Excellent News! Labour Plans to Abolish Fees for Dental Check-Ups

This is another really great policy from the Labour Party. They’ve announced that they plan to abolish the £22.70 fee for dental check-ups, and Corbyn has said that the ultimate aim is to abolish all fees for dentistry.

According to a piece Mike has reblogged from elsewhere, the fees were first introduced in 1951 to pay for the Korean War. It notes that one in five adults puts off going to the dentist because of the cost, and that ‘worrying numbers’ are turning to the internet for kits for scaling and makeshift fillings, which can cause serious problems.

515,000 patients a year go to A&E or their GPs for treatment for toothache, which costs the Health Service £38 million a year. Over a hundred children have rotten teeth removed in hospital every day, and decay is the leading cause of hospital admissions for children aged from five to nine. Ninety per cent of those cases can be prevented by early treatment.

In addition to abolishing the fees for ordinary check-ups, Labour also wish to remove them for oral cancer examinations, X-rays, clinical scaling and polishing and emergency treatment.

Mike adds that it would also be great if Labour could also ensure that everyone has access to an NHS dentist. He hasn’t seen one since June last year, 2018, because the dental service in mid-Wales was handed over to a private company. He concludes

Health service privatisation – it will always leave us short-changed. 

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/16/great-labour-election-promises-theyll-scrap-fees-for-dental-check-ups/

Mike’s right again, and this is an issue that goes back years. I’ve read a number of newspaper reports about people missing out on dental treatment because they can’t afford it. And there is a crushing shortage of NHS dentists. We’ve had problems finding suitable dentists in my part of south Bristol, as a number of them went private and immediately put their prices up. Some of this problem comes down to the profit motive at the heart of any system of private healthcare. Where it exists, there will always be the motive to charge inflated fees and concentrate on those, who are better health, rather than those who need much more treatment, because the latter aren’t as profitable.

And like the other issues with healthcare in this care, it was caused by Maggie Thatcher. I can remember how there was a massive dispute between her government and the dentists over funding, with the result that many split off from the NHS and went private. They claimed that they simply couldn’t survive with what the government was prepared to pay them. Thatcher, I remember, put the blame on them for demanding too much. I don’t know which side was right, but instinct tells me it wasn’t the Tories. Thatcher was determined to privatise the NHS in toto, but was prevented by a cabinet revolt. She carried on, however, with a campaign to encourage 10 per cent of the British population to take out private health insurance, and a programme of limited privatisation. Some of the auxiliary services for the NHS were opened up to private contractors. The department specialising in in vitro fertilisation – test tube children – was privatised. She also introduced fees for eye tests at the opticians.

The Tories are past masters at creating an industrial dispute, which will allow them to attack a particular industry and the trade unions or professional associations for its workers. We’ve seen how she did it to the miners, in order to break the NUM and close down most of the mining industry. I think she did something similar with the dentists. She manufactured a dispute with them, so that she could force some at least out of the NHS and created a private dental service.

And thanks to her, people are missing the dentist and their health is suffering.

Labour’s plan to abolish dental fees are needed. People really do need proper dental examinations. A few years ago I was diagnosed with a mouth condition that could have become serious and which needed monitoring, and I’m very sure I wasn’t alone. People are damaging their health, possibly seriously, by not going to the dentist and having the examinations and work they need done.

And it is the fault of the Tories.

Thatcher and her legacy have been catastrophic for this country, its industries and working people. But she’s still a molten idol to the Tories, Lib Dems and the Blairites. They have to be defeated, and Thatcher’s vile legacy consigned to the dustbin it deserves.

Our health, and our Health Service, cannot afford not to.

 

American Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein’s Universal Healthcare Advert

After Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist candidate to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee was blocked by the Democratic party machine and its head, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, many of those on the left wing of the party have increasingly turned to the Greens and their presidential candidate, Jill Stein. Stein also stands for expanding the minimal welfare provision, social justice and universal healthcare as well as protecting the environment. In this short video, Stein pledges her support for universal Medicare. The video notes that 58 per cent of the American people want something like Britain’s NHS. She makes the point that she’s a medical doctor, who’s acutely aware of how poverty affects people’s healthcare. She states that Obamacare has added another layer of bureaucracy to the system, and as it’s in the hands of private insurers, these companies can decided who to keep on their books and who to reject as they can’t afford it. She promises a full healthcare, which will cover opticians and dentistry, as well as mental and reproductive health.

This is exactly what the Blairites in the Labour party, and the Tories since Margaret Thatcher, have been trying to deprive the British public. Thatcher wanted to dismantle the welfare state, including the NHS. Alan Milburn wanted the NHS to become only a kitemark for healthcare services provided by private healthcare companies. And Owen Smith wrote a pro-privatisation puff piece when he was working for Pfizer.

And like Jeremy Corbyn over here, Dr. Stein has similarly been smeared. It’s been claimed that she’s ‘anti-science’, which is rich coming from an American political establishment which denies climate change, using very selective research sponsored by the oil giants. In an interview on Watching the Hawks over at RT, Dr Stein talks about this, and how she authored a book, along with other socially aware medical doctors, discussing the threats to children’s developmental health from pollution and so on. Apparently, her Conservative opponents tried telling everyone that she was against vaccination. She states firmly that when she and her colleagues looked at the list of health threats to children, vaccines ‘weren’t even on the list, so I don’t where they got that from.’

The neoliberal consensus is facing a radical challenge and the supposed ‘left-wing’ establishment, both here and in the US, is running scared. But it’s radical politicians like Sanders, Stein and Corbyn that are injecting new life into politics and justly attacking a corrupt and oppressive system.

Hope Not Hate on the Disgusting Views of Kipper Lee Harris

As Britain tries to come to turns with the assassination of Jo Cox by a committed, Nazi, Lee Harris, the Kipper candidate for Shotton and South Hefton in the council elections last year, abandoned any attempt at maintaining a tactful silence. While expressing his own disgust at Cox’s murder, Harris posted on social media a strongly worded condemnation of everything Jo Cox stood for. He wrote on social media

Let us not forget that it is cultural Marxist, PC, Europhilic MPs like her we have to thank for the sorry state this nation is in.

Her ideology was cancerous to this nation, and now her comrades shamelessly milk her death in a desperate attempt to shame us into staying in a corporatist dictatorship.

I’m sure some will be offended by this post, and those who are, I know will be the virtue signalling SJW [Social Justice Warriors] that are milking her death in a last ditch attempt at shaming us into staying in the EU.

See: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/ukip/ukip-continue-their-overbearing-sensitivity-4925

This is pretty much typical of some of the verbiage and jargon coming from the extreme Right. Anti-racist activists and those on the genuine Left are attacked as ‘Social Justice Warriors’ and ‘cultural Marxists’. Right-wingers like Harris think that ‘cultural Marxism’ means the Frankfurt school and the tactics formulated by the Italian Communist, Antonia Gramsci, of attempting to change the nature of European and American capitalist society by attacking its culture. It isn’t. ‘Cultural Marxism’ was the term coined by British Marxists when Maggie Thatcher passed a law purging them from teaching in Higher Education. They got round this by making the fine distinction that they weren’t ‘Marxist’, but ‘Marxian’ – that is, they were Marxists by culture, not politics. It’s a very tenuous distinction, but it did manage to allow them to keep their jobs.

As for being called a ‘Social Justice Warrior’, while it is a term of contempt, the fact is that since that social justice – anti-racism, anti-sexism and attitudes to combat poverty and improve the circumstances of the working class, disabled and unemployed, are still under threat. There have been enormous strides made since the 1970s in tacking racism and sexism, but these are still extremely powerful issues where discrimination is very much present. As shown by the fact that Harris and many of the Brexiters haven’t been able to reconcile themselves to the fact that Cox was murdered by someone with a very long commitment to the Nazi Right.

Harris himself has a particular hatred of the Labour party. Hope Not Hate a few piccies of election pamphlets in the above article, in which he promises ‘to continue the failings of the Labour Party. It has let our communities down for too long!’ He also says, ‘Labour once stood for the working class, defending our way of life, defending our jobs, but now all they care about is pandering to big donors and big business. They are the party that started to privatise the NHS after all’.

This is a fair description of the greed and neoliberal economic policies at the heart of Blairite ‘New Labour’, but it doesn’t represent either Ed Miliband or the party’s new leadership under Jeremy Corbyn. As for the EU being a ‘corporatist dictatorship’, there’s a reasonable point mixed in with a gross lie. I’ve put up material discussing the massive power the EU constitution does give to corporations, and there are indeed several points in European commercial law that strongly protect and promote neoliberal economics. However, the EU is not a dictatorship, and it is a gross distortion to say that it is. This line seems to come from the old Eurosceptic idea that the EU is merely Napoleon’s Empire or Adolf Hitler’s Nazi-dominated Europe resurrected and marketed to Europe’s peoples in a more palatable form. It isn’t. It was set up by European statesmen, including Winston Churchill, after the War in the hope that by promoting European unity, such extreme nationalist movements and the drive by individual countries to conquer and dominate the country would be successfully combated. I don’t think it’s been entirely successful. Unfortunately, EU policy does represent too much the interest of the big EU nations, like France and Germany, at the expense of the smaller nations. But I do think that it has done much to promote international peace and reconciliation after the War, and so has done much to calm international tension, even if it has not succeeded in altogether eradicating it.

As for Harris’ comments about the Labour – if Harris was serious about them from a left-wing perspective, he could have joined a number of alternative Socialist groups and organisations. Buddy Hell, over at Guy Debord’s Cat, was so disillusioned with the Blairite takeover the Labour party that he joined Left Unity, if I recall correctly. I think one of the small, alternative Socialist parties was formed from all the trade unionists and Labour party members, who were thrown out of the Labour party because they did not back Bliar and Broon’s austerity campaigns.

But Harris hasn’t done that. Instead he’s moved to the Right, and shown how he despises much of the ideology of the Left with his attacks on ‘social justice warriors’. If you look through many of the classic statements of Socialism, several of them make the point that Socialists champion the working class in order to bring about a classless society, and as part of a general campaign to establish greater social equality. Marx, Engels and the early Fabians had some vile attitudes to what they considered to be less developed, backward nations, but as early as the 1920s the Labour party adopted a policy of granting the colonies their independence at the earliest possibility. Even when they were committed to the British Empire, such as in the book Empire, Your Empire, published by the Left Book club, they were critical of the way Britain’s imperial possessions around the world were being exploited. The author of that book wanted these countries developed, but in the interest of their indigenous peoples. As indeed did the veteran Socialist thinker and writer, G.D.H. Cole.

As for Labour privatising the health service, unfortunately, much of this was done by Bliar and Broon. But they were following policies established in the 1980s by Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe had looked at ways of abolishing the NHS and replacing it with a private medical service such as that in America. They didn’t, because they knew that it would lose them the next election. Also, Patrick Jenkin, the Health Secretary, reported just how awful American medical care was after he went on a fact-finding mission to the US. Nevertheless, she wanted more private medical care in and outside the NHS, including tax relief for people with private medical insurance. She also introduced further charges for hitherto free medical treatments in the NHS. One of these was eye tests at opticians. She stopped that, and then had one of her cabinet ‘vegetables’ try to con the nation into believing that after charges had been introduced, demand had actually gone up. It was Thatcher, who removed compulsory state funding for the elderly in nursing homes, with the result that many people now have to mortgage or sell their elderly relatives’ houses to pay for the tens of thousands of pounds it costs a year to keep them in such homes. She also picked a fight with the dentists, so that the majority left the NHS. And then Peter ‘I’ve got a little list’ Lilley introduced the Private Finance Initiative specifically as a way for big business to make money out of the health service under John Major. Bliar and Broon expanded this cruddy system, but they didn’t invent it.

Despite appealing to working constituents, Harris is, like the Kipper leadership, a Tory. He wants to capitalise on many people’s genuine disaffection from the Labour party due to neoliberal leadership of the Blairites. But he himself is very much a man of the right, and his stance is shown by the fact that he is not concerned with defending the NHS from its privatisation by Cameron and the Lib Dems. This has been going on for over half a decade now. Even last year he could not plead ignorance of it, not if he was serious about defending the NHS or his constituents against austerity and the cuts.

Tories Waffle to Prevent Bill against Privatisation of the NHS in Parliament

Mike over at Vox Political has put up another important piece reporting a filibuster in parliament to ‘talk out’ a bill by the former leader of the Green party, Caroline Lucas. The four Tories, who waffled and blustered in order to prevent the bill being discussed or passed, were David Nuttall, Phillip Davies, Phillip Hollobone, and Sir Edward Leigh.

Mike writes:

It’s hard to think of Philip Davies without imagining that the people of Shipley were so disillusioned with Parliament that they sent a motion of the bowels to Westminster as a sign of their low esteem.

The sh*t from Shipley was one of four Tory MPs who waffled their way through the time allotted for Caroline Lucas’s Bill to stop the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service.

By their actions it is therefore easy to conclude that Davies, Philip Hollobone, David Nuttall and Sir Edward Leigh want to take free healthcare away from their constituents as soon as possible.

That’s very bad news if you live in Kettering, Bury North, Gainsborough and the afore-mentioned Shipley.

For more information, go to:

When Tories talk about ‘our NHS’ it means they think they own it already

The title to Mike’s piece is ‘When Tories talk about ‘our NHS’ it means they think they own it already’. This is exactly right at a number of levels. As I have been blogging about recently, I had a commenter on my blog criticise me when I claimed that Nye Bevan was the architect of the NHS. He was. The commenter maintained that the NHS was a policy of the National government during the War, which produced the Beveridge Report upon which the NHS is based. Also true. He also pointed out that Churchill also backed the NHS. Again, true, but Churchill was also very cautious in his support, and only broadcast his backing for it after the Labour Party had demanded a parliamentary debate about its early implementation now in 1942. The Tories turned this down, leaving the report to spend two years in committee. At which point the government realised that the Tories had shot themselves in the foot, and given the next election to Labour.

Now the argument over the creation of the NHS is important. It’s true that the Beveridge Report united Labour, the Liberals and left-wing Tories in its support. However, the Tories need to lay claim to it in order to assure the population that they have their best interests at heart, and won’t do anything to deprive them of it. In the 1980s and 1990s Thatcher’s and Major’s government declared that they weren’t going to privatise the NHS, and that it was only the Tories that knew how to run it efficiently and effectively.

This has been shown to be bunkum. It was either Thatcher’s or Major’s government that picked a fight with the dentists, causing them to leave the NHS en masse. The result has been the decline in cheap dental treatment for the poor and unemployed, and the corresponding decline in the health of the nation’s teeth. Well, the Americans have always made jokes about how we’ve got bad teeth. It’s even in Orwell. Possibly one of the public school wags in the Tories thought it would be a jolly good jape to play up to the stereotype, at least with the peasants. Make them all look like gap-toothed yokels, what? Spiffing! She also introduced fees for eye tests, and as a result fewer people saw the optician. She and her ministers solved this problem by lying about it, and so told the press that since charges were introduced, more people were actually going to have their eyesight examined.

Right. Pull the other one.

As for the statement that only they could keep the NHS in budget, this is a massive, sick joke. The Tories introduction of the internal market in the NHS has created more bureaucracy, along with Peter Lilley’s introduction of the Private Finance Initiative. This is a ruse by which the millions contracted by the government in debt for certain projects are kept off the record books, even though it’s immensely more expensive than normal procedures of funding infrastructure development. In a way, it’s ironic that it was Lilley that dreamed the scam up. He’s been compared on various satirical shows with Nazi officers, and something similar to the PFI was used by the Italian dictator, Mussolini, to finance infrastructure spending in Fascist Italy. Or perhaps it isn’t a coincidence at all, considering how well parts of the Tories got on with Gianfranco Fini’s ‘post-Fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale. And the results of the Tories’ latest mismanagement of the NHS has been to push it even further into debt, no doubt in preparation for its eventual sale.

And the commenter, who turned up here to criticise me for crediting the creation of the NHS on Nye Bevan also let the cat out of the bag there. He claimed that an opinion poll showed most people weren’t concerned if healthcare was private, so long as it was free. Well, that contrasts with the 85% of people in other polls, who definitely don’t want the NHS to be privatised. Presumably the people, who aren’t concerned if it’s private are all friends of Sam Cam, like the businesspeople who supposedly came out in supported of Cameron’s policy. This was later revealed to be not a spontaneous display of support, but due to Sam Cam ringing round their friends.

Don’t be fooled. Since Thatcher, the government has wanted to privatise the NHS. They are laying claim to it in order to sell it off.