Boris is already demonstrating how his government will be all tell and no show

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister - a phrase that used to sound like a joke - made a lot of promises in his first speech from Downing Street. His announcement of £1.8bn has been reported as the first down payment on these pledges.

Here-in lies a key sample of what we can expect from Boris Johnson and his verbose new government. A big promise and an announcement, with all the PR trimmings to follow, which on inspection fails to live up to the terms.

All tell and no show. The Boris way.

It's also been the Tories way through all of their time in government, whether under Cameron or May. Announcing old funding again as new funding, relabelling and reannouncing, fiscal politics played out in the media rather than in the treasury. And all the while, the cuts go on.

In the present case, Boris has offered up a lump of extra cash for the NHS. But it isn't what it seems. In fact, the £1bn 'upfront' is money that the government had already promised to the NHS - in exchange for three years of trusts slashing their budgets - only to then block hospitals from spending it.

The second half is for what is know as capital spending, long term investment to pay now for projects that will be ready years from now. This kind of spending is deeply important, but does little for struggling hospitals in the present - and even that sum isn't coming right away.

What the government cares about are the flurry of headlines that follow these press releases - often printed wholly and uncritically in the media. While the front pages tell people what the Tories want them to hear, the analysis is buried and with it the debunking of the government's claims.

These headlines are the heart of a long term government strategy, all about governing by telling and not showing. It has allowed them to slash and slash again at budgets, and the services they fund, and to deflect criticism on to others - mostly the vulnerable, exposed by the Tories' own austerity politics.

Don't be fooled by the headlines. Don't let the Tories, as John Harris puts it, sow "discord and resentment via austerity" only to reap the rewards of the chaos with a sharp PR strategy. If we're not sharper ourselves, we'll face the consequences of Tory disaster politics while they profit.

To be 'progressive' is to be hopeful, but progress won't happen by itself: first, the Left has to reach out and connect

Politics returns to Westminster from recess today to a social atmosphere, in Britain and elsewhere, that has become toxic with the noxious fumes spewed by bitterly divided sectarian factions.

Westminster returns from its latest recess today, to a political mood that has rarely been more toxic. Last night's American Presidential debate captured well the noxious fumes, unconstrained by borders or languages, that have poisoned the political atmosphere (Krugman, 2016).

Ignorance and anger abound, and, what's worse, they're being exploited. In the UK, the Conservative Party Conference set official policy at a new low over the weekend when it proposed forcing companies to make open lists of foreign born workers (BBC, 2016; Syal, 2016).

Instead of abolishing ignorance with education and facts - instead of diffusing anger and bringing calm - instead of reasonableness - anger is being inflamed and ignorance reinforced. Politics has lost a sense of reasonableness.

Harsh rhetoric has driven out decency and moderation. Compromise and consensus seem further away than ever. From France to the United States, the political arena has been reduced to a vague political class circling the wagons to see off opponents stoking ignorance and anger to advance their agendas.

All the while, important matters are rendered impossible to address by the partisan impasse created by opposing outrages flung across wide gulfs of understanding between deeply entrenched factions. Whether Europe or America, people need access to affordable healthcare, affordable housing and affordable energy - and all of it stable and sustainable.

For progressives - whether radical or moderate - decency, reasonableness and respect for a plurality of voices aught to be at the heart of any method that pursues those objectives. So for those who cherish these things, the rise of narrow aggressive sectarianism has made politics in 2016 difficult to navigate and hard to bear.

But the only way is forward, and the only way forward is to reach out. At the Compass Progressive Alliance event, journalist John Harris spoke with passion about the people in the abandoned North who voted for Brexit. He said that:

"These are places characterised by fear. Yes, a fear of immigration and the idea that it might make opportunities even more scarce and wages even lower and put more pressure on already way overstretched services. But underlying this all is a very, very cold, frightening really, fear of the future. A fear, when you talk to people, even of tomorrow and next week.

Please, let's not think about the vast majority of the people I've talked about, who voted Leave, as stupid or deluded or bigoted and hateful... If you haven't got a progressive politics which speaks to places which embody the inequality we all fight against, its not worthy of the name."

Before progressives can reach out, they need to understand what it is that they themselves want, and why - and they need to understand what that will mean for the lives and livelihoods of the least well off. And if these two understandings cannot be completely reconciled, work has to begin on a meaningful compromise, on an inclusive next step.

To be progressive is to be hopeful - to believe in human progress, to believe that all people are capable of self-improvement. But it won't occur on its own. It requires defeating neglect with care & listening, ignorance with education & encouragement, despair with hope & opportunity. The norm is adversarial politics that divides to rule. The progressive alternative has to reach for something better.

Caroline Lucas' National Health Service Bill seeks to restore the NHS to its reassuring place in the UK's social security safety net

Almost perfectly timed to follow on the tail of the latest round of Junior Doctors Strikes, Caroline Lucas' backbench National Health Service Bill has its second reading in the Commons today (Friday 11th).

The aim of the bill is to rein in, what has been called, the undemocratic backdoor privatisation of the NHS. The bill seeks to undo internal competition introduced in 1991 and reintroduce local health boards, to streamline the identification of the services needed and to provide them (Lucas, 2016).

Public backing for the NHS remains high, and the bill has received broad support from celebrities and other publicly notable persons (The Guardian, 2016). The good feeling towards the institution can be seen in the still high support for the junior doctors in the ongoing contract dispute between the British Medical Association, the BMA, and Secretary of Health Jeremy Hunt (ITV, 2016; Stone, 2016).

The junior doctors strikes themselves seem almost to be symptomatic of the problems to be found in the NHS' inner workings. Staff have been stretched thin across shifts for years (The Telegraph, 2012).

After a number of strikes, negotiations completely broke down, with Jeremy Hunt attempting to suggest that the doctor's union, the BMA, was trying to hold the government to ransom (Ashmore, 2016). Treating unionised medical professionals like they're mutineers at least doesn't seem to have helped Hunt's standing with the public.

Yet the decision by the Health Secretary to impose the government's newly designed contracts (Tran & Campbell, 2016), without further negotiation or bilateral acceptance, was a potentially damaging but possibly effective escalation of the dispute - effectively calling out doctors in the expectation of grumbling compliance.

For doctors are left with little alternative, besides interminable strikes, than flight - literally abroad, or figuratively, to the private sector. With the NHS in crisis in recent years, this has already been increasingly the case (El Sheika, 2016; Johnson, 2016).

Yet it has also been suggested that Hunt, and others who are actually in favour of a privatised system of healthcare, are unlikely to shed a tear for staff flying to the private sector (Stone, 2016). In fact there are some who see these events as part of a long chain, a long and concerted effort to discredit the NHS in order to pave the way for privatisation (El Gingihy, 2015).

Supporters of the NHS Bill, which is being debated and voted on in parliament today, see the privatisation agenda as both undemocratic and also contrary to the facts. Accusations have been made that the costs of healthcare are being inflated, in all parts of the NHS, by the infiltration of the private sector (Furse, 2016) - completely contrary to the standard narrative of market 'efficiency'.

Caroline Lucas', who is sponsoring the bill, has argued that the virtual army of staff required to manage private contracts is contributing heavily to the growing deficit and debt hanging around the NHS' neck (Lucas, 2016{2}). In fact, it has been pointed to that by the WHO, World Health Organisation, definition, the NHS is all but privatised already (El Gingihy, 2016).

The backbench NHS Bill is an attempt to reverse that direction and keep the institution alive and restore it for the future. The NHS remains an important part of the public safety net that guards against disaster. Alongside future progressive, like the basic income and a shortening of the working day, a free-at-the-point-of-use public healthcare system still has a place in ensuring justice and liberty.

Rainbow celebration needs to fuel fresh momentum in the long struggle to create societies that take consent seriously

Photograph: Rainbow American via photopin (license) (cropped)

In two terms, mired in partisan politics bitterly divided between Liberals and Conservatives, US President Barack Obama has struggled to give his administration a definitive identity. A pair of Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rulings from the past week have certainly helped make that task a little easier.

The first Supreme Court ruling ensured the continued existence of Obama's flagship healthcare reforms, for the near future at least (Roberts & Jacobs, 2015). The ruling decided that the Federal government could deliver its affordable health insurance plan in all fifty states.

The second ruling confirmed equal marriage as a constitutional right (Roberts & Siddiqui, 2015). That means that in all fifty states same-sex couples will have the right to marry, and that marriages from other states have to be recognised.

These rulings, lauded as successes by Obama (Jacobs, 2015), have been heralded as a triumph for liberalism and individual freedoms, over the conservatism of the established social order. Along with having earlier overseen the end of the ban on openly gay military service (McVeigh & Harris, 2011), these rulings have made civic equality into a major theme of the Obama administration.

Although there clearly is still resistance, some of which has been aggressively intolerant (Butterworth, 2015), people will adapt. But that doesn't mean that the work is over. Combined, these steps have established a new social plateau, which represents a renewed acknowledgement of the rights of consenting adults to live on equal terms with their peers. Yet, those who have won equal marriage will still face discrimination and legal hurdles (Roberts and Siddiqui, 2015; Buncombe, 2015).

Though by themselves these rulings are huge victories for human rights, civil rights and individual liberty, they also represent smaller parts of a broader human struggle, towards the attainment of respect for consent as a central human value.

The ideal of a representative democracy is based around consent. Government by the consent of the governed, laws created with the consent of those who have to abide by them, economics with the consent of the community, and social interactions with the consent of the participants.

Without the removal of coercion and fear, whether from economic conditions in which you cannot afford to get ill or from social conditions where you cannot openly define your own identity due to discrimination, there can be no civic participation on the basis of consent. Without liberty from coercion and fear, there can be no free choices.

To get there, the Supreme Court rulings need now to be the inspiration for the next step (Thrasher, 2015). They are breakthroughs in their own right and just cause for celebration, but that energy and solidarity needs to be poured into renewed motivation to keep moving forward.