Frightened Davidson Tells May to Concentrate on Funding NHS

A day or so ago I put up a post arguing that Corbyn’s promise to renationalise the NHS had Tweezer and the Tories rattled, as there had been a story in the I that May had held the promise of repealing some of Andrew Lansley’s vile Health and Social Care Act. This is a long, convoluted act which basically absolves the Health Minister of the requirement to provide universal healthcare free at the point of delivery to everyone in Britain. It’s one of the major landmarks on the long campaign of the Thatcherite right – both Tory and New Labour – to privatise the NHS. May was also talking about increasing taxes to mend the funding deficit in the NHS. This was, however, spoilt by May acting true to form as a Tory. She immediately declared that everyone would have to pay this tax, which could be as high as £2,000. Mike’s posted a piece on his blog about how this was worked out, and pointed out that not everyone should have to pay the same amount. We have progressive taxation in this country, which means that the rich pay higher rates of tax than the poor, who can’t afford it. The Tories, however, hate progressive taxation, because they’re solidly on the side of the rich and despise the poor. And so Thatcher, Major, Cameron and now May have done their best to shift the tax burden onto the poor, in order to lower the tax rates on their rich friends. And Thatcher came unstuck in 1990/1 when she tried to promote the poll tax.

Like May’s proposed tax increase for the NHS, this was supposed to be a uniform rate charged on rich and poor alike. It was expected to replace the rates, which were charged on the value of your property. So a rich Tory donor living in a mansion was going to be charged the same amount of money as someone on unemployment benefit living in a simple terraced house. Never mind: Thatcher and her cabinet of grotesques claimed this was ‘democratic, because we all pay the same’. The British public didn’t agree, and there were massed protests and riots against it. I also know of a number of magistrates, who resigned because of it. As Justices of the Peace, they would be required to enforce this piece of legislation, which they personally felt was terribly unjust. And rather than find people guilty in support of a law, with which they profoundly disagreed, they obeyed the calls of their consciences and resigned. And I have every respect to these people for doing so. Thatcher was then outed in a coup, Major installed as her replacement, and unfortunately the Tories carried on in power until Blair’s victory in 1997.

It struck me at the time, as I said in my previous article, that May was probably trying to scare people with the £2,000 figure, which many poorer people wouldn’t be able to afford, so she could claim that the NHS is unaffordable as it stands. Cue more privatisation. Despite the fact that we could easily afford it if we took a leaf out of the European’s book and spent more on the NHS, and increased the tax rates for the rich instead.

But the fact that May is holding out the prospect of undoing her predecessor’s legislation, and raising taxes for the NHS, shows that Corbyn’s got her rattled.

And not just May. It also seems to have worried ‘Rape Clause’ Ruth Davidson north of the Border. The I ran a story on Tuesday reporting that Davidson had warned may to concentrate on increasing funding for the NHS, and ditch plans for more tax cuts. If she didn’t, she risked relegating the Tories to history.

This shows just how far the panic is spreading in the Tory party. Quite apart from Davidson and Gove forming a think tank – surely an oxymoron in their cases – to reinvigorate the Tory party with new ideas. Because, they warn, if they don’t have them, the Tories may be out of power for a whole generation.

Well, I’d just love to see this vile party and its horrendous politicians thrust out of power, and not just for a generation. That’s too short a time.

As for the gurning, smirking leader of the Tories in Scotland, today’s I carried pieces from a couple of newspapers predicting that Davidson is too young, ambitious and talented to be content to remain head of the Tories in Scotland. According to them, she will most probably try to head down south to forge a political career in Britain and Wales. What a terrible prospect! Davidson is responsible for trying to implement the government’s wretched austerity campaign in Scotland, including its demand that women, who’ve had more than two children due to rape, should have to prove this is the case when claiming child benefit. Hence her soubriquet of ‘Rape Clause’. It’s a nasty piece of vindictive legislation which punishes already vulnerable women, who have been traumatised by their sexual assault. But this is the Tories, who have absolute contempt for the poor, the weak and the underprivileged. Davidson is supposed to be a ‘liberal’ Tory, but there’s no evidence of that except her sexuality. And despite May’s attempts to position herself as a feminist, this is a thoroughly misogynist piece of legislation. The last thing the rest of Britain needs is for her to come down south to spread even more misery down here.

Actually, reading between the line, it’s possible that Davidson may not have a choice. For all that she’s supposed to have masterminded the revival of the Tories in Scotland, she didn’t actually increase their vote. Instead, the SNP’s vote decreased and Labour’s revived, which split the opposition and allowed the Tories to emerge as the largest single party, even though most
Scots voted against them. Which is another argument in favour of proportional representation. Given the parlous situation of the Tories in Scotland, it’s possible that the Scots may vote them out. This would result in the party looking around for a new leader, and Davidson given her marching orders. In which case, if she wanted to continue her career, she’d have to go south.

I don’t want her coming to England and Wales, but I look forward to the Scots voting out the Tories and their thoroughly grotesque and objectionable leader.

Frightened May Holds Out Possibility of Undoing Tory Reforms of NHS

For all the repeated smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party as a nest of vicious anti-Semites and Trotskyites, the Labour leader clearly has the Tories worried. Last week Tweezer made a couple of pronouncements about the NHS, which showed more than a hint of desperation in one, and a fair amount of the usual Tory deceit and double standards in the other.

According to the I, Tweezer had made a speech in which she discussed the possibility of trying to improve the NHS by going back and repealing some of the Tories’ own recent legislation. The article, which I think was published in Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper, but I could be wrong, stated that she was specifically considering repealing part of the 2012 Social Care Act. This is a nasty piece of legislation, which actually needs to be repealed. It was passed when Andrew Lansley was Dave Cameron’s Health Secretary. The verbiage within the Act is long and confused, and deliberately so. Critics of the Act, like Raymond Tallis, one of the authors of the book NHS SOS, have pointed out that the Act no longer makes the Health Secretary responsible for ensuring that everyone has access to NHS healthcare. The Act gives the responsibility for providing healthcare to the Care Commissioning Groups, but these are only required to provide healthcare for those enrolled with them, not for the people in a given area generally. It has been one of the major steps in the Tories’ ongoing programme of privatising the NHS. For more information on this, see Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis, NHS SOS (OneWorld 2013).

The fact that Tweezer was prepared to hold out the possibility of repealing, even partly, her predecessors’ NHS legislation suggests to me that Corbyn’s promise to renationalise the NHS has got her and her party seriously rattled. It shows that this policy, like much else in the Labour programme, is actually extremely popular. And so Tweezer is doing what she had done elsewhere with dangerously popular Labour policies in the past. She’s going to try to make it look as if the Tories are going to do something similar. Like when Labour talks about renationalising part of the electricity grid, the Tories immediately start going on about how they’ll cap energy prices.

Actually, I doubt very much that Tweezer has any intention of revising Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act, or about restoring the NHS to proper public ownership. The Tories have been trying to sell off the NHS and support private medicine since Maggie Thatcher back in the 1980s. But if Tweezer did repeal part of the 2012 Act, my guess is that it would only be to make it much worse. In the same way that Cameron announced he was going to clean up the lobbying industry and make it more transparent, and then passed legislation that actually made it far less so. This gave more power to the big lobbying firms, while making the kind of lobbying done by small groups like charities much more difficult. You can see something similar being done by the Tories with their proposed NHS legislation.

And then there was the report last week, which stated very clearly that due to the terrible underfunding of the past nine years or so, the NHS would need an extra tax of £2,000 to be paid by everyone in the UK. Or so Tweezer and the Tories claimed. Mike dealt with that projection in a post yesterday, where he noted that the Tories have been reducing the tax burden on the rich. He went on to quote Peter Stefanovic, a blogger deeply concerned with the crisis in NHS care and funding created by the Tories. Stefanovic said

“Or alternatively the Government could tax those earning over £80,000 a little more, scrap tax breaks for the very rich, stop PFI deals bleeding the NHS dry & companies like Boots accused of charging NHS over £3,000 for a £93 cancer pain-relieving mouthwash.”

Mike makes the point that with the increasing privatisation of the NHS, the call for more taxes to be spent on it is in fact a demand for more to be given to private healthcare providers, who are delivering less.

Mike concluded with the words:

These people are trying to make fools of us. They are to be challenged. Let them explain why they think the poor should be taxed more when we all have less, thanks to Tory policies.

Let’s kill this talk about more tax for the NHS right now

I also wondered if there also wasn’t a piece of subtle, ‘Nudge Unit’ type psychology also at work in the statement that we’d all have to stump anything from £1,200 to £2,000. This is a lot of money for those on very low incomes. And the Tories see themselves very much as the party of low taxation. Hence their attacks on ‘high spending’ Labour and claims that their tax reforms allow working people to keep more of their money. Though even this is a lie. The Tories have actually moved the tax burden from the rich on to the poor, and made the poor very much poorer through removing vital parts of the welfare safety net. My guess is that they’re hoping that some people at least will see that figure, and vote against increasing spending for the NHS on the grounds that they won’t be able to afford it. It also seems to me that they’ll probably try asserting that Labour will increase everyone’s tax burden by that amount when the Labour party starts fighting on the platform of NHS reform.

And with frightened working class voters rejecting an increase in taxation to pay for the NHS, they’ll go on to claim that the NHS, as a state-funded institution, is simply unaffordable and so needs further privatisation. Or to be sold off altogether.

This is how nasty, duplicitous and deceitful the Tories are. And I can remember when the Tories under Thatcher were similarly claiming that the NHS was unaffordable in the 1980s. Just like the Tory right claimed it was unaffordable back in the 1950s.

In fact, a report published in 1979 made it very clear that the NHS could very easily continue to be funded by increased taxation. And that taxation should be levelled on the rich, not the poor. But this is exactly what the Tories don’t want. They don’t want people to have access to free healthcare, and they really don’t want the rich taxed. And so they’re going to do everything they can to run down the NHS and tell the rest of us that it’s too expensive. Even though this country’s expenditure on healthcare is lower than that of many other countries in Europe, and far lower than the American’s expenditure on their massively inefficient and grossly unjust private healthcare system.

If we want to save the NHS, we have to reject May’s lies, and vote in Corbyn and a proper Labour government.

Sun’s ‘Red Tory’ Propaganda Shows Conservatives Scared of Corbyn

Remember when the Tories and their baying lapdogs in the press were all howling that Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable? They’re still trying to make this stupid and risible claim, but the increasingly hysterical puff pieces about Theresa May show that they really believe the opposite: They’re scared that he’s all too electable.

Looking through the newsagent’s yesterday, I glanced at the cover of the Scum. Its headline proclaimed that May’s manifesto showed that she was a ‘Red Tory’. They even hailed it as ‘Socialist’.

All lies of course. There’s nothing remotely ‘Socialist’ about it – it promises more privatisation, more cuts and more poverty and misery for the poor. Standard Tory policies. But it also shows that the Tories are very afraid of the Labour party manifesto and the return of real Socialism under Jeremy Corbyn.

The nonsense about May being a ‘Red Tory’ is just a rehash of the way David Cameron tried to rebrand his party in his campaign against Blair and Brown. It’s also the title of a book by his mentor, Philip Blond, which tried to argue that under Cameron, the Tories would be the true friends of the working class, citing episodes from the early 19th century when paternalist aristos like Lord Shaftesbury passed the Factory Acts and other legislation to improve conditions for workers in the mines and industry. He also spouted a lot about the Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin.

This was all part of Cameron’s campaign to present himself as being more left-wing than New Labour. He promised to ring-fence and protect funding for the NHS. He and the Tory faithful also went out and campaigned against hospital closures.

It was all a front, with absolutely no substance behind it, of course. Once in power, Cameron threw out all these promises, and did the exact opposite. He carried out with a programme of cuts and privatisation, including that of the NHS. This included Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act which removes from the secretary of state for health the obligation to provide healthcare, along with further legislation allowing the NHS to be broken up, sold off to private healthcare firms, and to charge for services.

Just as May is doing even now.

And to make sure that people didn’t remember how they’d been lied to, the Tories started removing their election pledges from their website, in a blatant rewriting of history, which would be familiar to anyone who’s read Orwell or knows a thing or two about Stalin.

Blair and Brown were easy targets for the ‘Red’ Tory approach, as they were neoliberals, who were also determined to privatise the NHS, and many of their policies were directly lifted from the Tories. Like the Private Finance Initiative to hand government infrastructure over to private firms to build and operate, including hospitals. It was easy for the Tories to pretend to be more left-wing than them, as the Tory ‘wets’ probably were. The Tories complained about Labour’s hypocrisy over these privatisations, stating quite correctly that they never dared to go so far when they were in power, as the Labour party would have bitterly and entirely rightly criticised them for it.

One in power, however, Cameron and the Tories changed their tune, and proved to be even more extremely right-wing than New Labour.

The return of this piece of shop-soiled propaganda under Corbyn conveys a rather different message, however. The Blairites and the Tory press were howling last year that Corbyn was a ‘Trotskyist’, leading dreaded Marxist radicals to infiltrate the party. The line is that his policies will lead us all back to the 1970s. And, in any case, Corbyn is ‘unelectable’. The British public don’t want his policies, and will prefer instead the neoliberalism that has kept them poor for the past forty years, as preached and followed by Thatcherite politicians like Tony Blair, Dave Cameron, and Theresa May.

But by trying to paint May as a ‘Red’ Tory with ‘Socialist’ policies, however risible this claim is, the Sun has tacitly admitted that they, and their Tory masters, are dreadfully afraid that Socialism and Jeremy Corbyn are genuinely popular, that neoliberalism is no longer popular as an economic and social policy, and that unless they try to paint May as somehow a ‘one-nation’ Tory, Corbyn is only too likely to get elected.

So let’s make their fears come true. Vote Labour on June 8th to end Tory rule and bring prosperity back to Britain’s real working people.

Another Pamphlet Written against the Privatisation of the NHS

I’ve also added another pamphlet I’ve written against the privatisation of the NHS to the ‘Pamphlets and Literature’ page on this website. I wrote it a little while ago, and am hoping to get it professionally printed. It’s entitled Privatisation: Killing the NHS, and is A5 format, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS than the other, Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.

The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.

If you want a copy of this, or any of the other pamphlets I’ve written, just head over to the ‘Literature and Pamphlets’ page, and get in touch using the contact form.

Pamphlets Written Against NHS Privatisation and Austerity

Yesterday I added a new page to this blog giving a few brief details about five pamphlets I’ve written on various subjects. I wrote them to get the information about some of the most pressing issues I’ve discussed on this blog out to a wider readership. I wanted to have something I could physically give to people if they asked for information, such as at demonstrations. They’re only short leaflets, produced on the computer and printer at home, and folded over, but I hope they do the job. They are the following:

The Advancement of Learning: Science in the Middle Ages, A5, 14 pp.
This is based on a talk I gave at Uni, and an article I put up on this blog, to show that, contrary to the received wisdom, the Middle Ages was also a period of great scientific and technical discovery, and that from the 12th century onwards scholars took a positive interest and delight in the scientific endeavour.

Academies: Failing Schools for Corporate Profits, A5, 14pp.

This traces the history of academy schools right back to their origins as City Technology Colleges, a Thatcherite policy set up under Kenneth Baker, which was terminated because it was a failure. It was then revived as City Academies by Tony Blair in 2000, before being renamed as just ‘academies’. It argues that they’re a form of educational privatisation, they don’t raise standards, and are taking the country back to a period before the 1944 Education Act that made universal secondary education free and universal.

Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, A5, 10pp.

This gives a brief history of the governments’ attempts to privatise the NHS gradually from Maggie Thatcher onwards, culminating in Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act, which threatens to completely privatise it. It also reproduces the arguments against the private healthcare system that Thatcher and Tony Blair wanted to introduce made by Robin Cook in a Fabian pamphlet published in the 1980s. A longer pamphlet on the same subject is also in preparation.

Stop the Work Capability Test – Before More People Die, A5, 6pp.

Short leaflet describing the introduction of the Work Capability Test, the flawed models of sickness on which it’s based, and the assumption behind it that most people claiming long term sickness or disability benefit are malingerers. It attacks the commercial interests behind it – it was drawn up on the advice of Unum, an American insurance company that was prosecuted in the Land of the Free for not paying out on its insurance schemes, and was labelled a ‘disability denier’ by the American authorities. This scheme is scientific nonsense, designed to enrich corrupt private corporations and has led to suffering and deaths of the people, who have been thrown off their benefits as a result.

This briefly discusses Guy Standing’s idea that a new class has arisen, the precariat, and his recommendations for ending their poverty. The precariat are those people, who have become less than citizens, through having the rights taken away through punitive employment legislation and welfare cuts. They are often highly educated individuals, forced to accept work below their educational qualifications, simply to make ends meet. They are trapped in a series of low paid jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment. This is a result of flexible employment policies, such as zero hours and short term contracts. They are forced into poverty through welfare cuts, benefits sanctions, and workfare. This class also includes migrant workers, who travel around the world in search of work, and find themselves similarly trapped in poverty without the rights of their host nation’s citizens. Standing’s recommendations for ending their poverty include restoring citizenship, giving migrants and the unemployed the same rights as fully employed citizens, and ending the sanctions system, workfare and the work capability tests.

If you’d like any of these pamphlets, go to the page for them and use the contact form there. Or simply get in touch using the comments below, and I’ll get back to you. If you only want a single issue of any of these pamphlets, let me know, and I’ll post it to you free of charge.

NHS SOS: Further Resources against NHS Privatisation

As well as the information and resources Michelle has kindly posted as a comment to my piece on the cuts to the service at my local health centre as a result of the government’s creeping privatisation of the NHS, I’m also putting up the list of further resources included in Jacky Davis’ and Raymond Tallis’ book, NHS SOS. This is a very detailed description of the long campaign against the NHS from Maggie Thatcher onwards, and in particular its latest phase introduced by Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act of 2012. As well as describing the attacks on the NHS, the book also includes chapters on the failure of the press and medical profession as a whole to bring down the whole process of privatisation when they could. It’s a very good book, clearly written, but it will leave you depress and furious.

It also the following resources people can use to fight the cuts and privatisation. Here they are:

National Campaigns on the NHS

* Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) – runs a national campaign as well as local groups across England. Campaigns for a publicly funded, publicly delivered and publicly accountable NHS. Website: http://www.keepournhspublic.com; Twitter @keepnhspublic.

* London Health Emergency (LHE) – campaigning against cuts, closures and the privatisation of the NHS since 1983. Website: http://www.healthemergency.or.uk; Twitter @JohnRLister

* NHS Support Federation – an independent pressure group that campaigns to protect and improve the NHS, true to its founding principles.

* National Health Action Party (NHAP) – campaigning for a publicly funded, publicly delivered and publicly accountable NHS.
Website: http://www.nationalhealthaction.org.uk; Twitter @NHAparty.

Allied Organisations

* Centre for Health and the Public Interest – a new independent health think tank.
Website: http://chpi.org.uk; Twitter CHPIthinktank.

* Medsin – Student network and registered charity tackling global and local health inequalities through education, advocacy and community action.

Website: http://www.medsin.org/; Twitter @medsinuk

* NHS Consultants Association – organisation of hospital doctors who support the NHS and campaign to end market-based policies.
Website: http://wwwnhsca.org.uk/

* OpenDemocracy – ‘free thinking for the world’. Running ‘OurNHS’, a new three-year project dedicated to reinstating a genuine National Health Service in England.
Website: http://www.operdemocracy.net/ournhs/about; Twitter: ‘OurNHS_oD

* Spinwatch – works for lobbying transparency, promotes greater understanding of the role of PR and propaganda.
Website: http://www.spinwatch.org/; Twitter @Spinwatch.

* 38 Degrees – online organisation that brings people together to take action on the issues ‘that matter to you and bring about real change’.
Website: http://www.38degrees.org.uk/; Twitter: ’38_degrees

Further Reading and Watching

* Health Policy Reform: Global Health versus Private Profit, by John Lister (Libri Publishing, 2013).

* NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care by Allyson M. Pollock (Verso Books, 2004).

* The Plot Against the NHS by Colin Leys and Stewart Player (Merlin Press, 2011).

* Privatising the World: A Study of International Privatization in Theory and Practice by Olive Letwin (Cengage learning EMEA, 1988).

* ‘The NHS and the Section 75 regulations: Where next?’ by Bob Hudson. Guardian healthcare network, 30 April 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/healthcare-network/2013/apr/30/nhs-section-75-regulations-where-next. This helpful article covers some additional actions that can be taken by opponents of the health care reforms.

* Conflicts of Interest and NHS Privatisation, video by the National Health Action Party, http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/component/k2/item/s441-conflicts-of-interest-and-the-privatisation-of-the-nhs.

* Take a Tour of Lansley’s Private Healthcare Supporters.
Video by Spinwatch, http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/component/k2/item/S336-take-a-tour-of-Lansleys-private-health-care-supporters.

* The Spirt of ’45, a film by Ken Loach, for screenings and availability, see http://www.thespiritof45.com.