Posted On January 30, 2012 1 Comment

NHS “safe” under a Tory-led ConDem government? Chris updates her report.

30th January 2012

Just over a week ago I posted the report below because I am so consciouse of the effects that the Tories’s approach to the National Health Service could have on the low and middle income people I represent in Egremont, Seacombe, Poulton and Somerville.    Things have certainly moved fast in a week – and not very well for the Tories.  The newspapers are increasingly open about the damage to its own popularity the Tory-led government is creating for itself.

The Bill seeking to change Labour’s NHS so fundamentally is back in the Lords on 8th Feb.  The Government seem to be on the defensive.   ”Yougov” has just published the results of a new survey on public attitudes to the NHS and its reforms, with a sample size of 1884.   Here are some of the highlights:

36% trusted the Coalition to deliver high quality NHS services, but a startling

57% didn’t trust the government “much or at all”.

Could you?

A full breakdown by political party support, gender, age, social group and region is available at:

http://cdn.yougov.com/today_uk_import/YG-Archives-Life-Sun-NHS-190111.pdf

A higher percentage of the British public opposes the Government’s plans to restructure the NHS than supports them, and faith in the Coalition’s ability to deliver NHS services is sinking.  After all didn’t the Tories go into the general election with slogans that they could be ‘trusted’ with the NHS?  Who believes that now?

Cllr Chris Jones gives her opinion of the government’s NHS proposals

On 22nd January Chris reported:

Following years of neglect under Tory governments, Labour invested heavily in replacing crumbling buildings and increasing nurse and doctor numbers to rebuild the National Health Service.   Most residents of the Wallasey Riverside area, covering from Seacombe to New Brighton, would agree that we are now well served with excellent local medical practices, backed up by top class Wirral hospitals.  But we have not yet met anybody on the doorstep who believes what this Tory-led government is now doing to the NHS is acceptable.

Follow the link below to read Angela’s summary in November. The latest developments show her view was spot on.

http://www.angelaeaglemp.co.uk/news.php?id=242

Labour created the National Health Service during the economic aftermath of Hitler’s war when Britain faced economic re-construction with burdens greater even than the Bankers’ gambling-debt crisis we are all now being forced to pay for.   It was created in the face of dogged opposition from the Tories.  So what’s changed?

Health is the most important element of every person’s ‘wealth’.  Isn’t there something fundamentally unwholesome about the privatisation of health provision into profit inspired businesses?

Last week the pressure on Lansley increased when official health department data revealed that the number of patients not being treated within the 18-week time limit has soared by 43% since the Tory/LibDem coalition took office. Led by the Doctors’ organisation “The British Medical Association” a meeting has been called of all 20 members of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.  Along with the nurses’ and midwives’ unions, these health professionals are calling loudly for the bill to be scrapped.

The meeting comes as one of Downing Street’s advisers on the NHS, Professor Chris Ham, King’s Fund health thinktank chief executive, warns that growing disquiet across the medical establishment “could become an NHS version of the Arab spring”.

Despite the Tories’ attempts to personalise politics, with rather silly jibes at individuals, we believe the people of the UK will no more forgive the collaboration government of LibDems and Tories, for their policies towards the NHS, than they will for their closeness to the bankers who plunged the world into its present economic chaos.

This ‘Health Policy Insight’ article provides excellent information, well worth reading for anyone who believes in the NHS

http://www.healthpolicyinsight.com/?q=node%2F1313

We will be interested to hear your views.

Posted On January 12, 2012 Leave a Comment

Angela Eagle is MP for Wallasey and shadow leader of the Commons

Angela Eagle

The government suffered a huge blow to its planned changes to the welfare system on Wednesday night when the House of Lords voted three times against means testing of benefits for cancer patients and young disabled people. In the commons chamber, I congratulated the Labour, crossbench and the tiny band of Liberal Democrat peers for standing up for decency and fairness and blocking these shocking plans. I urged the leader of the House not to use parliamentary time to reverse the votes and instead have a debate on fairness to remind the Liberal Democrats in the coalition just why they entered politics in the first place.

At business questions on Thursday, I raised the issue of fat cat salaries following the prime minister’s New Year tour of TV studios and his announcement that shareholders’ votes on executive pay would be binding. But in November the prime minister announced that his idea to address exorbitant boardroom pay was to appoint more women to boards. In October he told us the solution was boards asking themselves ‘is this the right thing to do’.

Over the last year we have had plenty of press releases from No. 10:  yet FTSE 100 bosses put their own salaries up by a staggering 49 per cent while last year average earnings went up by just 1.4 per cent. Instead of the prime minister touring TV studios once a month, I asked the Leader of the House explain to him that if he is serious about dealing with fat cat salaries we need action not more press releases and asked him to tell us when we are going to get it.

I also called on the leader of the House to have a word with the chancellor and enquire when we can expect to see a response from the treasury to Will Hutton’s report on fair pay in the public sector. In June 2010 the chancellor announced in yet another press release that this was an ‘important review’ and it would pay ‘a crucial role’ in developing government policy.  But it has all gone very quiet since, with not so much as a whisper from the government since the report was published ten months ago.

Following a year in which the issue of lobbying engulfed more than one minister, the cabinet office promised in November that the government would be publishing proposals to clamp down on the access lobbyists have to government by ‘the end of the month’.

Since then we have had a Bell Pottinger executive boasting of the access he can get his clients to the top of government and now one of the prime minister’s top aides, has signed up to another lobbying firm. What we haven’t had is this much promised consultation.

The last time the leader of the House was asked about this – at the beginning of December – he told the House the government would be publishing proposals ‘in a few weeks’. Given this consultation is now long overdue I asked if the cabinet office minister would return to the House to explain what has gone wrong?  I’m not holding my breath!

Angela Eagle is MP for Wallasey and shadow leader of the Commons

Posted On December 18, 2011 Leave a Comment

Lib-Dem/Tory collaboration in Euro-chaos? Watch this space!

18th ~December 2011

Our attention has been drawn to this news-link to our report of 11th December, 2011.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/18/aidan-burley-sacked-nazi-stag-party_n_1156089.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Cuk%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk2%7C88979

11th December 2011

In a spectacular collapse of unity (not that its ’unity’ was ever all that strong) the Tory-led Coalition with the LibDems seems today to be in deep crisis.  Is Cameron now desperate to placate the Right Wing of the Tory Party?  By advocating the interests of the City of London as a key part of his theme he at least appears to be ’on line’ with the bankers.

Err ….

  • Wasn’t it the millionaire bankers whose activities caused the world economic crash in the first place?
  • Aren’t there rather a lot of millionaires in Cameron’s Tory-led cabinet?
  • Doesn’t the Tory Party get rather a lot of funding from that sort of ‘club’?

And haven’t the bankers and financiers been investing UK industrial profits in the low-wage economies of the far east for decades, ever since the British de-industrialisation and export of formerly UK jobs during the previous Tory governments – with devastating effects on areas like Seacombe where manufaturing industry has suffered so much?

And what are the press saying about it?  Not much unanimity there, nor comfort for the Tory-led coalition - as today’s headlines show.

"Yes Cameron got it right" screams the The Mail on Sunday

"Oh no he didn't - It's a spectacular failure" quotes the (perhaps rather more up-market) 'Independent'.

Meanwhile this page 6 story needs no comment to show how prone some Tory MPs are to shooting their party in its Right foot.

There may well be groans of dismay all over the country from those Tory Party supporters who turn to the ‘Mail’ for a bit of a lift.   This story naming a British Tory MP, and the events related, with a picture of him with David Cameron as well, may not do much to persuade the Germans and French that all is as sweet as it may have seemed when Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath took us into the EEC (or EU as it now is) in 1973.
Anyone who can read on as far as pages 12 and 13 of the ‘Mail on Sunday’ will then find a strident lampoon of LibDem leader Nick Clegg which screams “Humiliation of Nick Clegg” with a photo of the poor chap looking rather sad and the comment “Nick Clegg is facing growing LibDem dissent.”  Not much comfort for the Tories in that, though.  Right next to it is another article ‘Brooding Europhile Clarke to confront Cameron tomorrow”.  It seems that one-time Tory leadership hopeful Ken Clarke is set for “… a potentially explosive meeting with David Cameron tomorrow.”
Oh dear, we always knew the LibDem/Tory marriage could not be a happy one.
But will it end in divorce and a general election?  Probably not;  the Lib Dems could just walk away leaving Labour to try to form a minority administration; or they could ask for a coalition with Labour instead.  But it’s unlikely they would want a general election even if the law (as they helped the Tories to change it) would now precipitate a general election – after all the poor old LibDems would probably be wiped out, and they’d hardly want that!
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