Ever since the Tory-led coalition government passed the wretched Health and Social Care Act in 2011 (after David Cameron blatantly lied to the British people, by falsely promising “no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down re-structures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS”), privatisation of the greatest and most important institution in the UK, the NHS (National Health Service, founded in 1948), has been increasing to an alarming degree.

As Headway, the brain injury association, described the impact of the Health and Social Care Act, “The Secretary of State no longer has a duty to provide health services through the NHS, which increases the opportunity for private health care firms to deliver many services that were previously operated by the NHS.” The bill also replaced the bodies responsible for commissioning services — Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities — with Clinical Commissioning Groups, nominally under the control of GPs (responsible for 60-80% of the NHS budget), but also providing another opportunity for private health care firms to infiltrate the NHS.

I campaigned against the passage of the Health and Social Care Act at the time (see here and here), and then became heavily involved in the successful campaign to save my local hospital, in Lewisham, in south east London, from savage cuts (see here, here and here). Last year I campaigned to resist the Tories’ spiteful response to Lewisham’s success, which became known as the “hospital closure clause” (see here and here), and covered the People’s March for the NHS, a grass-roots initiative that involved a recreation of the Jarrow March from the 1930s to save the NHS (see here and here). Read the rest of this entry »

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Welcome to the 16th chronological list of all my articles, since I began working as an independent journalist in 2007 — about Guantánamo and related topics, and other themes involving social justice. Please support my work if you can with a donation!

I first began researching the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there nearly ten years ago, in the fall of 2005, and began researching and writing about it on a full-time basis in March 2006. Initially, I spent 14 months researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files, based, largely, on 8,000 pages of documents publicly released by the Pentagon in the spring of 2006, and, since May 2007, I have continued to write about the men held there, on an almost daily basis, as an independent investigative journalist — for two and a half years under President Bush, and, shockingly, for what is now over six years under President Obama.

My mission, as it has been since my research first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, continues to revolve around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions. Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to Clive Efford, the Labour MP for Eltham and Plumstead, in south east London, and the 240 other MPs who voted for his Private Member’s Bill, the National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill, which aims to repeal the worst aspects of the privatising Health and Social Care Act that the Tory-led coalition government passed in 2012 (which I covered in detail at the time, prior to successfully campaigning to save Lewisham Hospital from destruction), and to protect the NHS from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a planned trade deal between the EU and the US, which, as the #noTTIP protest group explained, will, if it goes ahead, “grant corporations the power to sue governments, threatening to lock-in the privatisation of our schools and NHS. Rules that protect workers, the environment, food safety, digital rights and privacy would be undermined, with harmful industries like fracking encouraged.” See my article about TTIP here, and my media interviews here and here.

Only 18 MPs voted against the bill, and as the campaigning group 38 Degrees noted in an email to supporters, “It looks like the government told their MPs to boycott the vote. Maybe they realised they couldn’t win.” Or maybe they also realised how unpopular their privatising reforms are with the general public, who, for a change, seem to see through their lies. The bill can now move forward in the hope of becoming law — although that is a slim chance, as Private Member’s Bills rarely get that far. As Denis Campbell argued in the Guardian, however, “the admission by an unnamed cabinet minister last month that the [2012 Health and Social Care Act] was this government’s greatest folly (quoted on the front page of the Times) and the fact that 44% of the public think the NHS is under threat from private health companies suggests Efford’s bill has caught a mood.”

As the general political landscape shifts to the right, with UKIP promoted largely unchallenged by the media, the Tories opportunistically drifting further to the right to compensate and Labour suffering a damaging identity crisis, the stage is being set for an election campaign dominated by distractions about immigration, while a dangerous truth is obscured — that, if the Tories can somehow get into power again, perhaps through another Frankenstein’s Monster coalition, they may well take us out of the EU, destroying all our human rights legislation so that we can embark on a policy of ethnic cleansing (the enforced repatriation so beloved by UKIP), as well as furthering, unchallenged, their own disastrous mission, under the guise of austerity, to destroy the taxpayer-funded state and privatise almost everything except their own jobs, with disastrous effects for tens of millions of British people. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I spent a delightful half-hour speaking to Richie Allen, a colleague of David Icke, for his show on Volcania Radio, which is streamed live via various sites, including David Icke’s, and is available below via YouTube. It’s also on David Icke’s site here.

Richie asked me first about Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner in Guantánamo, and I ran through his story, his health problems, and the disgraceful fact that he is still held, even though, for the last seven years, the US government has been saying that it no longer wants to hold him, and the UK government has been calling for his return.

Richie and I also spoke about the specific torture program that was official policy at Guantánamo in the early years, which involved, amongst other things, prolonged isolation, forced nudity, the use of extreme heat and cold, the use of loud music and noise, the use of phobias, and the euphemistically named “frequent flier program,” whereby prisoners were subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation, being moved from cell to cell every few hours over a period of days, weeks or even months, to prevent them from sleeping adequately. The use of this particular package of torture techniques only came to an end when the prisoners secured access to lawyers after a Supreme Court victory in June 2004 — although I was at pains to stress to Richie that Guantánamo remains a place that is beyond the law, and that should not exist in a society that claims to be civilized. Read the rest of this entry »

See the video below and see my photos on Flickr here.

On Saturday October 11, 2014, I attended a protest in Parliament Square, opposite the Houses of Parliament in London, against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a dangerous new EU-US trade deal, which, if passed, as the organisers of the London event explained, “would grant corporations the power to sue governments, threatening to lock-in the privatisation of our schools and NHS. Rules that protect workers, the environment, food safety, digital rights and privacy would be undermined, with harmful industries like fracking encouraged.” My article published just before the protest is here.

The London event was part of a day of action across Europe and the UK, and the events across all the countries were attended by a significant number of people, although only a few hundred people attended the London event, sharing Parliament Square with Kurdish campaigners.

I was delighted to speak to RT’s Harry Fear in Parliament Square for a televised broadcast, which is available below, and if you like it I hope you share it. Read the rest of this entry »

Please sign the European petition against TTIP here, which has received over 400,000 signatures in just four days.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a dangerous new EU-US trade deal, has been on my radar for some time, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for months, particularly in relation to the NHS.

As the #noTTIP website explains:

Our democracy, public services and environment are under threat. Behind closed doors, the EU and US are drawing up a new trade deal called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If agreed, TTIP would extend the power of big business over our society to unprecedented levels. Shamefully, the UK government are currently a major supporter. But together, we can defeat this agreement.

Tomorrow, Saturday October 11, 2014, across Europe, there will be protests against TTIP (as well as a handful of protests in the US), and I’ll be at the London protest, which takes place in Parliament Square, beginning at 2pm. There is also a Stop TTIP Facebook page here.

As the organisers explain further on the Facebook page for the London event: Read the rest of this entry »

See my photos of the People’s March for the NHS and the rally in Trafalgar Square on Flickr here!

Some people think that protest is futile, but in Lewisham, in south east London, we know that’s not true. In 2012 and 2013, a grass-roots people’s movement in Lewisham defeated plans by the government — and senior officials in the NHS — to severely downgrade services at Lewisham Hospital to pay for the debts accumulated by a neighbouring NHS trust. If the plans had gone ahead, the 270,000 people of Lewisham would have had no A&E (Accident & Emergency) Department, and would have had to join 500,000 other people, from two other boroughs, served by one A&E many miles away on a remote heath in Woolwich. In addition, all frontline acute services would have been cut at Lewisham, and, as a result, 90 percent of the Lewisham’s mothers would not have been able to give birth in their home borough.

Although we won a significant victory in Lewisham, the zeal of the government — and of senior NHS managers — for increased privatisation, and for cuts that can only damage the provision of services to those in need continues, and, as with so many facets of the opportunistic “age of austerity” declared by the Tory-led coalition government, mass opposition is in short supply. What we need, at the very least, is regular opportunities to show the government, the banks and the corporations that we are implacably opposed to their corruption and cruelty, and yet we have had only two major protests in the last four years — one in March 2011 (the TUC-led “March for the Alternative“), and another (“A Future That Works“) in October 2012.

In January last year, the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign got 25,000 people out on the streets of Lewisham, providing hope and encouragement to campaigners across the country, and on Saturday, thousands of NHS supporters gathered in Red Lion Square in Holborn and marched to Trafalgar Square for a rally that was a culmination of a three-week, 300-mile march by around 30 mums (the “Darlo Mums”) and others from Darlington, who recreated the 1936 Jarrow March, as the People’s March for the NHS. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 16, a group of mums in Darlington, in County Durham, set out on a march to the Houses of Parliament, ending this Saturday, September 6, “to build support for the NHS and to join up with amazing NHS campaigners across the country,” as they note on their website.

Their march, the People’s March for the NHS, was inspired by the Jarrow March in 1936, when, in the Depression, 200 people marched from Jarrow, 30 miles north of Darlington, to London to demand action from the government.

The campaign to save the NHS from the lying, Tory-led coalition government, whose leader, David Cameron, promised before the 2010 election that there would be no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS, is one that I have been involved in since 2011, when the privatising Health and Social Care Bill was first unveiled. I fought against the passage of the bill in the early months of 2012, and in October 2012 joined the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign, which, over the following year, secured unprecedented grass-roots support (see here and here) against government and NHS management plans to disembowel Lewisham Hospital to pay for the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust. That campaign was ultimately successful, but privatisation continues to invade the NHS, as intended by the government, numerous hospitals face uncertain futures, and further legislation — like the hospital closure clause (Clause 119) of the 2013 Care Bill — have had to be resisted (again, with success). Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work!

Over eight years ago, in March 2006, I began researching and writing about the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there since the prison opened in January 2002. Initially, I spent 14 months researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files, based, largely, on 8,000 pages of documents publicly released by the Pentagon in the spring of 2006, and, since May 2007, I have continued to write about the men held there, on an almost daily basis, as an independent investigative journalist — for 20 months under President Bush, and, shockingly, for what is now five and a half years under President Obama.

My mission, as it has been since my research first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, continues to revolve around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions.

As I highlight every three months through my quarterly fundraising appeals, I have undertaken the lion’s share of this work as a reader-supported journalist and activist, so if you can support my work please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week there was some rare good news about the NHS, which I’m posting belatedly because I was too busy last week, and also because I want to make sure that my approval is on record. I’m also posting it because, let’s face it, those of us who care about social justice have few victories to cheer about.

The victory in question was the government’s acceptance of an amendment to Clause 119 of the Care BIll — generally known as the “hospital closure clause” — which is designed to prevent neighbouring hospitals to those facing grave financial difficulties from having their services cut without local consultation.

The circumstances in which this would have occurred involved hospitals close to those subjected to the appointment of a special administrator because of severe financial problems — under the Unsustainable Providers Regime that was first launched in south east London in October 2012. In that case, the Trust Special Administrator, Matthew Kershaw, proposed savagely cutting services at Lewisham Hospital to help pay off the debts of a neighbouring, but otherwise unrelated trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, which had hospitals in the boroughs of Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley. Read the rest of this entry »