Chris Whiteside's Blog

Yesterday   the   Prime Minister launched a national mission to tackle dementia   in honour of Dame Barbara Windsor, doubling research funding by 2024 to beat this awful disease.   Dementia is a horrible condition which affects about one in 14 people over the age of 65 and 1 in 6 people over 80. I've seen far too many friends, family members and other people I knew and respected reduced to a kind of living death through Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia and if it is bad for them, it can be worse for their families and those who love them. Up to 40 per cent of dementia cases are potentially preventable, but clinical trials remain under-resourced and causes are still poorly understood.  That is why the Prime Minister launched the ‘Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission’ yesterday, ringfencing £95 million to speed up research with a new Covid vaccine-style Taskforce, boosting the number of clinical trials and delivering on the Conservative our man...

During the discussion in the press and the internet about the AV referendum result, one commentator described the Yes campaign in the Australian referendum on whether they should become a republic as the text book case for how to lose a referendum. It was, but no longer. For the rest of our lifetimes the "Yes to AV" campaign will be the textbook case on how to lose a referendum. Both sides made some good points and some, shall we say, less good ones, though I think there is room for honest people to disagree on quite a few issues, such as how much more AV would cost and whether voting machines would be needed. (There isn't any reasonable doubt that AV would cost more.) But the key difference was that the "Yes to AV" Campaign took for granted that it was the voice of progress and talked to a narrow chunk of society, while the "No" campaign was aimed with ruthless effectiveness at the concerns of much larger numbers of voters. Coupling a sick child with...