Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne poses for photographers outside 11 Downing Street Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
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Today's top SocietyGuardian stories
• NHS reform: health and social care bill passes its final hurdle
• Health and social care bill was a deep failure of Conservative politics
• NHS reform bill passes with government bloodied, but unbowed
• NHS staff survey: 40% would not recommend health service to family
• Budget 2012: George Osborne will 'institutionalise poverty'
• Mark Serwotka: no one should take lectures from privileged Tories
• Daily dose of aspirin can cut cancer risk, say studies
• Pregnancy safe after breast cancer treatment, study shows
• Boris Johnson widens lead over Ken Livingstone in race for London mayor
• Horse-riding to the rescue: Exmoor's volunteer crime-fighters
All today's SocietyGuardian stories
In today's SocietyGuardian section
• Councils' blind gamble with equality
• David Brindle: Charities hit by funding switch to business
• London 2012: Game plan to boost community
• Peter Hetherington: We need more housing urgently, but not at any cost
• Sociologist urges a wider view of the welfare state
• Mark Johnson: Why it's OK to give to homeless drug addicts
On the Guardian Professional Networks
• Live discussion from noon: Is personalisation working in social care?
• Oxford NHS trust treats ills caused by electronic patient records roll out
• Could the politics of the town hall drive health commissioners away from local government? Oswin Baker shares his fears
• Kirsty Kitchen from Amazon PR explains how to use communications to prepare for, implement and cement charity mergers
• How can social franchising help social enterprises break into the big time, asks Simon Lee
• Children's health: a good map is worth a thousand words, says Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
• What does NHS reform mean for housing officers
On my radar ...
• The budget, which is being delivered today. Andrew Sparrow and Graeme Wearden will be following all the news and reaction on the Politics live blog; Sparrow notes that the Treasury has already put out 11 budet-related stories and the broad outline of the tax changes being announced are already in the public domain. He adds:
So should we all pack and go home? Of course not. It's a budget, and so there's a plethora of announcements to report, plus all the drama, plus - all importantly - the politics.
We'll also have analysis from our specialist correspondents and public services networks throughout the rest of the day. Do also see Polly Curtis' Reality Check blog, which is posing the question Are we really all in this together?
• Some reactions to the passing of the health and social care bill. On his Health Matters blog, Paul Corrigan asks Why is the government so pleased with itself now that it has passed its health and social care bill? and warns:
Only very few people are really interested in the detailed cut and thrust of the politics of the NHS and the language used in those rows, and whilst only a few are interested in the politics everyone is very interested in the practice of the NHS.
The public know that there has been a row about the NHS caused by Government reforms. So over the next few years every time when they, or their mum or son, use the NHS the Government's reforms will be casting a shadow over their experience.
If all goes well it will because the NHS is full of good people. But if something doesn't go well, then some will link their problems to the 15 months of political fuss caused by the Government NHS reforms.
For the Government the difficulty is that the NHS is a real organisation and not one that operates just at the level of ideas and emotions. There are 1 million people having some kind of consultation with the NHS every 36 hours. This organisation is primarily a delivery organisation having with real relationships with real people.
And thanks to Bob Hudson for sharing the link to this piece by Professor Ian Shaw , professor of health policy at Nottingham's School of Sociology and Social Policy, who warns that the government appears not to have learned the lessons of NHS restructuring in Kidderminster:
Every single Royal College of Health is against the bill, as are the three big health unions, with the BMA even passing a vote of no confidence in the Health Secretary. This is mainly because of its privatising elements and the grossly unwieldy structure it promises to impose, which they see being of detriment to patients. What is more, doctors have been actively campaigning against it, with 50 doctors targeting marginal LibDem and Conservative seats in the next election.
... Take away the rights and (considerable) wrongs of the Health and Social Care Bill and anyone can see that it needs the doctors 'on board' to make it work. Without this we can expect a Kidderminster magnified 1,000 times across the country. It is hardly surprising that the Prime Minister is looking to a Cabinet re-shuffle before the summer. Considered opinion is that Lansley will go. He would have to, if the government is to try and re-engage with doctors and much-maligned NHS managers to best deliver services to patients. Even then, it's unlikely to deflect the Kidderminster effect.
• A fascinating post from the Not So Big Society blog on adoption , in which Abe Laurens describes attending an "adoption party" and analyses the government's reform proposals:
Whatever your views, it's disconcertingly easy for the evidence of the lasting effects of culture and background to be shunted into the sidings in favour of the 'common sense' conclusion that children are better off in a home than they would be in care, regardless of the consequences later in life. The seductive comfort of common sense in adoption provides a measure of security and sanctity for almost everyone involved in the adoption process, except for the child who has to deal with this, now and for the rest of their life, and has nowhere to hide.
Many decisions about what constitutes a cultural match are absurdly arcane and are based not on a proper understanding of the child's history and perceptions of their own identity but on a skewed, mechanistic process that equates 'culture' to a sum of their parents' ancestry and distorts complex reality as much as the common sense approach. I've come across siblings who waited and waited because their maternal grandparents were Polish and no white family was considered unless that box was ticked, or black prospective adopters rejected because they lived in an area of London that was predominantly white.
Of course there is some truth behind the government's apparent wish to relegate culture and background to a minor role. The remedy, however, isn't an arbitrary shift based on ideology and expediency. Rather, it is about better practice, better assessments and a more preceptive insight into the subtleties of identity. This in turn leads to improved matching, including both an acceptance that perfection is not possible every time but also what does and does not constitute an acceptable deviation from the vital principle of a cultural match, what the evidence is for such a conclusion and how this will be handled, now and in future. None of this is encouraged by the proposals
.
• Citizens' Advice Bureaux, which are taking part in a Twitter experiment this week. Bureaux around the country are tweeting their work using the hashtag #CABLive; as Polly Toynbee points out:
They're the real Big Society - yet cut
• A heartwarming post from Alex Andreou's blog in which he describes a night-time ritual in his south London neighbourhood, as local shopkeepers hand out food and drink to the rubbish collectors cleaning their street. Sturdy concludes it's:
The Big Society. No speeches; no fanfares; no empty rhetoric. Just a recognition of togetherness. Unrehearsed solidarity from one group of people, doing a shitty job for little money, to another.
Kindness is not expended. It is merely recycled.
Other news
• BBC: Ads watchdog clears child charity
• Children & Young People Now: Cell fires prompt safety fears for young offenders
• Community Care: Children's minister gets adoption lesson from top social worker
• Independent: AstraZeneca antidepressant is dumped after trial failures
• Inside Housing: Peer withdraws attempt to change squatting law
• LocalGov.co.uk: Sutton hands residents budget controls
• Public Finance: Jury's out on procurement cards, says NAO
• Telegraph: Austerity measures could be eased, OBR to show
• Third Sector: Charity advice sector will lose £100m by 2013/14, says coalition
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