News

Experts in a city nicknamed Britain’s 'Brexit Capital' are predicting a spike in racist attacks when the country leaves the EU next year. The people of Stoke-on-Trent showed their strength of feeling when 69 per cent voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. In the two months following the shock result, Staffordshire Police dealt with 227 complaints of racial abuse – compared with just 50 in May of that year. Experts fear racist attacks will rise again across...

Tens of thousands of ambulances were dispatched with single crew in Scotland over the past four years. Despite the Scottish government previously saying single-crewing should occur only in "exceptional circumstances", a FOI request has today revealed that paramedics were sent out on their own to 2,204 emergency call-outs in 2016/17, and 3,514 went out the year before. The numbers have followed an upward trajectory since the data was first collected in 2013, when 1,644 ambulances were sent out with a...

An investigation has been launched after a man died in a waiting room for Accident and Emergency in a hospital in Dudley in the Midlands. The person died in Russells Hall Hospital's emergency waiting room in November, the NHS trust confirmed today. BBC Midlands reported that  the man was a suspected cardiac patient with chest pains. News of the investigation into the death of the patient waiting to be treated comes as new figures revealed that last week a third of...

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has leapt to the defence of his Government’s new appointment to its universities watchdog as other prominent Tories have defended Toby Young too despite his appalling comments about working class students and women. "Ridiculous outcry over Toby Young. He will bring independence, rigour and caustic wit. Ideal man for job,” tweeted Boris Johnson - a man also renowned for crass and offensive remarks. Perhaps this is an example of Toby Young’s “rigour and caustic wit':  ...

Fertility treatment could soon become more effective after scientists developed an 'assault course'... for sperm. It uses an obstacle course to separate the 'men from the boys' - identifying the strongest and fastest swimmers. Appropriately dubbed SPARTAN, after one of the most feared military forces in Ancient Greece, it uses obstacles to select the fastest and healthiest sperm. Already available for use in the clinic, it is hoped it will be helping women to become pregnant with fewer cycles of...

Theresa May was at pains yesterday to insist that a national A&E meltdown and 55 cancelled ops is NOT an NHS crisis. Even though Jeremy Hunt apologised for it, then appeared on TV again, insisting actually it wasn't a crisis as at least it’s not like last winter when loads of operations were cancelled 24 hours before. The Prime Minister and Health Secretary’s insistence that the current debacle across hospitals all over the UK is an unforeseeable consequence of winter...

The majority of Conservatives want to bring back the death penalty as a punishment, a major study of political activists has found. Academics have branded Tory members a "breed apart" from their Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP counterparts after research revealed stark differences between them on a range of issues. The report by Queen Mary University of London found 54 per cent of Conservatives were in favour of the death penalty, compared to 23 per cent of SNP supporters, 9 per...

Jeremy Hunt is odds-on to lose his job as Secretary of State for Health. The embattled minister is overseeing one of the worse crises in NHS history this January, with 55,000 operations cancelled. Dr Taj Hasan, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, was one of many doctors to recently speak out about the scale of the crisis, warning that "we are seeing conditions people have not seen in their working lives." Dr Nick Scriven, President of the Society...

Britain's fat cat bosses will have made more by lunchtime today than the average worker will earn in a year. Chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.45m a year, which works out at 120 times the £28,758 collected by full-time UK workers on average. On an hourly basis the bosses will have earned more in less than three working days than the average employee will pick up this year, leading campaigners to dub the day...