Labour’s Powerful Pro-NHS Ad

Okay, a few moments ago I caught part of the Labour party’s new party political ad powerfully defending the NHS and attacking Tweezer and the Tories for its privatization. It featured actors taking the part of patients, doctors and hospital visitors talking about the perilous and shameful state the heath service is in thanks to the Tories’ cuts and privatization campaign. Interspersed with these were truly terrifying statistics. Like 7 million cancelled operations last year, the closure of 450 GP’s surgeries, £9 billion worth of contracts given to private healthcare firms, £7 billion cut from NHS budgets since 2010, and teenage suicides up by 50 per cent. And although the parts were played by actors, the stories they told were real. One doctor talked about how upsetting it was that she had to send parents half way across the country so that their child’s eating disorder could be treated. The various patients featured in the broadcast spoke about hospital overcrowding and patients being left in corridors. They spoke of their disgust that this was happening in one of the richest countries in the world. One black lad, playing a hospital visitor, said how he was most disgusted by nurses running down the corridor, having to rush out and pay a parking meter so that people could visit their loved ones in hospital. The black woman doctor said how she had heard fair words about treating mental health, but the reality was that social care budgets were being slashed all the time. They also lamented how people were being sent to hospital casualty departments because they couldn’t see their doctor.

And the advert said openly what this was all really about, but what the Tories are desperate to hide from us. One of the patients declared that this was about the Tories’ selling off the health service to their friends.

The Tories deny it, of course, but this is the truth. It’s laid out very clearly in a number of books, like NHS SOS, edited by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis (London: One World 2013).

I’ve also written a short book describing how the Tories – and Blair’s New Labour – have been determined to sell off the NHS, Privatisation: Killing the NHS, available from Lulu, price £5.25. See here for details: http://www.lulu.com/shop/david-sivier/privatisation-killing-the-nhs/paperback/product-22828232.html

I’ve got a few copies here, so if anyone wants one, let me know and I’ll post them to you. The cost will be as stated plus that of postage.

Labour’s pro-NHS advert is one that desperately needed to be made. It could have come from the NHS Action party, which was formed when Blair started privatizing the NHS and closing hospitals, following the political and economic ideology of his heroine, Maggie Thatcher. It’s great that the party that founded the NHS, the party of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan, should now have returned to its socialist roots and pledging to end its privatization and give it some real, proper funding.

But this was always the policy of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party. I found this short video from RT’s Going Underground on YouTube, put up on January 19th, 2019. It shows a woman, who is then joined by a man, walking through a suburban residential district, while Corbyn’s voice intones about a country that believes in fairness, in shared ideals, while they walk past a street named after Clement Attlee.

Rattansi was also discussing the massive defeat that day of Tweezer’s motion on Brexit, the biggest defeat for a post-War prime minister. It shows one MP saying in the debate that the chamber was once the seat of Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill. Now it’s just a farce.

From that, Rattansi goes to talk about the late British WWII hero, Harry Leslie Smith, who made it very clear that he supported Jeremy Corbyn. This is followed by a clip from what looks like Channel 4 News when, speaking from Ontario, Canada, Smith said that Corbyn reminded him of Clement Attlee in 1945, and he thought that if Corbyn put his shoulder to the wheel he’d change England for the better, just like Attlee did. Which to my eyes doesn’t seem to go down terribly well with the presenter, who appears to purse her lips tightly and suppress a smirk when he says this.

I’ve no doubt that over the following days and weeks we’ll get the Tories claiming that they’re putting more money into the NHS than ever before, loudly deny that they’re privatizing it and declare that they’re going to increase funding.

It’s all lies.

Mike in his articles has taken apart these claims, showing that budgets are still being slashed, despite the Tories’ statement that they will increase funding and Tweezer’s vaunted vision of the NHS for the next decade.

Just like Thatcher’s claim that ‘the NHS is safe with us’ was a lie, when in 1987 she was very much thinking about privatizing it, and then under John Major the Private Finance Initiative was introduced with the connivance of American insurance fraudster, Unum, in order to open it up to private industry.

I’ve also no doubt that we’ll be hearing more screams about how Labour is viciously anti-Semitic, or that Jeremy Corbyn is losing young voters because of his stance on Brexit. More lies and slurs, as you’d expect from the Blairites in the Labour party, who are utterly complicit in the Thatcherite privatization programme, and the Tory establishment and media outside.

The reality is that the Tories are determined to privatise the NHS, and with a few rare exceptions, the lamestream media has been complicit in it. There’s an entire chapter in the Davis and Tallis book describing how the Beeb actively promoted the Health Service’s privatization.

Don’t be taken in by the Tories and Blairite’s lies and smears. Only Jeremy Corbyn can be relied on to save the NHS, and so it’s vitally important to support him in the Labour party and get him into No.10 and Tweezer out.

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Ian Blackford Shreds May’s ‘Strong and Stable’ Slogan

Remember when the Tories were trying to fool the public into thinking that May was ‘strong and stable’ repeating this at every opportunity? This was supposed to be in contrast to Jeremy Corbyn. It was a slogan that was particularly applied to the relationship with Europe. Europe, we were told, would prefer to deal with a ‘strong and stable’ Europe under May.

Mike sent up that slogan after it became abundantly clear that May is anything but. He called her ‘weak and wobbly’. Which is what she is. Instead of being a ‘bloody awkward woman’ who would get the best deal she could from the EU, she was reduced to following the EU president around pleading with him to give her something. She could not be told that the EU was under absolutely no obligation to give her any kind of deal or offer of one.

This video from RT, again of just under a minute long, show Ian Blackford standing up in parliament today to shred May’s precious slogan. He says

Mr Speaker, we were promised strong and stable, what we have is a government in crisis. A government that has lost two Brexit Secretaries, a Home Secretary, a Foreign Secretary, a Work and Pensions Secretary. A government that has suffered from three consecutive defeats in just two hours. The first government to do so, Mr Speaker, in 40 years. And now a government found in contempt of Parliament. Is it time that the Prime Minister took responsibility for concealing the facts on her Brexit deal from members of this House and the public. Will she take responsibility?

As you can see, it’s quite a funny video. When Blackford itemizes the various cabinet ministers she’s lost, their faces pop up below him while a tinkling piano plays sad music, like the theme from Love Story. Then the shots of May’s Tories are shown in black and white, as if it’s all in mourning.

But there’s a very serious side to this. The Tories have created a situation that has split England dangerously from the rest of the UK, as well as Gibraltar, never mind about the rest of the EU. Cameron did so solely for his own advantage as leader of the Tory party. It allowed just over half of the British public to be seriously misled by a ‘Leave’ campaign that lied about the scale of migration from the EU and fraudulently claimed that once we left, 350 million pounds a year would be saved and put back into the Health Service. This was plastered all over the sides of buses by Boris Johnson and his crew, who then denied that they had made any such promise at all. And then after issuing the denial, Boris Johnson, the man who would be the next Prime Minister then went back and repeated the original lie.

And with Brexit and the farcical deal May has negotiated, people have been advised to stock up on food and medicines, as these may be in short supply after Brexit. The curbs on migration from the EU will prevent badly needed workers coming to Britain to supply staff for the NHS. Not that the Tories are going to be too worried about that. They are actively running it down ready for privatization.

People are worried about prices going up, which will once again hit those on low wages, which the Tories have insisted on throughout the last eight years in order to keep labour cheap and disposable, and profits high for employers. Businesses worry about finding staff, and being able to export their goods to the continent. Or import from there the raw materials they need.

It’s a mess. And it is solely due to the Tories.

May was never ‘strong and stable’. It wasn’t even an original slogan, as the Australian spin doctor who came up with it had previously used it to garner support for the Country Party – Australia’s Tories – Down Under. And it didn’t work down there either.

May and the Tories have lied, and deceived not only the general public but also parliament. Meanwhile, half her cabinet appear to have jumped ship like rats before May finally goes down.

And that can’t come too soon. May should go down, and the rest of her wretched, deceitful, mendacious, vicious and incompetent party with her.

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.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/05/27/lets-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.

Weak and Wobby May Does Massive U-Turn over ‘Dementia Tax’

This also shows how much pressure and desperate the Tories are feeling from a resurgent Labour. In her manifesto four days ago, ‘strong and stable’ May said that she intended taking the value of people’s houses into consideration when assessing the amount they would be charged for their social care. This would lead to people having to take out ‘equity release’, in which their houses would be sold and the money used to pay for their care, while allowing them to remain as tenants.

Florence, one of the great commenters to this blog, has pointed out just how nasty this policy is in a comment she posted to an earlier piece I did about it. She wrote

Equity release is not the same as insurance. Using equity release to pay for care is already available and has many times been shown to be the worse possible use of a house for the elderly. They are essentially unpaid mortgages where the interest accrues along with the original debt, so any capital increase in value is eaten up by interest and charges. The resident can be forced out of the house at any time. Instead of banning these deals the May cabal want to force us to use them.

Insurance will only be available to the young and fit or through workplace schemes. No one will insure a retired person.

Not surprisingly, large sections of the population did not welcome having the government force them to sell the homes they saved for throughout their lives. With the result that May has now made a U-Turn so fast, that she’s left skidmarks in the road, if not in her underwear.

It’s a very quick U-Turn indeed, as only this morning various Tory talking heads were appearing on breakfast TV defending it, saying that the Tories were showing resolve in coming to grips with Britain’s aging population. Now she’s telling everyone she’s going to put a cap on the amount they will be expected to pay. Even though her ministers, like Jeremy Hunt, have been saying all week. She’s also gone on the offensive – and to me, she’s always been very offensive – and accused Labour of scaremongering.

But, as various people on social media have noticed, it’s May herself who appears scared. Or ‘frit’, as the former Leaderene used to say in her native Grantham patois.

Mike’s posted up two videos of her speaking, stating that her own fear is evident from her body language and tone of voice.

One person has posted a picture of a backbone, with a note beside it saying ‘Wanted for Theresa May’. Marcus Chown also posted a photograph of a jelly, to show how weak and wobbly May is. Chown’s a scientist and science writer, who’s written for New Scientist, and published a book on the Cosmic Background Radiation, The Afterglow of Creation, far back in the 1990s. But you really don’t need the Hubble Space Telescope or Jodrell Bank to see how desperate May and her fellows now are.

She’s now telling everyone that she’s going to keep her new promise to cap charges for social care. And the Daily Mail, like the Tory lapdog it is, has issued an article hailing her as an ‘honest politician’.

No, no she isn’t. Not remotely.

Among the various promises and pledges she’s broken are her support for ‘Remain’, which has now definitely been ditched in favour of Brexit; her promise to raise National Insurance contributions from the self-employed; she claimed she wanted to put workers in the boardroom – that went very quickly; and her stated resolution not to hold a snap election. Along with a pledge to reduce the sugar content in children’s foods.

See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/22/dementia-tax-u-turn-theresa-may-is-a-weak-and-wobbly-conservative-in-chaos/

As Mike states in his article, it’s not a complete list.

In fact, May’s party lies frequently and shamelessly. Remember when David Cameron, May’s predecessor, was telling everyone that the Tories would ring-fence NHS spending against cuts? How he, IDS and the rest of the Tory faithful claimed they were trying to protect the NHS for New Labour’s closure of hospitals up and down the country? These policies were ditched almost as soon as Cameron got his foot in No. 10. As was his statement that his would be the ‘greenest’ government of all. That was ditched along with the little windmill outside his house, and replaced with a huge support for fracking and other environmentally destructive policies.

And May’s new pledge about capping the Dementia Tax is, in my opinion, another lie, from a party of liars.

UKIP’s Leaflets in Cheltenham: Printed in Germany

According to today’s Gloucestershire Echo, the party’s leaflets for their campaign in Cheltenham were printed by a Bavarian company, Onlineprinters, at Neustadt an der Aisch. Which kinda makes a mockery to the party’s slogan of ‘Believe in Britain’.

UKIP’s spokeswoman, a Mrs Simmonds, said that it was a simple business deal, as the Gloucestershire printers couldn’t provide the same quality and price.

The article’s at http://www.gloucestershireecho.co.uk/General-Election-2015-Cheltenham-UKIP-s-Believe/story-26325765-detail/story.html

So much for UKIP’s patriotism, but it does show you their real values. They have absolutely no interest in protecting the country economically. Indeed, they seem to stand four-square behind the Tories’ privatisation of Britain’s assets, which have been sold to companies outside the UK.

What they are really against are mass immigration, and, of course, Britain’s own working class. Hence the demands to remove workers’ rights like maternity leave, sickness pay, paid holiday.

As for criticising the Tories for their ‘broken promises’, this is mendacious coming from the Kippers. They promise to provide another £3 billion in funding for the NHS. As Nigel Farage wants to replace it with an insurance based system, and Paul Nuttall and other senior Kippers have said they want to privatise it, the reality is that probably the NHS won’t see any money from them at all. Except in so far as a temporary boost in investment may make it attractive to the highest bidders.

Vox Political on the Tories Empty Pledge for Extra NHS Funding

On Saturday, the Tories declared that they were going to add an extra £8 billion to the NHS budget by 2020 if they are returned. When pressed by Andrew Marr on his show about where the money would come from, George Osborne repeatedly refused to say, and instead gave evasive non-answers about the state of the economy instead. He also gave assurances that it had all been correctly costed, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Labour have released a video of this section of the interview, which the good Mr Pride has put on his blog. He had accompanied it with a clip from the classic Newsnight interview, when Paxo repeatedly asked Michael Howard a question, which the then head of the Tories refused to answer, and hummed, ha-ed, and bluffed instead.

Mike over at Vox Political has also posted his critique of Osborne’s claims in the post ‘Tory NHS pledge is ‘fantasy funding’’. This begins

The Conservative Party must be getting very desperate indeed.

Faced with the failure of the plan to belittle Ed Miliband, the Tories are making a belated attempt to take some of Labour’s policy ground with a promise to provide £8 billion extra, every year, for the NHS.

From where?

The Conservatives have already told us they will be squeezing the economy by (at least) £30 billion over the next five years – if they remain in office. The National Health Service is ring-fenced from those cuts, we are told, but that hasn’t prevented real-terms funding from falling during most – if not all – of the Parliament that has just ended.

The Tories had no intention of adding funds to the NHS – or at least, they didn’t until today.

Despite claims that the health service in England alone needs another £8 billion in order to cope (the shortfall is £30 billion but NHS boss Simon Stevens reckons “efficiency savings” – cuts – will cover £22 billion of it), the Conservative Party had been hoping to keep it quiet and let the public service quietly starve while private, profit-making firms strip it of its most lucrative sources of funding; the services that attract the most money.

Like the plan to attack Miliband, this was a mistake; Labour has campaigned forthrightly on the needs of the NHS and the public has responded strongly.

So the Tories have wheeled out Jeremy ‘Misprint’ Hunt to announce a funding commitment that they don’t have the ability to honour.

It is exactly the kind of fiscal ineptitude of which they were accusing Labour, before the other party publicised its fully-funded plans for government.

Mike also refutes Hunt’s claim that the Tories have increased funding to the NHS. They haven’t. As the table from the National Statistics Authority shows, it’s actually been below intended funding, not above.

He also shows Hunt’s claim that the Tories have turned the economy around to be equally mendacious. Well, not exactly. Not if you believe the exact opposite of what they’ve said. They claimed that Labour had produced the depression, and that now, thanks to them, the economy is expanding. In fact, the economy was growing thanks to Alistair Darling. The Tories, on the other hand, have managed to shrink the economy.

Mike therefore concludes that What we’re seeing is fantasy funding – building castles – or rather, hospitals – in the air.

Judging the Tories on their record, they certainly won’t be improving health here on the ground.

Mike’s article can be read at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/04/11/tory-nhs-pledge-is-fantasy-funding/

In fact, as I commented on my reblog of Tom Pride’s post about this, there is a way to increased effective funding of the NHS and make massive savings: cut out the waste of money that is the Private Finance Initiative, the internal market and the outsourcing of NHS treatment to private firms. The bureaucracy involved in this waste’s billions, as well as causing massive inefficiency and waste.

On the other hand, it does provide a nice, juicy income to Tory donors, and the private healthcare firms which 92 Tories and Lib Dem MPs either own, or are employed in. Cameron, IDS and Clegg really won’t want to upset them, especially as they might need to find a few more jobs after the election.