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Your Vote Could Mean The End of the NHS

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Horton - BlogWe were told the last election was all about Education – Education – Education. This one should be NHS – NHS – NHS.

The road to privatisation of the NHS has been a long one and began under the Conservatives in 1992 with the Private Finance Initiative.  It’s a neat trick that enables huge amounts of debt to be moved off the national balance sheet whilst still expanding operational infrastructure.

New Labour saw it as something too good to be true, as it allowed them to build new hospitals, without borrowing more money or raising taxes.  But like most things that seem too good to be true, it was.  By the end of their tenure Labour had saddled the NHS with £80Bn in repayments on total capital assets worth around £11Bn, and we’re still paying for it now.

Then along came the Conservatives again who just love to privatise things.  Every time they’ve been in government they’ve privatised something. The trains, electricity, gas, BT, the post office – which they practically gave away.

But the Tories have a problem when it comes to the NHS.  They can’t flat out privatise it, because that’s politically toxic.

So in 2012 – The year that Danny Boyle showed us in his spectacular Olympic opening ceremony what a glorious thing the NHS is – the Conservatives brought in the Health and Social Care Bill.

A bill that many people didn’t even notice passing through parliament.  But a bill that arguably affects all of us more than any other legislation in our lifetime.  A bill based on the premise that the NHS was a poorly performing institution that needed reform and another £3Bn top down reorganisation that we’d been promised before the election wouldn’t happen.  A bill that ignored the core values of the NHS and characterised it’s staff as a problem to be dealt with rather than it’s greatest asset.  A bill that achieved the Tory Nirvana of laying the NHS open to private contractors, furthering their ideology that the state should not be responsible for providing public services.

It effectively legislated against free universal comprehensive healthcare and flung the door to privatisation wide open.  And private health firms are falling over themselves to come inside.

Jeremy Hunt has just announced £780Million worth of private contracts to 11 firms, many of which have a chequered history. Many of them are also donors to the Tory Party.  There are also plans in Staffordshire to privatise cancer care in a £700M contract and ‘End of life care’ worth another £500M

In a leaked confidential document it’s proposed that these contractors will be :

“Given ‘discretion’ to design services they would like to deliver, slash spend per patient and propose the payment structures most beneficial to themselves”.

In that one clause we get a glimpse of how private companies will pervert the ethos of the NHS to their own end.

First the add on services will be an extra cost.  Then any new treatments, drugs or therapies will be extra

In effect we’ll end up with a RyanAir NHS  – Your operation will be free, but they’ll charge you £500 for the bed and another fifty for using the toilet.

The government consistently claims the NHS budget is protected but in reality, it’s being forced to make cuts dressed up as efficiency savings of £15bn – £20bn by the end of this year. No wonder we’re losing services.  And across the country, A&Es, maternity and other services are being closed, with thousands of jobs lost.  Competitive tendering also fragments healthcare. Where patients are sent miles to access different care resources around the country based on contractor costs.

I’m standing as Parliamentary candidate for the Green Party in Banbury, where people are rightfully worried about that fragmentation and the future of their beloved Horton General Hospital.  Labour have already tried to close it once, and more recently the coalition began a reduction in the range of services offered there, with the removal of emergency abdominal surgery facilities. This has resulted in some patients being forced to make a 3 or 4 hour, 50 mile round trip to services at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.  Not only is this extremely inconvenient, it also potentially impairs patient outcome as additional stress is added to their situation.

Banbury has a long history of returning Conservative MPs, but this time every voter in the constituency has to ask themselves the question – do I still want to have access to a fully free and fully funded NHS in 5 years time?

If the answer is yes you have to remember that, no matter how much you might like the Conservative candidate this time (and I’ll admit I like her too), a vote for Victoria Prentis will just make another Tory led government more of a reality.  No matter how much she says she’ll fight for the Horton, she’ll be forced to follow her party’s privatisation agenda.  Even if she votes against the whip she’ll be a lone voice in a government she helped to put into power.

I want to see an end to all privatisation of the NHS and I believe the NHS should be brought back entirely into public ownership.

The Green Party supports the NHS re-instatement bill, we’d negotiate an exit from PFI and repeal the Health and Social Care Act.  We’d also fight TTIP which could have a huge impact on the NHS. We believe that NHS staff deserve a fair deal and that they should be supported and valued rather than treated as a problem to be dealt with

Aneurin Bevan was once asked how long he thought the NHS would survive.  He replied: “As long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

Every party is pledging to invest more money into the NHS but the Green Party won’t just invest cash, we’ll also invest our faith.  We all have to show that faith now or by the end of the next parliament Danny Boyle’s proud Olympic love letter to our wonderful NHS could become it’s epitaph.

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Save Banbury’s Phone Box Library!

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Who’d have thought that a small but effective local community initiative in an Oxfordshire town would attract such global attention?  The Banbury Phone Box Library is one such brilliant piece of local engagement which is now garnering international attention as BT looks towards chopping it off at the knees.

The red phone box is almost as iconic as the red bus as a national symbol of Britain around the world.  You’d think if you were company who owns and operates these highly visible pieces of cultural capital you’d be only too pleased to see them being involved in well supported local campaigns that add value to a service that is perhaps not as loved as it once was.

In that context it seems daft to me that BT are hell bent on annoying small and large communities across the country by removing public call boxes where they’re valued for numerous reasons other than a quick natter on the phone.  It’s even more self-defeating that they’re erasing some of the very symbols of Britishness that have helped them build a world class multi-national company.

It has to be said that the Town Council in Banbury share some of the potential blame if the box is removed, as they are refusing to adopt it (something that BT now allow for the princely sum of £1), if BT go ahead with plans to decommission the phone service in the box.  Previously they struck a deal with BT to adopt the box and save the library and a local steel fabrication firm offered to fix permanent shelves in the box to house the books to assuage BT’s prior objections to the library service on health and safety grounds, as they believed the current shelving arrangements could be dangerous.

BT now claims that it is uneconomic for them to continue to run the service anyway, even though I understand thousands of calls were made from it last year.

The under-story seems to be that BT want out of the call box game at any cost, and most of that cost will be borne by local communities using the boxes for a number of vital social services or simply to make a call when other options are not available to them.

Banbury Town Council now say that they’re not prepared to adopt the box if it is then decommissioned by BT.  Whilst I support taking a stance against the loss of the phone service, I think it would be a sad loss to the community of the box were to be removed as a result of the Town Council refusing to adopt the box itself.

Moreover, If BT are claiming the box is loss making, I think it would be useful for them to provide the figures backing that up. It would at least give us an idea of the likely shortfall which could perhaps be covered in some other way.

It’s also crazy that BT are missing this as an opportunity for some very positive PR. It has to be said that they’re not universally loved as a company, so something like this, that is fairly minimal in cost terms, would seem to be a great way for them to connect with the community.

Going forward perhaps the government needs to bring in a legal requirement on telecoms companies like this to provide a certain number of public call points in an area. Just because most of us carry mobiles now, doesn’t mean that sometimes they might not fail at a vital time, or have been forgotten when they’re most needed.  I know BT used to be obliged to seek permission from local or parish councils in order to remove a box, but it sounds like that requirement has now been watered down.  In very rural areas mobile phone reception is also notoriously patchy.  In those areas call boxes provide a vital service for emergency calls.

In terms of usage statistics, it might also be interesting to track the number of calls made against the minimum price of a call in a phone box, which I understand is now 60p. Perhaps BT need to be reminded of the law of supply and demand.

If you’re on Twitter you can follow and support the campaign to save the Banbury Phone Box Library by following the hashtag