Monday, 6 September 2010
SAVE HOPE MATERNITY UNIT.
Well done to all who turned up at The Born In Salford Rally on Saturday. A Fantastic turnout and very well organised. Special mentions for Lisa Kean & Heather Rawlinson for pulling it all together.
We will now continue to work to put pressure on Andrew Lansley and the relevant bodies to ensure we keep our maternity unit in Salford so that future generations of Salfordians are born in Salford.
Keep signing the petitions and and lobby your GP's.
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Sarkozy's Roma Purge.
Having done work for the Council of Europe around the Roma population and their continuing persecution across Europe, I couldn't agree more with the sentiments of this editorial from today's Independent.
By the letter of the European law, Nicolas Sarkozy has the right to expel immigrant Roma from France and break up their settlements. Although the two countries where the majority of Roma have long been settled, Romania and Bulgaria, are now members of the EU, until 2014 their citizens are only allowed to stay in other EU states for a maximum of three months, unless they have jobs there.
So M. Sarkozy – whose ministers met European Union officials this week to defend their actions – can claim that he is merely upholding the law. And, technically, there are other justifications he can summon for his initiative, which has seen more than 600 Roma put on flights to Eastern Europe since July, and more than 8,000 expelled so far in the course of the year. It is an "offensive sécuritaire", because the Roma pose a security threat; it is an "action humanitaire", a "voluntary repatriation" of individuals whom the French government is generously presenting with gifts of a few hundred euros to start afresh. And it is a blow against human trafficking.
Nobody should be fooled by this rhetoric. In hard times, when politicians feel the lash of people's anger, there is nothing more satisfactory than a good scapegoat. And the Roma have always been the ideal scapegoat, being not only visually distinctive but also poor and atomised. To an increasingly intolerant element within France, and many others in Western Europe, gypsies are an insult to the settled way of life, and certain ideas about property, education and work.
They are, in other words, the perfect victims, and M. Sarkozy would not be the crafty politician he is if he did not see in them an excellent opportunity to steal a march on Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. There is evidence that his campaign is already paying dividends in the opinion polls.
The risk now, after objections were raised when the expulsions started at the end of July, is that the matter is forgotten about. But that must not be allowed to happen. Hitler did not target gypsies because they were a security threat but because in the Nazi scheme they were labelled as genetically inferior. The rationale was different, but the impulse was the same, and so were the victims. Wrapped into our belief in progress is the idea that we learn from history, and that collectively we have the wisdom to avoid repeating the more terrible mistakes of the recent past. M. Sarkozy's Roma purge is a reminder that we ignore that lesson at our peril.
By the letter of the European law, Nicolas Sarkozy has the right to expel immigrant Roma from France and break up their settlements. Although the two countries where the majority of Roma have long been settled, Romania and Bulgaria, are now members of the EU, until 2014 their citizens are only allowed to stay in other EU states for a maximum of three months, unless they have jobs there.
So M. Sarkozy – whose ministers met European Union officials this week to defend their actions – can claim that he is merely upholding the law. And, technically, there are other justifications he can summon for his initiative, which has seen more than 600 Roma put on flights to Eastern Europe since July, and more than 8,000 expelled so far in the course of the year. It is an "offensive sécuritaire", because the Roma pose a security threat; it is an "action humanitaire", a "voluntary repatriation" of individuals whom the French government is generously presenting with gifts of a few hundred euros to start afresh. And it is a blow against human trafficking.
Nobody should be fooled by this rhetoric. In hard times, when politicians feel the lash of people's anger, there is nothing more satisfactory than a good scapegoat. And the Roma have always been the ideal scapegoat, being not only visually distinctive but also poor and atomised. To an increasingly intolerant element within France, and many others in Western Europe, gypsies are an insult to the settled way of life, and certain ideas about property, education and work.
They are, in other words, the perfect victims, and M. Sarkozy would not be the crafty politician he is if he did not see in them an excellent opportunity to steal a march on Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. There is evidence that his campaign is already paying dividends in the opinion polls.
The risk now, after objections were raised when the expulsions started at the end of July, is that the matter is forgotten about. But that must not be allowed to happen. Hitler did not target gypsies because they were a security threat but because in the Nazi scheme they were labelled as genetically inferior. The rationale was different, but the impulse was the same, and so were the victims. Wrapped into our belief in progress is the idea that we learn from history, and that collectively we have the wisdom to avoid repeating the more terrible mistakes of the recent past. M. Sarkozy's Roma purge is a reminder that we ignore that lesson at our peril.
Monday, 30 August 2010
Friday, 27 August 2010
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
Open wide for public service destruction
July 6 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of the great Welsh socialist Aneurin Bevan, the father of the NHS.
Just six days after the anniversary, Tory Health Minister Andrew Lansley (above) announced radical government plans which, if carried out, will mark the end of Bevan's great, humane creation in all but name.
The extent of the reforms, which allow all hospitals to leave public ownership as well as scrapping primary health care trusts and the revenue cap on private patients, shocked many political observers. They were a clear breach of Lansley's own pre-election pledge not to introduce any major structural reform of the NHS.
But those who appreciate that the "progressive" Con-Dem government bats for capital and not for the ordinary British people would not have been surprised in the least.
In January, the Daily Telegraph revealed that Lansley, then shadow health secretary, had received £21,000 for the running of his private office from private equity tycoon John Nash, chairman of Care UK and several other health companies.
In company documents Nash, who also gave the Tories £60,000 in September 2009, enthused over "recent policy statements by the opposition Conservative Party in the UK which have substantially strengthened their commitment to more open market reform to allow new providers of NHS services and for greater freedom for patients to choose their GP and hospital provider."
For privateers like Nash the trouble with Labour was that after the fall of Tony Blair the "open market reform" of the NHS was proceeding too slowly.
Now Nash and his fellow private healthcare providers have got the fast-track "reforming" government they want. But for pro-privatisation politicians like Lansley there remains a problem.
Despite the relentless propaganda of neoliberal think tanks and NHS-bashing columns by right-wing writers such as Janet Daley, Simon Heffer and Richard Littlejohn, the NHS remains an enormously popular institution. It's loved not just by socialists and social democrats, but by Conservative voters too.
If the government announced that the NHS was to be privatised en bloc there'd be a huge public outcry. So Lansley needs to present his reforms as "liberating" the NHS and achieve privatisation through the backdoor.
The government is clearly using the destruction of NHS dentistry as its model.
From the 1990s onwards, private dental chains started buying up NHS practices and converting them to private-only practices. The value of private dentistry grew from £289m in 1994-95 to just under £2bn in 2001-2. And costs for treatments soared - on average private treatments are four times more expensive than those offered on the NHS.
Millions of Britons, unable to pay the higher costs and without an NHS practice in their area, simply stopped going to the dentist altogether. As a result tooth decay, mouth cancer and other oral diseases rose sharply.
As I highlighted in the New Statesman in 2005, "A predominantly private dental service inevitably means a two-tier service: good mouths and gleaming smiles for the rich; disease, tooth decay and emergency extraction dentistry for the rest."
What we are heading for if the coalition gets its way is a predominantly private health service. As in dentistry, that will mean a two-tier service - good health and prompt treatment for the rich, longer waiting times and a second-class service for the rest.
How Nye Bevan must be turning in his grave.
Neil Clark Morning Star
Just six days after the anniversary, Tory Health Minister Andrew Lansley (above) announced radical government plans which, if carried out, will mark the end of Bevan's great, humane creation in all but name.
The extent of the reforms, which allow all hospitals to leave public ownership as well as scrapping primary health care trusts and the revenue cap on private patients, shocked many political observers. They were a clear breach of Lansley's own pre-election pledge not to introduce any major structural reform of the NHS.
But those who appreciate that the "progressive" Con-Dem government bats for capital and not for the ordinary British people would not have been surprised in the least.
In January, the Daily Telegraph revealed that Lansley, then shadow health secretary, had received £21,000 for the running of his private office from private equity tycoon John Nash, chairman of Care UK and several other health companies.
In company documents Nash, who also gave the Tories £60,000 in September 2009, enthused over "recent policy statements by the opposition Conservative Party in the UK which have substantially strengthened their commitment to more open market reform to allow new providers of NHS services and for greater freedom for patients to choose their GP and hospital provider."
For privateers like Nash the trouble with Labour was that after the fall of Tony Blair the "open market reform" of the NHS was proceeding too slowly.
Now Nash and his fellow private healthcare providers have got the fast-track "reforming" government they want. But for pro-privatisation politicians like Lansley there remains a problem.
Despite the relentless propaganda of neoliberal think tanks and NHS-bashing columns by right-wing writers such as Janet Daley, Simon Heffer and Richard Littlejohn, the NHS remains an enormously popular institution. It's loved not just by socialists and social democrats, but by Conservative voters too.
If the government announced that the NHS was to be privatised en bloc there'd be a huge public outcry. So Lansley needs to present his reforms as "liberating" the NHS and achieve privatisation through the backdoor.
The government is clearly using the destruction of NHS dentistry as its model.
From the 1990s onwards, private dental chains started buying up NHS practices and converting them to private-only practices. The value of private dentistry grew from £289m in 1994-95 to just under £2bn in 2001-2. And costs for treatments soared - on average private treatments are four times more expensive than those offered on the NHS.
Millions of Britons, unable to pay the higher costs and without an NHS practice in their area, simply stopped going to the dentist altogether. As a result tooth decay, mouth cancer and other oral diseases rose sharply.
As I highlighted in the New Statesman in 2005, "A predominantly private dental service inevitably means a two-tier service: good mouths and gleaming smiles for the rich; disease, tooth decay and emergency extraction dentistry for the rest."
What we are heading for if the coalition gets its way is a predominantly private health service. As in dentistry, that will mean a two-tier service - good health and prompt treatment for the rich, longer waiting times and a second-class service for the rest.
How Nye Bevan must be turning in his grave.
Neil Clark Morning Star
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