The jewel in the crown trampled underfoot

I wonder if the Tories are as exhausted dismantling the welfare state (and much besides) as I and fellow campaigners, trade unionists, etc, are trying to defend it. I blooming well hope so!

I've found myself rather belatedly campaigning to save the NHS. The crowning achievement of the post-war Labour government, the representation above all else of a post-war political settlement where even the Tories accepted that ordinary people had a right to expect decent healthcare, and that the market in health that had operated up till then failed them.

I picked up a book the other day which I wish I'd read sooner and which should be required reading for anyone who ever uses the NHS. It's The Plot Against the NHS by Colin Leys and Stewart Player.

Sounds rather conspiratorial, and I don't like that sort of thing, usually, but it's a fair title. It outlines the recent history of the NHS, under New Labour, first of all. How they introduced market mechanisms and allowed chinks where private healthcare companies could enter the NHS as providers.

Those cracks have been prised open by the lobbyists of the private healthcare industries. Now, in spite of not announcing it in their manifestos, the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government propose to open up the whole NHS to private providers, and much besides, which will probably spell the end of the NHS as we know it.

Our system will become much more like a US-style market for healthcare, with, in time, people paying for treatment through personal insurance policies. It's a system that is expensive and inefficient, that largely excludes poorer people from many treatments, and that exists primarily to make big profits for private companies.

I went to a last-ditch protest against this prospect at the Department of Health on Whitehall yesterday. The organised labour movement largely having accepted the inevitability of the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill this coming week were not present. Nor were representatives of all the health professional bodies, who also oppose the Bill.

The unions and the Labour Party could have, should have organised a national campaign to save the NHS, and a national demonstration. Instead, there was a last-minute rally last week, at which all the general secretaries stood up, wrung their hands, expressed their personal commitment to the NHS, and then sat down again.

On Saturday we were, instead, a motley crew of anarchists, UKUncutters, elderly health campaigners, and families with children. We occupied Whitehall for a few halcyon minutes, grouped around the Cenotaph - but taking extreme care not to disturb the wreaths.

There is ample reason to think that we got the NHS because the British ruling class was worried about how the returning troops would react in 1945 if they didn't get a better deal socially and economically. Someone held a banner for Lambeth Save Our NHS in front of the monument with the words 'The Glorious Dead' on it.

Then the riot police moved in to shove us all up Whitehall and off down the Strand. I pushed a woman in a wheelchair who was determined to keep up with the protest up the road while the police over-ran us and the traffic got flowing again behind us. One of the most miserable days of my life. If that gives any Tories comfort, I hope you fall ill in your old age and can't afford the treatment you need.

We marched to save the NHS

While Hendon Town Hall saw all manner of drama this evening, including Lynne Hillan sending a statement announcing she is stepping down as Barnet council leader, Barnet Alliance for Public Services made its collective way to central London to participate in the March to Save the NHS.

The march aimed to show some of the opposition that exists to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill. For a weekday evening, it was a good turnout of a few thousand, with a good spread of organisations represented. From Barnet, as well as the Barnet Alliance, Middlesex University Students Union were present.

The march started from outside University College Hospital, where I had an unpleasant brush with a security official banning me from taking a photo from the steps of the hospital: this is Foundation Trust property, he kept telling me. Amazing, isn't it? And Lansley's privatisation drive hasn't even started yet. This guy could have given MetPro some lessons, I tell you! Still, I got my shot.

We marched down Gower Street, part of Shaftesbury Avenue (past my workplace!), down Charing Cross Road, through Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall. We finished up outside Richmond House, the HQ of the Department of Health in England.

An additional feature of the evening was witnessing the weekly picket by Syrian democracy campaigners, opposite Downing Street. So what if I missed animals on the Hendon Town Hall lawn this evening!

I have a few pictures of the evening here. While they expose my lack of skills in photographing in twilight, only a couple are taken at weird angles - I'm learning.

P.S. Did I really miss animals on the lawn at Hendon Town Hall this evening? That would have been something to see...

Promoting independence? Barnet fails the frail elderly

In July 2009, around the time that they were defending their plan to cut the resident wardens from sheltered housing, Barnet's Tory administration decided

to replace the ‘Supporting the Vulnerable’ corporate priority with the more suitably titled ‘Promoting independence’.

Lynne Hillan, then Cabinet Member for Community Services, announced the change at a Cabinet meeting, saying that "Supporting the vulnerable" sounded patronising. All the user groups she had consulted agreed, she said, and were happy with the change. Given Hillan holds the purse strings, that's probably not a surprise.

If Barnet Tories are so keen on promoting independence what's this then? Barnet blogger the Barnet Bugle has drawn his readers' attention to a report in the Daily Telegraph today. It says that frail and elderly people waiting for adaptations to their homes to help them live independent lives could wait longer than six years for the change they need. Guess which council took longer than six years to make adaptations in at least one case? Which council headed the list of shame?

The average lag between an assessment of a request for help, and an adaptation taking place, was 15 months.

There were hold-ups of more than six years in the London borough of Barnet, and at least five years in Oldham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, East Sussex, Cheshire, Warwickshire and Salford.

It would be good to see more detail on this case. When someone close to me needed adaptations made they were done quite quickly, but perhaps that was because they were simple things - some rails - and because the person in question has articulate people lobbying on her behalf. Nevertheless, Barnet has a case to answer. It appears that they are falling down in their aim of promoting independence.

The phrase was always, I believe, partly simply rhetoric used to cover cost-cutting measures.

The Tories justified their plan to cut sheltered housing wardens on the grounds that the money saved would be redistributed to people choosing to stay in their own homes. Sheltered housing was disparaged as an institutional way of life that didn't suit today's modern elderly!

In fact, sheltered housing, with a resident warden, is an excellent way for people to remain independent; and sheltered housing schemes are often pleasant, sociable communities. I can't see how being isolated in your own home, with only an occasional visit from a social worker or mobile warden, is necessarily more dignified.

Barnet had better have a good story to explain away this latest embarassment. The Tories' shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley tries to put the blame on the Labour government for the failings overall, but this example has happened in our Tory-run council.

P.S. Now would be a good time to mention that the Tories, standing in the council elections, will press ahead with their plan to axe the sheltered housing wardens if they win the council. Labour and Lib Dems are committed to halting the plan. I don't know the positions of the other parties (and in the case of the BNP I don't want to know).