronts. One is Brussels, where he seeks concessions to Tory gripes about the EU. His renegotiation aims to make the union more economically liberal and fairer to non-integrationist members like Britain. Yet the summit showed how, with the EU grappling with multiple crises, these demands (however calculatedly modest) are a low priority. The second front is the domestic one, where he seeks to heal his party’s deep divides over Europe and rally most of it behind an “in” vote. There, too, recent events hint at the difficulties ahead.

Critics crowed on June 26th when Downing Street...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Death on the beach

Brian Rushton,

AS THE shots got louder and the gunman appeared, moving methodically along a row of sunloungers, killing every sunburnt, cowering European holidaymaker he could find, Stephen and Cheryl Mellor, a middle-aged couple from Cornwall, clung to one another, saying, “I love you, I love you”. Seconds later, on the afternoon of June 26th, both had been shot, he fatally, as he lurched to save his wife, who lay, playing dead, in the sand.

Up and down the beach in Sousse, a north Tunisian resort town, similar scenes of panic and intimacy were taking place. By the time police marksmen caught up with Seifeddine Rezgui, a radicalised engineering student, he had scoured the beach, a hotel and its swimming-pool, then doubled back to cover the hotel reception area twice. Of the 38 he killed, perhaps 30 were British, making this Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity since the bomb blasts on the London Underground a decade ago. It was also, in its savage indiscriminateness, particularly difficult to comprehend.

Those bombings in 2005 were carried out by similarly indoctrinated British Muslims. Yet they were not a random assault on Westerners, as the Sousse...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Decision time

Brian Rushton,

WHEN Heathrow airport first opened in 1946 it was little more than a muddy airfield. A few thousand passengers waited in freezing-cold marquees. Since then the hub, now the third busiest in the world, has changed dramatically. Each day a small town of 200,000 people travel through its gleaming terminals. But as the airport has grown, so too has opposition towards it expanding further. This means that the recommendation on July 1st by Sir Howard Davies, an economist, to the government to build another runway there will not happen without a fight.

Few doubt that London, Britain’s financial centre, needs more airport capacity. Last year its three main airports (Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted), with four runways between them, handled 130m passengers, 10m more than New York’s main three, which have nine. Heathrow is operating at full capacity, and has been for at least five years. Gatwick, Britain’s second-busiest airport,...Continue reading

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