Corbyn: We need to stand up for the future of our NHS

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/corbyn-we-need-to-stand-up-for-the-future-of-our-nhs

Image of Jeremy Corbyn and Hugo Chavez
Image of Jeremy Corbyn and Hugo Chavez

Labour’s former leader spoke to the Morning Star’s CEREN SAGIR this weekend on the party’s current trajectory on the NHS, during a huge demonstration against further privatisation of the health service

WHEN Peace and Justice Project founder and Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn warned the public by revealing evidence of the Tory government’s secret dealings with US companies selling off the NHS, the media labelled it “a Russian conspiracy.”

But it seems that Labour’s current leadership is determined to follow in the Tories’ footsteps, with Keir Starmer declaring that nothing is “off limits” when it comes to the NHS.

When asked if the NHS would be safe in the hands of the opposition if it were to win the next general election, Corbyn said: “I’d like to think so, but I’m very worried — because our NHS is a very precious institution: healthcare, universal and free at the point of need.

“If we go into an election pledged to continue the private operation within the NHS and farming services out to the private sector, then that is a form of privatisation.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/corbyn-we-need-to-stand-up-for-the-future-of-our-nhs

Continue ReadingCorbyn: We need to stand up for the future of our NHS

The Labour Party Can’t Abandon Working People – Jeremy Corbyn

https://labouroutlook.org/2023/03/01/the-labour-party-cant-abandon-working-people-jeremy-corbyn/

Image of Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party
Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party

At a time when the Tories are accelerating their assault on democracy, the Labour leadership should be fortifying its defense. However, it will not be able to defend democracy if it isn’t prepared to respect it within its own movement. Across the country, left-wing members are being barred from applying to be a candidate, denying local parties the chance to vote for popular, working-class, talented people in a fair and democratic selection process. As Keir Starmer himself promised in 2020, “Local Party members should select their candidates for every election.” Reneging on this pledge sends an alarming signal to those whose trust you now seek to garner.

It also displays a lack of respect for those to whom we owe our very place in Parliament. Labour members are the ones who give up their time to knock on doors in the pouring rain. Labour members are the ones who campaign for local change in their communities. Labour members are the ones who keep the party afloat. The Labour membership is the soul of the Labour Party — you cannot crush one without the other.

Only a democratic party can provide the space that is needed to empower those with the creative ideas and transformative solutions this country desperately needs. Today, the division between rich and poor and the threat of ecological collapse are greater than ever before. Our aim should be to unite disenfranchised communities around a more hopeful alternative.

https://labouroutlook.org/2023/03/01/the-labour-party-cant-abandon-working-people-jeremy-corbyn/

Continue ReadingThe Labour Party Can’t Abandon Working People – Jeremy Corbyn

Labour bans CLPs from links with string of human rights/peace/health groups incl PSC, JVL, Corbyn’s PJP

Original article and image republished from The Swawkbox for non-Commerical use.

Email to CLPs warns them that any existing affiliations with groups campaigning for abortion rights, minority human rights, disarmament and a fully public NHS are cancelled

Image thanks to The Skwawkbox

The Labour party has banned local parties (CLPs) from affiliating with an array of groups supporting the human rights of ethnic minorities or campaigning for a public NHS, in yet another Stalinist move to limit members’ freedom of expression.

And local parties are being notified by email that any affiliations they already have in place are unilaterally cancelled – and that if a right-wing group is affiliated with the party nationally, they have no say over whether that group affiliates with them locally.

One such email reads:

Organisations that are nationally affiliated to the party are eligible to affiliate to any CLP provided they pay the appropriate fee and the CLP cannot debate or decide on their affiliations.

…The following affiliations are therefore no longer valid and the CLP may not renew its affiliation without approval from the NEC. To do so would breach party rules. These are:

Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War Coalition, Republic, London Irish Abortion Rights Campaign, Jewish Voice for Labour, Somalis for Labour, Sikhs for Labour, All African Women’s Group, Health Campaigns Together, The Campaign against Climate Change Trades Union, Peace & Justice Project.

Yes, you read that right: a group campaigning for peace, human rights, women’s rights, disarmament and to protect the environment are not welcome in Keir Starmer’s Labour party and party member groups risk disciplinary action if they try to associate with them.

The news should come as no surprise in Starmer’s racist, pro-privatisation, pro-apartheid party where his promises to renationalise the NHS and public utilitiesprotect the climate and empower member rights and democracy were binned almost the instant he got his backside into Corbyn’s office and his claim to be on the side of domestic violence victims masks a shameless cover-up of abuse of them.

And of course, given recent appalling comments by the leadership and its agents, Jews who believe in the human rights of Palestinians are particularly unwelcome – and indeed are being disproportionately targeted by the regime in a campaign of blatant (but ignored by the media) antisemitism and discrimination.

Original article and image republished from The Swawkbox for non-Commerical use.

Continue ReadingLabour bans CLPs from links with string of human rights/peace/health groups incl PSC, JVL, Corbyn’s PJP

Record number of junior doctors vote overwhelmingly for strike action

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/record-number-of-junior-doctors-vote-overwhelmingly-for-strike-action

Junior doctors wear scrubs and masks as they sit down in a silent protest outside Bristol Royal Infirmary on the second day of all-out strike action in April 2016

JUNIOR doctors in England have voted overwhelmingly to take strike action over pay, their union the British Medical Association (BMA) announced today.

Almost 37,000 members of the union took part in the ballots with 98 per cent saying they were in favour of striking, which the BMA said will be a three-day action.

The vote is the largest turnout for a ballot of doctors by the BMA, and a record number of junior doctors voted for strike action.

BMA junior doctors committee co-chairs Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi said: “The government has only itself to blame, standing by in silent indifference as our members are forced to take this difficult decision.”

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/record-number-of-junior-doctors-vote-overwhelmingly-for-strike-action

Continue ReadingRecord number of junior doctors vote overwhelmingly for strike action

Tory government’s ‘authoritarian’ anti-strike legislation slammed by human rights and civil liberties groups

Members of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) on the picket line outside London’s St Thomas’ Hospital as they go on strike for the first time over pay

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/tory-government-authoritarian-anti-strike-legislation-slammed-by-human-rights-and-civil-liberties-groups

MORE than 50 human rights and civil liberties groups slammed the Tory government’s new anti-strike legislation today as an attack on the fundamental right to take industrial action.

An open letter, penned by groups including Liberty, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam, said the proposals would allow “a further significant and unjustified intrusion by the state into the freedom of association and assembly.”

Ministers prepared to rush the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill through its final stages in the Commons last night, claiming public services need safeguarding amid the biggest strike wave in decades.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/tory-government-authoritarian-anti-strike-legislation-slammed-by-human-rights-and-civil-liberties-groups

Continue ReadingTory government’s ‘authoritarian’ anti-strike legislation slammed by human rights and civil liberties groups

Revealed: Taskforce to tackle NHS backlog is stuffed with private health CEOs

Original article republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Lobbyists for private health corporations were among those tasked with shaping proposals for NHS recovery plan

Adam Bychawski 19 January 2023, 3.31pm

Sunak met with the CEOs of several UK private health corporations in Number 10 in December.
| No 10 Downing Street

Rishi Sunak hosted a meeting with seven bosses from the UK’s biggest private health companies to discuss how to tackle the NHS backlog, openDemocracy can reveal.

Campaigners have raised concerns that the close involvement of private healthcare corporations in the government’s response to the NHS crisis will benefit shareholders at the expense of public investment.

The government announced the creation of the Elective Recovery Taskforce in December to provide advice on how to “turbocharge NHS recovery from the pandemic, reduce waiting times for patients and eliminate waits for routine care of over a year by 2025”.

At the time, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) refused to give openDemocracy details of the group’s members, or say who had attended its launch at Number 10 led by the PM and health secretary Steve Barclay in December.

A guestlist for the event, obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request, reveals that half a dozen CEOs from private health firms were in attendance. 

Guests included the chief execs of the UK’s two largest private hospital operators: Paolo Pieri, the chief exec of Circle Health Group, and Justin Ash, who heads up Spire Healthcare. Also present was Jim Easton, the chief executive of Practice Plus Group, the NHS’s top private healthcare provider.

They were joined by David Hare, the chief executive of Independent Healthcare Provider Network, a lobby group that represents for-profit and not-for-profit private health organisations including Bupa and HCA, one of the biggest healthcare facility companies in the US.

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The private healthcare executives, which also included CEOs from Horder Healthcare, Newmedica, InHealth and Medefer, outnumbered the five NHS England directors invited to the event.

DHSC said it could not provide openDemocracy with minutes from the meeting because none were taken, and refused to share any papers handed out to attendees.

Separately, the government quietly published a list of members of the Elective Recovery Taskforce on Monday. The 16-person group includes DHSC ministers, six NHS bosses, and Hare.

Other members include Bill Morgan, a private healthcare lobbyist whose past clients included Virgin Care, who was appointed a Number 10 adviser in November, and Paul Manning, an NHS consultant surgeon who is also chief medical officer for Circle Healthcare.

The government said the role of the task force would be to “shape proposals for how the healthcare system can make use of all resources at its disposal, further tackling the backlog caused by the Covid-19 pandemic”. It will conclude its work in March.

Last week, the prime minister said he had signed up to an NHS GP after the Guardian reported that he had registered with a private clinic in west London that charges £250 for a consultation.

The British Medical Association warned last year that the government’s NHS recovery plan would significantly increase the outsourcing of services to private providers and that it “threatens the clinical and financial viability and sustainability of the NHS”.

Tony O’Sullivan, a retired consultant paediatrician and co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public, told openDemocracy: “The head parasites are at the table to maximise future extraction of NHS funds.”

He added: “This is an important disclosure extracted from the government proving the direction of travel – to continue disinvesting in the NHS and increase its enforced dependence on private health care.

“The private sector was bailed out during Covid, has a lucrative four-year £10bn deal ongoing and is also in a position to earn massive profits from patients forced to go privately to avoid NHS queues of 7.2 million.”

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Original article republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingRevealed: Taskforce to tackle NHS backlog is stuffed with private health CEOs

Ambulance workers stage another day of strike action as dispute over pay for overstretched staff shows no sign of ending

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/ambulance-staff-stage-another-day-strike-action-dispute-over-pay

Image of Accident and emergency

THOUSANDS of ambulance workers staged more strike action today as the bitter dispute over pay for overstretched NHS staff showed no sign of abating.

Nearly 2,000 paramedics, emergency care assistants, call handlers and other staff across north-west England downed tools for 12 hours from midday, their union GMB said.

The walkout, which followed industrial action by thousands of GMB, Unite and Unison ambulance employees on Monday, came ahead of what could be biggest-ever NHS strike on February 6, when all three unions are due to strike alongside nurses.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/ambulance-staff-stage-another-day-strike-action-dispute-over-pay

Continue ReadingAmbulance workers stage another day of strike action as dispute over pay for overstretched staff shows no sign of ending

Thousands of ambulance workers strike amid ‘disheartening’ and ‘demoralising’ conditions in the NHS

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/thousands-of-ambulance-workers-strike-amid-disheartening-and-demoralising-conditions-in-the-nhs

Image reads Accident & Emergency, A & E

THOUSANDS of ambulance workers across England and Wales took strike action today in face of the “disheartening” and “demoralising” conditions in the NHS.

Up to 25,000 paramedics, call handlers, drivers and technicians from Unison and GMB took part in the action across 24 hours in a dispute with the government over pay.

Workers on the picket lines said it was the last place they wanted to be, describing regular hours-long waits to hand over patients from ambulances to the care of doctors and nurses.

Paramedic Jenny Giblin, on a picket line in Birkenhead, Wirral, with her 16-month-old son, said the situation had “definitely got worse” in her seven-year career.

She said: “Corridors are almost like wards. Sometimes you spend a whole shift on a corridor.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/thousands-of-ambulance-workers-strike-amid-disheartening-and-demoralising-conditions-in-the-nhs

Continue ReadingThousands of ambulance workers strike amid ‘disheartening’ and ‘demoralising’ conditions in the NHS

Starmer ditches pledge to end NHS outsourcing

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/starmer-ditches-pledge-end-nhs-outsourcing

LABOUR leader Sir Keir Starmer’s apparent U-turn on a commitment to end NHS outsourcing is “morally wrong and politically self-defeating,” campaigners said today.

The criticism from groups including Keep Our NHS Public and Momentum came after Mr Starmer told Sky News he would seek to use the private sector in the health service more “effectively” if elected prime minister.

The policy breaks a promise Mr Starmer made during his party leadership campaign in spring 2020 to abolish the use of external private providers.

The volte-face follows comments by shadow health secretary Wes Streeting urging Tory ministers to use private hospitals to help clear Covid pandemic-related treatment backlogs.

Continue ReadingStarmer ditches pledge to end NHS outsourcing

How austerity caused the NHS crisis

The A&E delays can be traced back to Cameron – and have been worsened by successive health secretaries

Original article republished from Open Democracy under  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

NHS sign

Danny Dorling

4 January 2023, 1.19pm

When the coalition government first introduced its landmark Health and Social Care Act in 2010, health secretary Andrew Lansley claimed the NHS would never again need to undergo such huge organisational change.

But even at the time, one widely respected commentator warned that – far from being the final fix that Lansley had advertised – the act “could become this government’s ‘poll tax’”.

In the event, it has been a slow-burn poll tax. Only now, ten years after it came into law, are we seeing its full effects, with publications from The Times to the Morning Star reporting that “A&E delays are ‘killing up to 500 people a week’”.

This figure – 5% above the normal number of people who die each week, though that baseline is also rising – can surely be traced back to the act, which ushered in a greater wave of privatisation than ever before. It compelled NHS management to behave as if they were in the private sector, competing to win business, and led to an increase in the proportion of contracts won and the use of contracts overall.

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At the time, the damage caused was little noticed because government cuts in the first round of austerity targeted local authorities and adult social care. The first group of people to see their life expectancy fall were elderly women who most often lived on their own. It was in 2014 that this connection became apparent.

Back then, the government was still confident, with the Department for Health and Social Care rebutting any suggestion that austerity and privatisation might be linked to mortality. The privatisation figures were also opaque. In 2015, halfway through Jeremy Hunt’s tenure as health secretary, it was reported that ministers were misleading the public. By that point, private firms were winning 40% of new contracts – far higher than the 6% spend share claimed by the government and almost identical to the 41% won by NHS bodies.

The first great increase in mortality was recorded in that same year, a 5% rise that the government tried to attribute to influenza. The problem with that explanation was that the stalling and falls in life expectancy were not seen to the same extent anywhere else in Europe.

Last year it was claimed that austerity since 2010 had led to a third of a million excess deaths

By 2019, life expectancy for women had fallen in almost a fifth of all neighbourhoods and in over a tenth for men. Poorer people, both old and young, in poorer areas suffered most, with infant mortality among babies born to the poorest parents rising. Later there was a rise in deaths of women who were pregnant.

As NHS waiting lists spiralled, a tenth of all adults, most of those who could, were resorting to accessing private health care in 2021. But, in doing so, they lengthened the lists further by jumping the queues and thus diverting resources.

By April 2022, the number of vacant beds in hospitals was at an all-time low. Estimates of the damage done kept rising. Less than six months later, it was claimed that austerity since 2010 had led to a third of a million excess deaths, twice as many as from the pandemic.

Now, A&E departments are stretched to capacity, unable to clear patients to other beds in our hospitals as they could in the past. Those other beds cannot be cleared as they were before because adult social care has been repeatedly decimated, with what is left being tendered out to private companies.

All of this was foretold. In the four years after 2015, the value of one group of private sector contracts in the NHS rose by 89%. These figures were released just before the 2019 general election, partly in response to Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, claiming that “there is no privatisation of the NHS on my watch.”

Again, the damage was not so much through the extent of covert privatisation, but through the wider ethos that had been promoted. Take the USA: most of the enormous amount of money spent on healthcare there has little impact on improving health, because the ethos is wrong.

Related content: No one voted for Rishi Sunak to return the UK to crippling austerity

24 October 2022 | Adam Ramsay

OPINION: Sunak wants yet another round of cuts to public spending. And just like in 2010, we didn’t vote for it

It is sometimes said – wrongly, that is – that the NHS has not been further privatised because the share of its spending that went to the private sector remained roughly the same between 2012 and 2020. By 2020 that share was about 7%, or just under £10bn a year. It rose to over £12bn during the pandemic when the government paid private hospitals to treat patients, but because overall health spending rose, the proportion remained roughly the same, still around 7%.

But the number of private companies involved did increase greatly, particularly in areas where there was already more private healthcare. By last year, private firms were delivering a quarter of all planned NHS hospital treatment in the least deprived areas of England, and 11% in the most deprived areas. Those shares – which have risen since 2020 – are higher than the overall 7% because it is in planned hospital treatment where the private sector has most infiltrated the NHS.

Last year, the Health and Care Act of 2022 put paid to Lansley’s claim that he had fixed the NHS ‘once and for all’. The act reduces the compulsion of the NHS from having to tender so many services to private sector bidding in future, but it was not designed to stop the rot. It will not solve the service’s problems, though there is hope that it could be the beginning of an actual change in ethos.

The pandemic made the effects of privatisation clear: Britons now have the worst access to healthcare in Europe and some of the worst post-pandemic outcomes. But the successive health secretaries who inflicted this tragedy are unrepentant.

The pandemic made the effects of privatisation clear: Britons now have the worst access to healthcare in Europe and some of the worst post-pandemic outcomes. But the successive health secretaries who inflicted this tragedy are unrepentant.

In 2018, Lansley criticised Hunt’s cuts in screening services, blaming them for delaying the detection of his bowel cancer. Hunt, meanwhile, went on to become foreign secretary and then chancellor of the exchequer. His legacy, as openDemocracy’s Caroline Molloy wrote last year, is “one of missed targets, lengthening waits, crumbling hospitals, missed opportunities, false solutions, funding boosts that vanished under scrutiny, and blaming everyone but himself.” Hancock is now most remembered for eating a camel penis and cow anus on live TV for money.

Belligerence, bravado and buffoonery. We got here because too many of us believed the words of fools.

Original article republished from Open Democracy under  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingHow austerity caused the NHS crisis