The Save Lewisham Hospital Victory Dance, September 27, 2013, a set on Flickr.
Sometimes you just need to have a party and celebrate, and that is what happened on Friday September 27, 2013, at the Rivoli Ballroom in Crofton Park, in the borough of Lewisham, which is the last surviving unreconstructed 1950s ballroom in London.
Hundreds and hundreds of supporters of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign gathered for a Victory Dance — the Spirit of Lewisham Victory Dance — to celebrate the campaign’s high court victory at the end of July over health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who approved plans to severely downgrade services at Lewisham Hospital at the end of January, leading to two judicial reviews — one launched by the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, and the other by Lewisham Council — that ended in success on July 31, when Mr. Justice Silber ruled that Hunt had acted unlawfully when he approved the plans. See my photos here.
The plans had first been put forward last October by Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator appointed to deal with the financial problems of a neighbouring trust, the South London Healthcare Trust, in the first use of the Unsustainable Providers Regime, legislation for dealing with bankrupt trusts that was introduced by the last Labour government. The proposals involved Lewisham, a solvent hospital, having its A&E Department shut, so that there would only be one A&E Department for the 750,000 inhabitants of the boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley, and cutting maternity services so severely that nine out of ten mothers in a borough of 270,000 people would have to give birth elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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