Asa Briggs says ‘Yes’.

There is a article on Asa Briggs, the British historian and academic, by Neil Ascherson in the LRB, reviewing The Indefatigable Asa Briggs by Adam Sisman. (William Collins, 2025). I have read some of Briggs’ work and liked much of what he stood for. People would say his ideas are dated — but that is our loss. The following caught my eye.

To say Briggs took on too much is a laughable understatement. By the end of his life, his unfinished commitments towered over him. And yet it’s not quite right to conclude that he could never say no. His problem was wonderfully positive: he always said yes, with bursting enthusiasm for the new project.

This is what I call the Lord Acton problem. I have a bad, possibly terminal, case.

‘He was a busy, bustling figure who radiated energy and vitality, seemingly always in a hurry, and who travelled so frequently that he earned the nickname “Professor Heathrow”,’ Sisman writes.

(Many moons ago, in Newcastle, I was a medical registrar to the Professor of medicine, KGMM Alberti (“George” but Professor to me). He appeared to be always travelling, so we christened the Newcastle airport ‘Alberti’. The (false) rumour was that he wasn’t liable for UK tax given his travel commitments.).

Back to the article: Briggs was brought up in Keighley.

Keighley was a relatively progressive town to grow up in, and yet social unfairness soused it like the rain blowing down from Ilkley Moor. Briggs, in this respect resembling the late Jimmy Reid of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, saw around him capitalism’s monstrous waste of human potential. As Reid would put it, see the Ian Rankin living up that stair who will never write a novel, the Menuhin in the next tenement who will never hold a violin, the Chloe Kelly in that council block who will never hear the roar as she slams a ball into an open goal. For Reid, fairness would only come through social revolution. For Briggs, it was through knowledge: an eruption of public education whose lava would overflow all the conventional boundaries of elitist schooling and narrowly academic universities.

As the saying goes, the revolution in physics in the first half of the C20 was led by the sons of illiterate cobblers.
Briggs was heavily involved in attempting to change UK higher ed for the better, both at Sussex, and at the Open University (OU).

As Sisman points out, when Asa left school, there were only fifty thousand university students (almost all of them men) in the whole of Britain. Today, to a substantial degree because of Briggs’s campaigns and ideas, there are more than three million in higher education.

But the three million don’t get what was once on offer to the few. There is room for plenty of blame within and outwith the academy for this. I wish it were otherwise but most British universities never thought as seriously as the OU did about the tradeoffs of scale and good teaching (and learning).

Guardian Obit

For the life of me I never understand why she wasn’t awarded a Nobel prize (for medicine / physiology). She fundamentally changed our understanding of human biology: of how we think of ourselves as Nature’s gamble on the triumph of rationality over reflex. The ethology precedent was there: Lorenz, Tinbergen and von Frisch in 1973

Competition ratios: Hundreds of doctors compete for some specialty training posts, show “scandalous” NHS data | The BMJ

“Staggering” competition for some NHS specialty training posts has laid bare a “crisis facing medical training” that is leaving many resident doctors “in limbo,” leaders have warned.

Doctors said that newly released NHS statistics on 2025 competition rates—which show that demand for some specialties has almost quadrupled—were “indicative of a broken application system.”

The data show that a total of 91 999 applications were made in England for the 12 833 specialty training posts available at all training levels,1 giving an overall competition ratio of 7. This means that there were seven applications overall for every specialty training post in 2025, a rise from 4.7 last year2 and over three times the level in 2019 (1.9).

However, some specialties have faced competition of a far greater magnitude (table 1). For example, psychiatry saw 22 applications for every post (10 677 applications for 489 posts), up from 10 applications per post last year.

In my day — yes, spare me my over the shoulder view— medicine worked so much better than it does now. I didn’t think so as the time: but it was a (tarnished) golden age. And I didn’t qualify 100K in debt.

Now look at the world from the point of view of a UK intern.

The greatest competition was seen in applications for general practice and public health medicine, with 167 applications for every post (2173 applications for 13 posts). The second most competitive post was community sexual and reproductive health, with almost 99 applications per post—nearly quadruple the competition ratio last year (26).

Other specialty training posts have also gained a huge number of additional applications year on year. Demand for obstetrics and gynaecology posts has more than doubled, jumping from a competition ratio of 7 in 2024 to nearly 17 this year.

The total of 91, 999 applications is a jump of more than 30 000 in a single year. In contrast, the number of training posts has increased by only 90 posts. GP specialty training year 1 (ST1) had the most applications, with 20 ,995 applications for 4276 posts in 2025, a 4.91 competition ratio. This compared with 15, 036 applications for 4096 GP posts in 2024, a competition ratio of 3.7. [emphasis added]

What does the government say? “Good news for patients that the highest ever number of highly trained, skilled, and compassionate doctors are in post across the country.” Orwellian.

And:

“The government said that it had committed to tackling training bottlenecks in its 10 year plan…” [emphasis added]

The late Henry Miller, a former Dean of Medicine and Vice Chancellor at Newcastle University writing in 1966 gave the advice I would give UK to medics although the chosen destination would be very different (more so since Brexit).

Like many of my colleagues I no longer try to dissuade my juniors from leaving to work in the United States.

Your choice via Albert Hirschman :

1. exit (you leave)
2. voice (you argue and vote against)
3. loyalty — only remaining option. Silence.
   

NHS dermatology, like NHS dentistry has disappeared in many parts of the UK. Things will get worse. There is no coherent government plan. Things will be worst of all for those traditional labour voters, who can’t jump the NHS queues. But this is not just about waiting times: the NHS increasingly provides care that is unsafe and dangerous.

“Like many of his generation, [Harold] Macmillan’s life was principally defined by his service in the First World War. Wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he had lain for ten hours in a shell hole in no man’s land, treating himself with morphine and alternating between feigning death as German soldiers skirted past and reading Aeschylus in the original Greek.”

(“Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016” by “Tom McTague”).

Words fail— well actually, not if they are in Greek they don’t..

Can Keir survive? Inside the plot to bring down the prime minister | Keir Starmer | The Guardian

There has been a joke going around Labour MPs over the past week about three envelopes in Soviet Russia. “Whenever you run into trouble, open them in order,” the instructions go. Envelope one says: “Blame your predecessor.” So he does – and it works. The party officials are satisfied. A year later, problems arise again. He opens envelope two. It says: “Restructure the organisation. He does a big reshuffle, changes some titles, and again buys himself some time. Finally, another crisis comes. He opens envelope three. It says: “Prepare three envelopes.”

The UK government has ‘agreed to drop’ their demand for access to Apple user data, says the US

A timely comment in the FT on the UK security / government agencies.

Underlying problem: poor culture of hiding incompetent public snooping behind a veil of secrecy.

20 years back their public image was like James Bond; now it’s Slow Horses (ironically an Apple TV product)

Amen.

“There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. It is a racecourse tension. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once. James Joyce on Paris.

Question: Would I make more progress on my book if I decamped? ‘Why think, just do the experiment!’ was John Hunter’s advice to Edward Jenner (of vaccination fame). Hmm.

Blighty newsletter: Are 100m Britons too many?

Wales could certainly benefit from more inhabitants. Its 3.2m people are outnumbered three-to-one by sheep. The country’s population density of 150 people per square kilometre places it 44th in the world, sandwiched between Ghana and Indonesia. Wales could happily welcome a few million more, and few people would notice. Live in Abergavenny and want to find a mate that isn’t woolly? Probably best to go to London. 

Operation Rubific, the portrait of failure

“There are two kinds of British scandal. The old kind resemble the plays of Henrik Ibsen: studies of character failings and personal humiliation brought about by greed, desire and dishonesty. Think of the disgrace of John Profumo, Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken. The new owe more to Joseph Heller: portraits of institutional failure, in which the craven, the cynical and the helpless are trapped in crises they cannot control.

They are less salacious but far more corrosive, and they have piled up at alarming speed: from the negligence that saw patients treated with disease-ridden blood products to the bureaucratic inertia that led to the fire at Grenfell Tower and the fumbled response to the covid-19 pandemic. On July 15th another was exposed. In the High Court Sir Martin Chamberlain cancelled a super-injunction, applied contra mundum (against everyone), which had rendered a government programme called Operation Rubific a state secret…

The court papers read like a parody of 1950s Whitehall: low-level incompetence, an impulse to secrecy, a fixation with upholding institutional reputations and an aversion to accountability. The only riddle is which part of the state emerges most damaged…

The pattern of recent institutional scandals is unmistakable. They begin with low-level carelessness. Crises are massaged rather than confronted; a preoccupation with the “optics” of a policy triumphs over whether the policy is any good. So often, the first instinct of officialdom is to cover up, and then to lawyer up, and then, when that strategy is exhausted, to reach for the chequebook. And even then, names go unnamed; no one gets fired; and no one, ever, takes the blame.”

And still it will go on, and on. The Economist

Nicole Flattery · Priests are human too: John Broderick’s ‘Pilgrimage’

Colm Tóibín remembers seeing Broderick in the bar of Buswells Hotel in Dublin: ‘He was wearing a beautifully cut three-piece suit with elaborate stripes. He was alone and he looked desolate.’ He remained a Catholic throughout his life and even considered a late vocation to the priesthood, but instead descended into alcoholism.