If England achieves the EU average, will Tony Blair’s gamble have come off ?
The short answer is: be cautious in laying your bets. At £1,059 per capita it is almost a quarter higher than the figure for England (£885), and roughly the same as, or even above, the European Union average, depending on how that is calculated. Today’s level of spending on health care in Scotland has achieved the target set for England for 2004. For in one sense the promised future has already arrived there. But can he achieve a turnaround, let alone in this timescale?One way of predicting the future of the NHS in England is to use Scotland as a crystal ball. The worse the news of abandoned patients and mishandled bodies in the NHS has become, the more strenuously the Prime Minister has promised a solution by the next election. I doubt that she, for one, was cheering George Bush yesterday.n.walter btinternet .

“There is no heroism in bombing innocent civilians,” she said. The visit was organised by Global Exchange, a human rights group that believes in building a more ethical world, in the face of criticism from American media and trepidation from the State Department.And when I read about Rita Lasar, whose brother was killed in the World Trade Centre, saying how sorry she was to the family of Najiba Shakar, whose body was buried in rubble in central Kabul, I knew that the part of America that you simply can’t help but love and admire is still very much alive. A group of Americans who had been affected by 11 September are currently in Kabul, forging links with Afghans who have been affected by the American bombing. Its grand diversity means that, just as soon as you think you’ve surveyed its currents, you find other channels trickling in quite the opposite direction.British critics love to mock American conformity, but the US still has its dissenters, its Naomi Kleins and Noam Chomskys, its anti-capitalist groups and its peace and human rights movements.

Look at Hollywood movies with all their renewed enthusiasm for gung-ho history, from Pearl Harbor to Black Hawk Down.But even if you feel anger with the American government and impatience with aspects of American culture, what on earth would be the point of demonising the American people? Thank God that, as well as being a superpower, America is an open society, with all the potential for change and dissent that implies. And sharper edges may have been dulled far from politics, in aspects of film and literature and television that seem to be expressing a more conformist cultural mood. We are seeing a lowering of energy in American journalism, where even erstwhile critics have gone soft on Bush. It does sometimes look as if the decadence of American political discourse is affecting more than just politics. “The tableau was that of a celebration of a war hero,” said The New York Times.Sure, this kind of celebratory mood is making some critics feel anti-American as well as critical of the American government. His popularity is at unprecedented levels, and this speech was interrupted more than 70 times by clapping.