Hugh Pennington

Shares in the Nahl Group, part of the ‘no win no fee’ legal industry, fell by 25 per cent overnight after the chancellor of the exchequer announced in his autumn statement that the government ‘intends to introduce measures to end the right to cash compensation for minor whiplash injuries’. He also said that the government would be consulting on the details and expected average savings of £40 to £50 per motor insurance policy to accrue. In 2012, the Ministry of Justice characterised the UK as ‘whiplash capital of the world’. In 2012-13 there were 476,938 claims for whiplash, making up 58.2 per cent of all road traffic accident personal injury claims. The quick jerk of the head caused by the sudden stop of a vehicle can cause real injury. But in cases of minor whiplash the diagnosis relies on symptoms alone. This is the problem.

A police helicopter crashed into the Clutha Vaults Bar in Glasgow on 29 November 2013. The pilot, two police officer passengers and seven in the bar were killed. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch published its final report last week. Relatives of those who died had been briefed in advance. They said that they were doubly disappointed.

With the exception of the novels he serialised in them – Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations – the contents of Charles Dickens’s weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round have mostly been forgotten. But the lucky purchase by the book dealer Jeremy Parrott of a bound set of All the Year Round with handwritten marginalia identifying nearly all the anonymous contributors of its 2500 articles, stories and poems has generatedmuchexcitement. The handwriting seems mostly to be Dickens’s own, and names Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins and Lewis Carroll among many others: the speculation is that the bound set was Dickens’s file copy, which he kept in the flat above the office. Whether the number of general readers will increase – in spite of the complete availability of both weeklies’ contents online – is hard to say. It would be a great pity if it didn’t. Although the articles were written a century and a half ago, they covered many issues that still trouble us, and show that what we tend to think of as new and malignant manifestations of modernity are anything but new.

The Morecambe Bay Investigation, chaired by Bill Kirkup, published its report on 3 March. ‘The name of Morecambe Bay,’ it says, ‘has been added to a roll of dishonoured NHS names that stretch from Ely Hospital to Mid-Staffordshire.’ The report isn’t about the town of Morecambe, but deals with the dreadful things that happened for nearly a decade across the bay at Furness General Hospital (FGH) in Barrow, part of the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Trust.

There’s been excitement this week at the announcement of a new antibiotic. Called teixobactin by its discoverers, it is produced by a soil bacterium, also new to science because it needed the development of a novel system to enable it to grow and be tested in the laboratory for antibiotic production.