Jacobin was founded in 2011 by a guy in his dorm room. Now it has 30,000 print subscribers and over 1 million hits a month. How did that happen?

This week we’re giving you part one of our chat with Peter Frase, a writer and lapsed academic who is on the editorial board of Jacobin.

It probably started with the explosion of anti-neoliberal thought after the financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street was the forerunner for a change in mood, in tone. After decades of near consensus, the prevailing economic system seemed broken. There was an opening for the ‘next great Socialist magazine’, as Peter put it, and the team at Jacobin put themselves in the right spot.

We spoke to Peter about the resurgence of leftist thought in popular culture — particularly with young people — and all that goes into building a popular socialist magazine in the post financial crisis world we live in. You can check out Peter Frase on his website or on Twitter. Read one of his latest articles for Jacobin, discussing what it means to be on The Left in the 21st century.

(Next week, we will run part 2 which talks about his speculative book on four different pathways for a post-capitalist future. Check out his book here.)

We also dipped our toes into #TheWeekInBullshit with Priti Patel, James Dyson and the hilariously bullshit news that tax havens are, in fact, good things. To no one’s great surprise, leading Brexiteer Daniel Hannan wrote a cloying article in defense of tax havens. I discussed Daniel Hannan and his fellow Brexiteers in a previous blogpost — their deepest, darkest dream is for Britain to become a giant floating tax haven, operating without any sort of government. I guess his reaction to the Paradise Papers shouldn’t surprise anybody, but it’s worth calling out this nonsense when it happens.

Peter Frase told us that part of the success of @jacobinmag was that it looks great. And what should I find in a beautiful arty bookstore on Auguststraße? (@doyoureadme_berlin) Listen to our chat about Jacobin here: https://soundcloud.com/connectedanddisaffected/make-the-left-great-again-with-peter-frase-s2e3 A post shared by Rowan Emslie (@rdemslie) on Nov 17, 2017 at 3:54am PST

Understanding ‘ GP at Hand’

The 2014 NHS Five Year Forward View recognized a need, in response to huge strain from growing demands and frozen funding, for radical change in the way care is delivered. One part of this is putting more responsibility for care onto the individual, enabled by the use of technology and particularly our smartphones.

GP’s already meet patients by telephone, but this effectively adds an element of face-to-face communication and an ability for GPs to look at, say, a rash, remotely. They can give advice, refer you to a specialist, or fill out a prescription there and then. It won’t drastically speed up actual GP appointments, but there are two key benefits:

Patients do not need to travel to see GP , helpful if their mobility is impaired. GP resource can now be directed to demand anywhere in the country.

You can still see a GP face to face if you prefer, and GP’s will still ask you to come in if required. This is not the end of seeing your GP in person. Which all seems very sensible, really.

So why has it been so long coming?

The NHS ‘National Programme for IT’ was launched in 2002. It was supposed to create an integrated electronic health record system across the entire NHS. Unfortunately it was pretty much a disaster, failing to deliver that despite 9 years of effort and £11bn spent. Since then, NHS (and government in general) has been cautious to invest in nationwide IT changes.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 decentralized the NHS. It removed the command-and-control power of the Department for Health and effectively broke it up into hundreds of individual Trusts, GP surgeries and commissioning groups.

That made any kind of centrally-coördinated, national rollout of new technology more challenging.

In 2014, following release of the Five Year Forward Plan, there was a new recognition that DH and NHS England needed to be more proactive introducing ideas and tech nationwide, by partnering with suppliers. With so many demands on funding, it was incredibly difficult to qualify investing in a national programme unless there’s demand from patients and/or GPs. But, as Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. The demand isn’t always there for new approaches. So progress was slow.

Now that GP at Hand is in place, the hope is that this kind of thing represents a tipping point, where the NHS embraces new technology more vigorously. Let’s hope it acts as a catalyst for modernization across the board.

You know the drill:

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