Despite high hopes that members of the House of Lords would recognise their place in the history books on the side of the people, rather than on the side of David Cameron, Andrew Lansley, their Lib Dem stooges and the corporations who plan to make a killing out of the privatisation of the NHS, the Lords have voted by 328 votes to 213 to dismiss Lord Owen’s amendment, which, in a very reasonable manner, called for passage of the bill to be withheld pending the publication of the transition risk register, which a Freedom of Information tribunal ordered the government to release — for a second time — ten days ago. Not a single Lib Dem peer voted with Lord Owen, and just 27 out of 90 other crossbench peers supported him (see here for the analysis of votes).

The only good news is that, as the Guardian explained, the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham “has secured an additional Commons debate on the Health Bill for tomorrow afternoon on the issue of the NHS transition risk register.”

Announcing the approval of the emergency debate by the Speaker, John Bercow, Andy Burnham said:

Tomorrow’s debate will show the weight of feeling in the country. People care passionately about the NHS and they have a right to know the full implications of the Government’s proposed reorganisation. This Government is insulting Parliament by expecting it to support these plans whilst withholding information that could change the way MPs vote. Read the rest of this entry »

How did we end up in this mess? A majority of those who work for the NHS, at every level, and a majority of the public, believe that Andrew Lansley’s wretched NHS reform bill — technically, the Health and Social Care Bill, but more colloquially, and accurately, known as the NHS privatisation bill — should be scrapped, but the legislation appears to be unstoppable.

The latest group to oppose it was the the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), who, just last week, voted to stop the bill. 69% (6,092 respondents) rejected it in its current form, and, breaking that down, as the Guardian described it, “49% (4,386) said they wanted the RCP to ‘seek withdrawal of the bill,’ while slightly fewer — 46% (4,099) — said it should ‘continue to engage critically on further improving the bill.'” Typically, the Tories attacked the RCP findings, because only 35 percent of members had responded, but ministers should not forget that less than a quarter of the British people who were eligible to vote in the General Election in 2010 voted for the Tories, who clearly do not have a mandate for anything they are doing.

Lansley’s NHS bill was temporarily halted last spring for a “listening exercise,” after the first wave of antipathy towards it, and it has since been subjected to so many amendments that it doesn’t even make sense to healthcare professionals, but its central aim — of enforcing increased competition in the NHS — remains intact, and, as is clear from an examination of who stands to gain from it, it is not the patients, but the private companies with whom, of course, many in Parliament are far too intimately involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Time is running out. As I have been explaining throughout this week, it would be great if there was a huge turnout at Saturday’s protest against the Tory-led coalition’s butchering of the NHS. which may be on the statute books by Tuesday without further concerted effort. So please, if you’re in London, or can make it to London on Saturday, come to the Save Our NHS! demonstration outside the Department of Health, from 2.30 to 4.30. 

And there is more. David Owen — Lord Owen — has tabled a crucial, last-minute amendment calling for the passage of the bill to be halted until the government releases its risk register, and there has been time for that important document to be scrutinised carefully. This is a hugely important development, and, as I explained yesterday, Lord Owen has a firm grasp of how passing the bill now, without the risk register being released (despite a tribunal twice ordering the government to release it) would be the third great constitutional outrage committed by the government — following David Cameron’s lie about not allowing a top-down reorganisation of the NHS on his watch, and the stealthy implementation of aspects of Andrew Lansley’s rotten NHS reform bill before it has even been passed by Parliament.

To help peers decide why they should be on the right side of history, Dr. Éoin Clarke, on his blog The Green Benches, has been encouraging supporters of the NHS to contact members of the House of Lords to ask them to support Lord Owen’s amendment. With the help of a widget designed by the activist Brian F. Moylan, it takes just a quarter of an hour to email every peer who might be persuaded to defeat the government on Monday, and I urge you please to send emails to the peers if you have just 15 minutes to spare. Read the rest of this entry »

In the US, because of that country’s notorious fetishization of self-reliance, it has been appallingly easy for would-be exploiters to portray anything cooperative as being Communist, with the result that the gulf between the rich and the poor is horrendous, healthcare is a privilege and not a right, and it is possible for weird, self-defeating movements like the Tea Party to persuade ordinary people that is somehow a good idea to slavishly empower the same super-rich people who have treated them with disdain for three decades and outsourced all their jobs in search of greater profits for themselves and their shareholders, and then conjured up the greatest theft in history through deregulating the financial sector.

In the UK — the US-lite, in so many ways — it has taken a while for Tea Party-style self-defeating stupidity to take root, but successive governments — and their corporate advisors — have long been fascinated by the profits to be made in following the hyper-capitalism of the US, and, following the deranged property-driven bubble of the Labour years (which almost everyone bought into, and which is still preserved in the inflated house prices in London and the south east), the Tory-led coalition government now appears to be succeeding in its efforts to con British voters into accepting an artificial, ideologically driven “age of austerity.”

In this latest cynical assault on the British people, the Tories and their cowardly or deluded Lib Dem accomplices — while largely shielding the City thieves and corporate tax-avoiders from public scrutiny — have managed to persuade voters to believe that “we’re all in it together” in having to “tighten our belts,” even though those making these pronouncements are wealthy Etonians whose face fat alone ought to indicate that they’re not “in it with us” at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week appeared to be another good week for those opposing the Tory-led coalition government’s disastrous and entirely unwanted NHS reform bill, although no one should be fooled, as the government is still determined to press ahead with its terrible plans, even though wrecking the NHS will almost certainly cost them the next election.

First up was the matter of the e-petition launched by Dr. Kailash Chand OBE, a GP and chair of Tameside and Glossop Primary Care Trust. Simply entitled, “Drop the Health Bill,” the e-petition “[c]alls on the Government to drop its Health and Social Care Bill,” and, at the time of writing, it has been signed by 172,483 people, and is open for signatures until May 16.

This is good news, of course, although in order for it to count for anything, the Labour leader Ed Miliband — and shadow health secretary Andy Burnham — had to force David Cameron to honour a promise he made to the British people, and to Parliament. As Jonathan Reynolds, the Labour MP for Stalybridge and Hyde, and parliamentary private secretary to Ed Miliband, explained in an article four days ago: Read the rest of this entry »

So much for promises. David Cameron and his government are notorious, to those who are awake and paying attention, for implementing policies that they never mentioned on the election trail two years ago, and for not having a mandate for their swingeing cuts to the British state that are disproportionately affecting students, the working poor, the unemployed and the disabled.

David Cameron has also been developing a reputation for broken promises. The most prominent, of course, was his promise that there would be “no more top-down reorganisation of the NHS,” followed by a complete volte-face, as he allowed Andrew Lansley to propose the most sweeping top-down reorganisation of the NHS in its entire 64-year history.

The breaking of this particular promise may come back to haunt Cameron, as the NHS is considerably more popular with the British public than any government, and the party that tries to destroy it, having promised not to do so, may well have signed its own death warrant by persisting with its privatisation plans in the face of widespread dissent. As the Guardian noted on February 20, in an analysis of the latest Guardian/ICM poll: Read the rest of this entry »

Those of us who have been deeply troubled by the Tory-led government’s Health and Social Care Bill, since it first came under intense scrutiny a year ago, have sought nothing less than for the entire project to be scrapped. A thorough “top-down reorganisation,” despite a promise by David Cameron that he would do no such thing, it was intended from the beginning to break open the NHS, to make room for private predators, with rules regarding enforced competition, and the health secretary’s own intention to remove the entire service from direct government control, that were far too alarming to allow for anything other than total opposition.

Criticised by a majority of health professionals, by the Tories’ Lib Dem partners in the coalition, and by the House of Lords, the bill was paused for a period of reflection last spring, and has been subjected to so many amendments, in an attempt to keep it alive, that it is now an almost inconceivable mutant monstrosity, albeit one that, at its dark heart, still seeks to fatally undermine the NHS.

Despite the relentless criticism, the Tories managed to retain a united front until last week, when cracks began to show, beginning on Tuesday, when, in an explosive article in the Times (hidden beyond the Murdoch paywall), Rachel Sylvester quoted an unnamed official in 10 Downing Street as saying that the health secretary Andrew Lansley “should be taken out and shot” because he’s “messed up both the communication and the substance of the policy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I published an article about the Tory-led coalition government’s ongoing attempts to destroy the NHS, after the health minister Andrew Lansley issued a new set of amendments to his Health and Social Care Bill, in an attempt to suppress dissent in the House of Lords, which only succeeded in prompting GPs and physiotherapists to issue their own official opposition to the bill.

It is but no means clear that the government can be persuaded to scrap its bill, as the entire rationale for the coalition government’s existence seems to be to remove whatever remains in public ownership and to hand it over to the private sector, even though that particular approach to politics is exactly the opposite of what we need, after the unfettered greed of bankers and the private sector led to the economic crash of 2008, whose reverberations have, perhaps fatally, undermined the economic health of the West, even while, in the UK, cynical and thoroughly unqualified ideologues like David Cameron and George Osborne attempt to pin all the blame for Britain’s economic woes on the poor, the unemployed and the disabled.

This approach — and the way it is being lapped up by a majority of the British people — marks a particularly low point in my lack of respect for politicians or my fellow citizens, and I’ll be writing more about it soon, but for now, in an effort to maintain the focus on the NHS, and the need for persistent opposition to the government’s plans from anyone who understands how extraordinary it is to have a health service paid for by general taxation, which is free at the point of entry and exit, and how important it is to hold onto this service, I’m cross-posting below an article by Dr. Clare Gerada, the chair of the Royal College of GPs — whose members last week voiced their considerable opposition to the government’s planned reforms — which was published in October in the Guardian. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since the coalition government introduced its Health and Social Care Bill, it has been obvious that what was planned was nothing less than the destruction of the NHS as a universal healthcare provider, and the gradual privatisation of the service, leading to greater profits for private companies and, simultaneously, cuts to services.

Understanding this, the professional bodies representing those who actually work in the NHS have opposed the bill. Amongst other bodies, the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives have opposed the government’s plans, and last week, in an editorial published simultaneously in the British Medical Journal, the Health Service Journal and Nursing Times, the editors of those magazines described the government’s plans as a “damaging … unholy mess,” and stated that the NHS “is far too important to be left at the mercy of ideological and incompetent intervention” and that “we must make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.”

In a second British Medical Journal editorial last week, Kieran Walshe, professor of health policy at Manchester Business School, explained how abandoning the bill now would save over £1bn in 2013. As he explained, “Going ahead with the bill means setting up the NHS Commissioning Board (with an annual running cost of £492m), 260 clinical commissioning groups (with an annual running cost of £1.25bn), and the new economic regulator, Monitor (with its anticipated annual running cost of £82m). Each of these new statutory organisations will have additional set-up costs — perhaps amounting to a one-off spend of £360m. If the bill were stopped now, it would save all those set-up costs, and at least £650m in annual running costs — just over £1bn in 2013.” Read the rest of this entry »

After a year of hiding a risk assessment regarding its plans to transform the NHS (into an increasingly privatised monstrosity, with the government no longer in charge of it), health secretary Andrew Lansley has been ordered by the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, to release a document that outlines the risks associated with his widely-criticised Health and Social Care Bill.

As the website Practice Business explained, “The Information Commissioning Office (ICO) found that the Department of Health had twice breached the Freedom of Information Act in not disclosing the document and the strategic risk factor associated with the NHS reforms contained therein.”

Upholding separate complaints by John Healey, who was the shadow health secretary until last month) and the Evening Standard, after the Department of Health rejected two separate requests under the Freedom of Information Act to see its assessment of the risks, Christopher Graham stated, as Practice Business described it, that the “public interest was more important than minister’s insistence that revealing the information would hinder the formulation of government policy.” As he explained, “Disclosure would significantly aid public understanding of risks related to the proposed reforms and it would also inform participation in the debate about the reforms.”

Describing the victory, the Evening Standard noted that the document was “expected to reveal the risks to patient safety, finances and the very workings of the NHS from the unprecedented reshaping of the health service,” and also, crucially, pointed out that, when the Standard “put in its FOI request in February with debate raging over the NHS changes,” Mr. Lansley’s officials argued that releasing the risk register would have “jeopardised the success of the policy.” (emphasis added) Read the rest of this entry »