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.

Policing and Crime Bill, with oversight and transparency reforms, goes to Commons unlikely to face much opposition

Theresa May's Policing and Crime Bill has a stated aim of improving disciplinary and complaints systems, along with the Inspectorate, in order to improve public confidence in the Police.  Photograph: Police Motorbike from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

In Parliament today, Home Secretary Theresa May presents her Policing and Crime Bill to the Commons for its first formal vote (Parliament, 2016). With a Conservative majority, its passage at this stage should be just a formality - particularly when English Votes for English Laws is applied. That only makes it all the more important for those outside of Parliament to pay particularly close attention.

The government claim the bill will 'finish the job' of police reform (Home Office & May, 2016). Included in its aims are reforming the police disciplinary and complaints systems, strengthening 'the independence of HM Inspectorate of Constabulary', increasing protections for people with mental health problems, allowing chief officers to "confer a wider range of powers on police staff and volunteers", and introducing a requirement for 'suspected foreign nationals to produce a nationality document'.

While moves to increase oversight and accountability are always welcome, along with further considerations for mental health, elements of the bill have faced some criticism. For instance, the expansion of volunteers in police service with police powers has raised some concerns (BBC, 2016) - with suggestions that it may be an artificial way to inflate police numbers in the face of austerity and cuts. There is also some scepticism regarding the continually expanding role of the Police and Crime Commissioners (Russell Webster, 2016), though it has been argued that accountability brought by PCC's election are having a positive impact (Baird, 2016).

The Policing and Crime bill itself is being steered through Parliament by Theresa May. As Home Secretary, Theresa May has already overseen a number of disputes over law enforcement and policing policy.

May has been the force behind the slow and controversial progress of the Investigatory Powers Bill, the so-called snooper's charter (Watt, 2016). Nick Clegg, as Deputy Prime Minister, had forced early bills covering public surveillance, particularly on the internet, to be withdrawn. The most recent attempt has been criticised, not just for being an infringement of liberty, but for being largely unworkable (The Guardian; 2016).

By way of contrast, a positive move was made by May in response to Boris Johnson's wish to deploy water cannon in London. May promised never to deploy police with military style equipment, for fear of undermining the legitimacy of the police (Dodd, 2015) - which is supposed to be based on the principle of policing by consent.

Between refusing water cannons and promoting mass data gathering, and her lack of surety on elected Police and Crime Commissioners (BBC, 2016{2}), Theresa May has cut an inconsistent path as Home Secretary. That inconsistency, along with the Conservative government's poor attitude towards human rights, since cutting loose the Liberal Democrats in May 2015 (Bowcott, 2015), call for a particularly critical eye to be turned on any reform efforts they spearhead.

It is only the early stages for this bill. A bill whose aims will likely be disrupted by disputes over further 'efficiencies' to be found in police budgets (ITV, 2016) - and maybe still further cuts as those scarcely avoided by the Chancellor last time, through heavy dependence upon the prediction of an improved economy, may well come around again in next week's budget with the economy struggling and tough choices expected (Elliott, 2016).

Yet whenever one party seeks to make changes to the enforcement of law and order, it is important to stress the need for the public to remain vigilant. Reform is need. Oversight and transparency are needed. Clear statements of powers, who has them and when, are needed. But the process of reform should too be constrained by those principles.

Where is the grand vision? EU referendum debate is mired in a contest over who really represents the 'national interest'

The European humanitarian vision of peace, rights and prosperity for all individuals, regardless of nationality, religion or borders, is not just under attack but being largely ignored by two sides arguing over who represents the 'national interest'.

One of the saddest parts of the European Union referendum debate is that it seems to consist only of two patriotic factions, each arguing that their way represents the 'national interest'. For anyone with progressive, humanist and internationalist leanings, that clearly reflects the same narrowing of political debate that has hit the UK over the last decade.

The scope of the political imagination is being hemmed in. Europe, finding itself once again in the grip of 'national interests', has seen the grand vision that once underwrote the European project hollowed out (Spinelli, 2016).

Europe has faced at least two major crises that have hit the continent over the past decade, one financial and one refugee. If well administered and democratically accountable, European Governance could in itself have been part of the solution. And yet the idea, the entire political direction, has been largely suppressed as taboo in the 'national interest'.

David Cameron's renegotiation was entirely framed by the 'national interest'. Its primary purpose seemed to the search for opt-outs from a European system (Sparrow, 2016) - the ability to restrict or withdraw social security for non-nationals, exemptions from measures that might impact on the finance sector based in the City of London, reductions in regulations affecting business, and a two speed EU that removes an UK obligation to ever closer union.

The proposed Conservative bill of rights is a salient example. It proposes to console lovers of European Human Rights with a national counterpart, but it offers only certain rights - and those it gives to some people with less rights for others, with different categories of rights, creating different strata of people (Chakrabarti, 2015).

The In campaign has approached the referendum on much the same terms. The Labour Party's website for its 'Labour In For Britain' group makes its pitch all about Britain - national security, national economy and national influence, always framed as 'Britain' in the collective. This dynamic is an effect of the narrowing of vision, a seeming fear of anyone questioning patriotism, the kind of fears that lead to the advent of an left-wing party promoting itself with an anti-immigration mug.

As a result there has been little defence of the EU's work on its own terms. Its work across borders, for peace and prosperity and for individuals regardless of identity - protecting the environment, fighting globalised corporate corruption, supporting and promoting rights of the individual, often against infringements by their 'national' governments and nation-state authorities.

Under the aegis of the European Council, National Governments - including that of the UK, and with all of their attendant political bias - have in recent years taken control of the European agenda and turned it away from the grand vision according to their own 'national interests'. In doing their faces have turned inward, their vision narrowed and their eyes closed.

These governments have let fear be stoked, fears based on perceived threats to identity and vital safety nets (Zatat, 2016). This has pushed an EU exit onto the table, that would drop the pursuit of an international politics in favour of an uncertain future of globalised capitalism, doing business with countries who have little or no safeguards to protect their workers - that would in turn, in globalised competition, only undermine the safeguards protecting individuals in the UK.

The grand vision needs to be recovered. There are movements, such as Another Europe and Democracy in Europe Movement 25, and individuals, like Caroline Lucas and Yanis Varoufakis, that believe in staying and taking back Europe for its citizens. They want to improve democratic accountability, to recover the ideals of humanitarianism.

To leave Europe is no genuine alternative. It casts us, culturally, back into a small, narrow, inward-gazing isolation, while throwing us out onto the global markets without the kinds of guarantees that the EU has, at least tried, to offer. To leave is to pursue a revisionist false past, to satisfy some lingering notion of glorious empire. To stay, with a positive approach and a critical eye, presents the possibility of building the future.