The private health insurance industry has been trying to get think tanks to help it make money in Britain for the last 10 years. Is today's report by Reform calling for NHS charges the result?
Graham Allen MP, chair of the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee, talks to OurKingdom about the highly controversial lobbying Bill that has just been passed by parliament.
The Lobbying Bill being debated this week will do nothing to expose corporate lobbying. If we are going to diminish their influence in government, we need to understand their tactics better and call them out.
While severely limiting the ability of civil society to function for a full year before a general election, the primary alleged targets of the bill - professional lobbyists - escape largely unharmed.
Finance and the British state are mutually embedded to the point that it can be hard to tell where one stops and the other starts. Here, Tamasin Cave of Spinwatch gives us a brief tour of the tangled web that is public life in the UK.
A 5 minute video setting out why the government's proposed gagging law has caused such outrage - charities and campaigners will be largely gagged yet big money lobbyists won't. Is the government simply protecting itself from democratic pressure?
While doing virtually nothing to fix the real problems of money in politics, the government is trying to introduce a new law that will shut down vast swathes of political commentary and scrutiny for a whole year before general elections.
Who really drives policy at Westminster, the unions or the big commercial lobbyists who appear to operate without any democratic process whatsoever, and with "charitable" status to boot?
Both Labour and the Conservatives are keen to integrate social care and health care. But will these proposals put patients at their heart - or will they be driven by the needs of bureaucracy or even business?
