Queen and Prince Charles using power of veto over new laws, Reports the Telegraph

The Queen and Prince Charles are using their little-known power of veto over  new laws, according to Whitehall documents.

The Telegraph, January 2013.

At least 39 bills have been subject to Royal approval, with the senior royals using their power to consent or block new laws in areas such as higher education, paternity pay and child maintenance.

Internal Whitehall papers prepared by Cabinet Office lawyers show that on one occasion the Queen vetoed the Military Actions Against Iraq Bill in 1999, which aimed to transfer the power to authorise military strikes against Iraq from the monarch to parliament. She was also asked to consent to the Civil Partnership Act in 2004.

In the Whitehall document, which was released following a court order, the Parliamentary Counsel warns that if consent is not given by the royals “a major plank of the bill must be removed”.

Legal scholar John Kirkhope, who fought to access the papers following a freedom of information case, said the document revealed senior royals have “real influence and real power”. “There has been an implication that these prerogative powers are quaint and sweet but actually there is real influence and real power, and totally unaccountable,” he said.

The document also contains a warning to civil servants that obtaining consent can cause delays to legislation. Royal approval may even be needed for amendments to laws, it says. Andrew George, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, which includes land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, said the findings showed the Royals “are playing an active role in the democratic process”. He called for greater transparency in order to evaluate whether the powers were “appropriate.” “This is opening the eyes of those who believe the Queen only has a  ceremonial role,” he said.

“It shows the royals are playing an active role in the democratic process   and we need greater transparency in parliament so we can be fully appraised   of whether these powers of influence and veto are really appropriate. At any stage this issue could come up and surprise us and we could find parliament is less powerful than we thought it was.”

The power of veto has been used by Prince Charles on more than 12 government bills since 2005 on issues covering gambling to the Olympics.

The NHS – Rationing And The Two-Tier Health Service

The NHS – Rationing And The Two-Tier Health Service

NHS hospitals performing record numbers of private operations in ‘two-tier’ health service. Hard-up hospitals can now earn up to 50% of income from private work. Shock figures show their income from private patients rose 12% last year – with a further 10% rise forecast for the next 12 months. The Tories are creating a two-tier NHS – with those who pay gobbling up scarce resources.

A Freedom of Information request by Labour MP Gareth Thomas revealed English NHS hospitals earned £434million from private patients in 2012/13, up £47million in a year. And hospitals are forecasting they will earn even more this year (2013/14), raking in some £480million from private work.

Ealing Hospital in London, where the A&E department is under threat, increased the amount it got from their private patients by 250% in the last two years; while Great Ormond Street hospital saw a 58% rise, and Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust has budgeted for a 30% increase next year.

The MP who unearthed the figures, said: “Our hospitals are seeing a huge rise in the amount of money they receive from private patients. With yet more increases to come this year, it’s clear that under David Cameron a two-tier health service is emerging; pay privately and you’ll be seen quickly – don’t pay privately and join an increasingly long waiting list.”

He said there was growing evidence that patients are being forced to go private because they are being turned away from the NHS or spending so long on waiting lists. “Last year more than 52,000 patients in England were denied routine operations because of the financial pressures on the NHS. This included people waiting for common procedures such as cataract operations and varicose veins treatment”.

Meanwhile, one in five GPs who sits on a Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) board has a financial stake in a provider which currently provides services to their own CCG, a Pulse investigation has found, potentially having a conflict of interest because they hold a financial stake in a private healthcare provider.

Figures released by NHS England for July revealed more than half a million patients are on hospital waiting lists in London alone. Dr Clive Peedell, co-leader of the National Health Action Party said: “lifting the cap on private treatments would see a further rise in waiting NHS lists”. “It is a reflection of the huge financial strain on hospitals. The only way to survive and stop from going bankrupt is to increase the number of private patients. We are heading to a two-tier system with consultants having to decide who takes priority: do they see private or NHS patients first”. “The knock on effect will be increased waiting lists as the NHS only has a limited capacity, and if they treat private patients that pushes other patients out of the system. David Cameron is privatising our NHS”.

Rationing
According to the NHS Support Federation: 70% of GP’s are unable to refer patients to the NHS for treatment at least once a month, while 66% of GP’s reported an increase of patients enquiring about private health care because their treatment was no longer available on the NHS. Meanwhile, increased health care rationing is being felt accross the country. 56% of CCGs have further reduced access to care this year according to the Telegraph.

The NHS Support Federation reports that: 39% of people with diabetes have been left unable to monitor their blood glucose levels because the test strips required are being rationed to save money. Self-monitoring of blood glucose levels is essential for many people with the condition. Failure to do so can lead to serious complications such as hypoglycaemia and ketoacidosis.

The Evening Standard reported last month that the number of operations cancelled at the last minute by London hospitals is at a new high, with more patients having to wait at least four weeks for their rescheduled surgery. Other treatments being increasingly rationed include cataract surgery and hip and knee replacements. GP’s are to be given thresholds to ration 28 common surgical procedures including knee replacements, cataract surgery and bariatric surgery under new guidance currently being developed by the Department of Health.

A recent report from the National Audit Office stated: Hospitals in certain areas have stopped offering elective treatments for smokers or people above a certain level of obesity, while in others cataract patients are being forced to wait until their eyesight deteriorates further before being allowed surgery. Rationing elective operations “essentially defers, rather than avoids, spending,” the report said.

A survey of NHS professionals has found that ‘efficiency savings’ are not working, staff morale is low and services are being cut. Almost half of those surveyed believe patient safety is being affected by the need to save £20 billion by 2015, while nine out of 10 say staff morale is being badly hit.

NHS Privatisation Explained A Video By The Save Lewisham Hospital campaign

Americans spend over $4,000 more on profit driven healthcare than Brits do on their NHS. For that extra money, they have a lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality, have less practising physicians, leave 50 million people uninsured, leave tens of millions underinsured, and make health bills the top reason for bankruptcy and homelessness.

Every pound put into profit is a pound taken from care. Privatisation doesn’t work. It’s time to nationalise everything, and for councils of workers, and stake holders to democratically run our industries and services.

So check this video The VOAG stumbled upon, exposing the government lies regarding the NHS.

 Lords and MPs financial interests in private healthcare: http://socialinvestigations.blogspot….

5 Things You Need To Know About The NHS Bill

1 The bill will cost at least £2 billion
Estimates of the cost of implementing the Health and Social Care Bill range from the government’s £1.3 billion to Labour’s £3.5 billion, but most independent analysts estimate at least £2 billion. The government claims the bill will save money in the long run but even the Conservative-led parliamentary health committee says this is unlikely unless standards of care are cut. £1 billion is being spent on redundancy for managers, only for many to be rehired as consultants.

2 The bill will create more bureaucracy
The NHS bill replaces three levels of management (Department of Health, Strategic Health Authorities, Primary Care Trusts) with seven (Department of Health, NHS Commissioning Board, Strategic Health Authority clusters, Commissioning Support Organisations, Clinical Commissioning Groups, Clinical Senates, HealthWatch), and creates two unaccountable super-quangos (Monitor and the NHS Board).

3 Waiting times will grow – unless you go private
The bill allows hospitals to fill up to half of their beds with private patients, and waters down guarantees on NHS waiting times. NHS patients will increasingly find themselves at the back of the queue, even for their own local hospital.

4 Care will depend on a postcode lottery
The bill will break up the NHS and create a postcode lottery on a scale not seen before. With no national standards, there will be widespread variation in the treatments available on the NHS. In some areas, people may have to go private to get services available for free elsewhere. Scotland and Wales, which are not covered by the bill, will continue to provide services denied to patients in England.

5 Private companies, not GPs, will be in control
The bill says GPs will plan and commission healthcare. But this complex role cannot be done on the side while providing the same level of care to patients. We expect pilots to have excellent flying skills – not to design and purchase their own planes. In fact leaked papers show the government expects private companies called Commissioning Support Organisations to take over this role. CSOs will decide how care is delivered but there will be no democratic control over them.

A Betrayal Of Trust: Watch this video to find out why we must stop Lansley’s bill

Further information on the Health and Social Reform Bill is available at Keep Our NHS Public www.keepournhspublic.com/index.php and Health Emergency: www.healthemergency.org.uk

NHS Privatisation – services to be opened up to competition in April.

More than £1bn of NHS services are to be opened to competition from private companies and charities.

The government will open up more than £1bn of NHS services to competition from private companies and charities, reported the Guardian on 17^th July. It will lead to the “privatisation of the entire health service” it said.

In the first wave, beginning in April, eight NHS areas – including services for back pain, adult hearing services and wheelchair services for children – will be open for competition. If successful, “any qualified provider” will be allowed, from 2013, to deliver more complicated clinical services in maternity and chemotherapy.

Even Labour’s shadow health secretary, John Healey said it was “not about giving more control to patients, but setting up a full-scale market”. “The Tory-led government is pushing ahead with its wasteful and unnecessary NHS reorganisation, rather than focusing on improving patient care. Their policies were just a step towards privatisation. The government insists the NHS must save £20bn over the next four years”.

Writing in Labour Briefing, John Healey said: “In its original form the NHS bill was more than three times longer than the 1946 Act that set up the NHS and it has already been subjected to hundreds of amendments”. “Furthermore, the revised Health And Social Care bill is to be put before Parliament the day after the Summer recess, leaving MPs no chance to read the details of the bill before they vote on it”.   

A Unison spokesman added: “Patients will be little more than consumers, as the NHS becomes a market-driven service, with profits first and patients second, and they will be left without the services they need as forward planning in the NHS becomes impossible.”

A spokesman for the British Medical Association questioned the assumption that increasing competition will mean improving choice, and said: “The Government is misleading the public by repeatedly stating that there will be no privatisation of the NHS”.

 From April 2012 eight types of health services will be opened to competition:
• Services for back and neck pain.
• Adult hearing services in the community.
• Continence services (adults and children).
• Diagnostic tests closer to home.
• Wheelchair services (children).
• Podiatry (feet) services.
• Leg ulcer and wound healing.
• Talking Therapies (primary care psychological therapies, adults).

Max Pemberton commented in The Telegraph on July 26^th: “There are 15 clauses that will allow private companies to buy and asset-strip NHS facilities. This means that in these areas the NHS will no longer exist. Sure, the logo will still be there, but the NHS will no longer be national, any more than British Telecom is”. “The health secretary and the Prime Minister assure us the NHS will not be privatised when the legislation they are pushing through explicitly suggests otherwise”.

 

Labour Briefing – The Privatisation of NHS
https://suacs.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/labour-briefing-the-privatisation-of-nhs.pdf

 

 

British Medical Journal: The Privatisation of NHS
https://suacs.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/bmj-the-privatisation-of-nhs.pdf

PFI And The NHS – A Health Emergency

Report by Health Emergency, Published: 04/03/11
More and more NHS hospitals built at high cost with private finance in the last decade (under the controversial Private Finance Initiative) are already closing beds and axing clinical and other staff in a desperate bid to balance the books as NHS budgets face the biggest-ever squeeze.

And now cuts and closures of services are being combined with asset-stripping sales of land and property to bail out floundering Trust finances.

• The financially-strapped South London Healthcare Trust, which includes two financially-disastrous PFI hospital schemes (Bromley’s Princess Royal University Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich) has announced plans to flog off “spare“ land assets on several sites. This will virtually dismember what remains of the Queen Mary’s hospital in Sidcup, where A&E and maternity services have already been axed, despite pre-election promises that they would be kept open – killing any last faint hopes of restoring the lost services.
• In West London, the struggling West Middlesex Hospital Trust is planning to axe hundreds of nursing and admin jobs, and close more of the beds in the PFI-funded hospital, seeking to cut spending by 12% in two years.
• In North East London, the £239m Queen’s Hospital in Romford, part of Barking Havering & Redbridge Hospitals Trust, is running with a whole floor unused, while the Trust is still seeking ways to close most of the 18-year old King George’s Hospital in Ilford in order to stem its continued yearly deficits.
• Upwards of 100 beds in the most costly PFI development in the country, the £1 billion Bart’s & London Hospital (where each bed is costing £1m to build, and £5m over the lifetime of the contract) are also to be closed – before they are even built, leaving the Trust saddled with the escalating bill for building capacity it cannot afford to run.
• In Portsmouth too, a brand new £256m 1,200 bed QueenAlexandraHospital has announced 700 job losses and the closure of 100 costly beds in a battle to balance the books. The “unitary charge“ PFI bill, which rises each year, is £43m this year, making the total cost of the hospital and support services under PFI a staggering £1.6 billion.

Many other PFI hospitals are facing financial problems but have yet to announce cuts. But perhaps the financial nonsense of PFI is clearly underlined by the plight of the West Middlesex Hospital, which has already paid out £89m to the consortium which built the £60m hospital, but faces another 20 years or more of payments totalling more than £420m before the £515m contract is complete.

Commenting on the latest revelations, Health Emergency’s Information Director Dr John Lister said: “PFI means that hospitals face rising bills each year – regardless of their income: It also means that private sector profits are protected by legally binding contracts, taking an increased share of declining Trust budgets, while clinical services, patient care and the jobs of NHS staff are sacrificed – in an impossible battle to balance the books as the NHS faces real-terms cuts for the first time in a decade.

“Isn’t it significant that Andrew Lansley’s massive and controversial Health and Social Care Bill is seeking to break up almost every structure in our NHS, claiming to make the system more efficient, but leaving PFI intact, and instead opening even more ways for the private sector to rip off the taxpayer and undermine public services?

“The Tories appeared opportunistically critical of their own PFI policy when Labour was implementing it, but are now happy to see this growing haemorrhage of cash from the NHS.

“If ministers really wanted value for money in the NHS, they would scrap Lansley’s crazy Bill which hardly anyone – even GPs – supports, and which will cost £3 billion or more to implement, and focus instead on nationalising the PFI hospitals, many of which will be paying through the nose for a generation to come to banks that the taxpayer already effectively owns.“

SEVEN MORE REASONS WHY WE ALL SHOULD BE MARCHING FOR THE ALTERNATIVE ON MARCH 26TH

Disabled Housing Benefit Slashed
Government figures show about 450,000 disabled people will see their incomes cut under one of the changes planned to housing benefit. From April 2013, housing benefit for working age people in social rented homes will be linked to the size of property councils ‘believe they need’.

An assessment from the Department for Work and Pensions shows the change will leave 450,000 disabled people an average of £13 a week worse off. Many disabled people will have to leave their current home. The government will not even guarantee an alternative.

The government’s Communities Department has announced a review of councils’ statutory duties. Under the reviews proposals, councils would be allowed to decide not to provide any services to disabled people, including residential care and respite for families and carers. This is a very real threat to the lives, security and future of disabled people.

Disability Alliance policy director Neil Coyle said: “We’ve been contacted by people who’ve said that if they lose the kind of support that helps them get to work for example, if they’re no longer entitled to that support, they’ll lose the ability to be independent”.

The Great Pensions Robbery
The Hutton Report into pensions was published on 11^th March. Hutton wants to raise the retirement age to 66 by 2020. Hutton claims that retiring early, say at 55, is no longer acceptable when people are living longer.

Hutton wants to do away with “generous final salary” pension schemes. Instead they will be set at the average salary across a person’s career. Thirdly, Hutton says workers should up their contribution to the pension scheme from 6.4% to 9.4%: i.e. a 3% pay cut or, with inflation running at over 5%, an 8% real pay cut. Scandalously, many unions have already agreed to this increase.

There isn’t anything generous about public sector pensions. The average pension is about £4,200 a year. The Coalition has already linked pension increases to the lower, CPI rate of inflation, so they will depreciate – by as much as £10,000 over the average retirement. http://www.workerspower.com/index.php?id=47,2797,0,0,1,0

As Unemployment Rises – Job Centre Cuts
Around 7, 000 staff in Jobcentre Plus (JCP) call centres have begun voting this week in a strike ballot over intolerable working conditions. The ballot widens a dispute which led to two days of strike action in January by more than 2, 000 workers in the seven newest contact centres, who have been forcibly moved from processing benefit claims to handling enquiries by phone.

The union says managers have “an obsession” with hitting call centre targets at the expense of providing a good quality public service. The oppressive conditions are resulting in high levels of stress and sickness, and staff are leaving at an alarming rate. Since April 2010, more than 2,700 staff have left – over 20% of the total call centre workforce of 12,800.

The ballot also follows an announcement by senior managers that they want to close more of the department’s benefit processing offices and call centres. JCP is planning to reduce staff from its current 73,000 to 65,600 by 31 March 2012. This is down from a peak of 84,000 at the end of 2009.

HSE Health And Safety Visits May Be Cut By A Third
A leaked letter from the Health and Safety Executive outlines plans to withdraw inspections from entire sectors of industry, including some where “significant risk” remains. Unannounced workplace safety inspector visits may be cut by up to a third. The possibility of an unexpected visit from either an HSE or a local authority safety inspector helps keep employers on their toes; even now, workplaces can go decades without ever seeing an inspector.

 NHS Job Cuts
50,000 NHS staff posts are set for the axe, destroying government claims that the NHS is in safe hands. The news was reported by the Anti-Cuts website False Economy, from information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

David Cameron famously claimed before the election that he would “cut the deficit, not the NHS”. However 10 months into the coalition government, the reality couldn’t be more different, with NHS cuts across the country as local health trusts struggle to save £20bn from their budgets.

The total confirmed NHS staff cuts across the country currently stands at just over 53,150 posts – and that’s before a host of trusts are expected to announce staff cuts over the next four months. The national total is already twice the previous estimate of 27,000 job cuts, published by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) last November.

Here in Guildford, the Royal Surrey has already seen four hundred job losses, together with a reduction of beds per ward. Many NHS trusts are seeing job losses of around 20% of the workforce. http://falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/more-than-50k-nhs-job-losses

Unemployment
It was reported in the guardian last week that the IMF held a conference about the financial crisis. The policy to emerge from the conference was “internal devaluation”

The idea is that countries with high labour costs relative to its trading partners will get its costs in line by lowering wages. The way they lower their wages is to force workers to take pay cuts under the pressure of high rates of unemployment.

An alternative, argued some would be to promote higher inflation in surplus countries. A higher rate of inflation would have the effect of eroding debt in real terms. A higher inflation rate will also increase the costs of the surplus countries relative to the costs of the deficit countries. It would allow the deficit countries to regain competitiveness.

The IMF and the central banks however have reaffirmed their programme of austerity and mass unemployment. Under our Capitalist system no government or bank is going to compromise its own competitiveness –however short term – for the common good.

Here in Britain, the unemployment rate is now 8%, with youth unemployment running at 20.6%. There are 2.54million presently unemployed according to the ONS, (Office of National Statistics) and another 1.19 million in part-time work because they can not find a full-time job. https://suacs.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/voice-of-anticapitalism-in-guildford-unemployment/  Unemployment is at a 17year high and is set to rise much further once the cuts proposed by the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review are implemented.

Apart from the threat of unemployment and the cuts to pensions and wages, a further attack on wages comes from the government’s plans referred to as the big society. Legions of volunteers, the government hopes will take over the running of public services where skilled workers were previously employed. The unemployed are also to be dragooned into working for their unemployment benefits, to take over the jobs once performed by fellow workers.

Families Could Lose Over £2,700 A Year Despite The ‘No Losers’ Welfare Pledge
Low and middle income families will suffer annual benefit cuts of over £2,700 a year by 2013, despite the government’s pledge that there are to be ‘no losers’ in the setting up of the new universal credit system, the TUC warned last week.

The government has said that no worker will be financially worse off when universal credits replace the current system of tax credits and benefits in April 2013. But in order to fulfil the ‘no losers’ pledge the government will have to reduce benefits before the changes take place in 2013, and so is making swingeing cuts to tax credits and benefits that will leave families thousands of pounds worse off in the run up to the April 2013 changeover.

Between April 2011 and April 2013, the government is introducing a series of welfare cuts which include reducing the amount of childcare costs that can be met by tax credits, freezing elements of working tax credit and child benefit, ending government payments to the child trust fund, and ending child benefit for higher rate taxpayers.

In addition, switching the measure for rating benefits from RPI (Retail Price Index) to CPI (Consumer Price Index) will reduce the value of key benefits over time, saving the Treasury £5.8 billion by April 2015, says the TUC. Housing benefit cuts will also lead to significant reductions in family incomes, including those of many working households. A TUC analysis shows that changes to the tax credit and benefits system alone could leave working families £2,700 a year worse off by April 2013.

Join the TUC demonstration against cuts in London, March 26th. There are coaches leaving from Guildford, subsidised by Unison. Only £2.00RTN. Click on the link at the top of the page for details.

Save Our Services in Surrey, meeting in Egham.

The latest in a series of Save Our Services in Surrey meetings was held at Staines Community Centre on 3^rd March.

The meeting was considerably smaller than previous meetings, but a very positive one. Although it was called at short notice, people still braved the mid-week freezing conditions. Most people were new faces, which was especially welcome.

Five of those attending the meeting, came from the newly constituted West Surrey branch of the Revolution Socialist Youth group. Revolution has been growing throughout the country with several new groups springing up. ‘Revo’s increasing popularity stems from its principled response to the cuts in education and rises to tuition fees. Revo were the main organisers of the Days Of Action against fees and cuts last year. It was Revo members in the Campaign Against Fees And Cuts that initially called for them.http://www.socialistrevolution.org/

Protest with REVO on the March 26^th TUC march against cuts. Join the student feeder march outside the University of London Union, Mallet Street. (Nearest tube Goodge Street)

Unfortunately The VOAG was late for the meeting, but arrived in time to catch Craig from the Royal Holloway Anti-Cuts Alliance in Egham, give a report on their latest developments.  The Royal Holloway Anti-Cuts Alliance is one of several anti-cuts groups affiliated to Save Our Services in Surrey. Craig, who is the SOSiS Youth Officer, spoke about the violent eviction of an occupation staged in the Central London campus of the Royal Holloway University.

Craig went on to speak about the University’s clamp down on the anti-cuts movement on his own campus in Egham. The Anti-Cuts group is being intimidated and slurred by the University authorities. Police and security have entered their meetings; and the university has even tried to label them as racists. The University recently banned a meeting of theirs about the conflicts in Palestine. It featured eye witnesses who had recently been volunteering on social and economic projects in the West Bank.

Craig announced his candidature for the NUS Executive Officer for Campaigns; and went on to tell the meeting that Daniel, another member of Royal Holloway Anti-Cuts Alliance, had been elected to be their next Union President. The VOAG wishes both of them every success!

Paul, a SOSiS and Surrey Unison officer, spoke to the meeting about the coaches he had booked for the 26^th March TUC demonstration against the cuts in London.

Coaches have been booked and subsidised by Surrey Unison. They will leave from Guildford, Woking, Redhill, and Staines. Tickets are only £2.00 Rtn. Buy a ticket on-line at www.saveourservic.es through the secure paypal, or email:guildfordagainstfeesandcuts@yahoo.co.uk

The VOAG doesn’t need to emphasise how important this demonstration is. It will be truly historic. There are more than two hundred Unison coaches coming from the South East region alone. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000336574245#!/event.php?eid=165255660190758

Chris from Save Our Services introduced the idea of distributing a pledge to all Labour Council candidates in the forthcoming election. The VOAG thinks this is an excellent idea. The candidates will be invited to sign the pledge, and join an on-line list of candidates who have signed.

A member of the PCS announced her members at the DWP were balloting in Surrey for strike action.

A Save Our Services street stall was arranged for 19^th March at Staines High Street. And the meeting was told about a rally due to take place in Redhill, March 24^th. This is being organised by Redhill Against Cuts, another group affiliated to Save Our Services in Surrey.

For a list of Save Our Services in Surrey events go to the events tab on the Guildford Against Fees and Cuts Facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000336574245#!/pages/Guildford-Against-Fees-Cuts/167151436659040 
Or for a diary of activists’ events in Surrey and the surrounding counties, click the Events Calendar on the right hand column on this page.

Aaron Porter, ConDem’d as a Tory, This Is Your Life – Guildford Against Fees And Cuts Bids Farewell

Aaron Porter – This Is Your Life!

What a month it was for Aaron Porter, NUS President. The Voice Of Anti-Capitalism in Guildford looks back at the lows and lows of a Tory low-life and bids farewell.

On the 29^th January, Aaron Porter was invited to speak at the closing rally of the NUS/UCU “A Future that Works” demonstration in Manchester. As protesters gathered at the starting point on Oxford Road, about thirty activists from Hull and Leeds Universities accosted Porter and demanded that he justify his record. Instead of engaging with the students, Porter turned and hurried off. In true Benny Hill style, he found himself being followed by a growing number of demonstrators. Within a couple of minutes he was literally being chased through the streets of Manchester by almost half of those who had gathered for the march – perhaps about five hundred people – with chants including “Students, workers, hear us shout, Aaron Porter sold us out” and “Porter – out”. Eventually he took refuge in Manchester Metropolitan Union, protected by a heavy cordon of riot police.

Aaron Porter is escorted in to the Manchester Met University, pursued by 500 protesters

Unsurprisingly, Porter did not turn up to speak at the closing rally. NUS Vice-President and Further Education officer, Shane Chowan spoke in Porter’s place. He was drowned out by hostile chanting and pelted with eggs and was unable to finish his speech. Most of the speakers were heckled repeatedly.

After the rally, about a thousand students marched back into the city center. They were met by a huge and violent police presence, and were kettled in central Manchester’s Deangate.

The following day, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail reported that during Porter’s pursuit through the streets of Manchester, he was subjected to racial taunts and chanting. The Mail’s article was titled: “Student leader faces barrage of anti-Jewish abuse at rally as protesters accuse him of being a Tory.”

When activists contacted the two newspapers, The Mail claimed a photographer was the sole source of their story but refused to name him. The Telegraph said there were only two sources for their story, a PA photographer, and the NUS itself. The NUS official who heard the chants, is “believed to be an aide to Porter”, an NUS Press Officer said: “We cannot allow you to speak to the person directly. There is an ongoing police investigation into the allegations, and we feel it is not appropriate to discuss the matter.”

In an email to NUS members printed in the Financial Times, Porter said; “Just before the march started, I was surrounded by a particularly vicious minority of protesters more intent on shouting threatening and racist abuse at me rather than focusing on the issues.”  On January 30^th, He sent a tweet that read: “I Will not back down to intimidation, and certainly not to racial abuse”, and in a Times article on January 31st he wrote of the protest: “However, before I was able to speak to the rally of thousands, a small group of people started to chant abuse to try to intimidate me, and there were audible anti-Semitic comments.”

Porter later admitted that he had not himself heard any racial abuse “The NUS had only confirmed the story when journalists contacted them for a comment”. In a statement through the NUS Press Office, Porter said: “I was not certain what was said by those shouting abuse at me, however I was informed by others present that amongst other things anti-Semitic comments were made. I have not made a specific complaint to the police as I did not clearly hear the contents of the chants myself.”

Allegations of racist chanting or abuse have been strongly denied and contemptuously shrugged off as a highly cynical attempt to salvage a sinking political career.

Two YouTube videos have emerged since the protest. One shows the moments before Porter was escorted into the Manchester Metropolitan Students’ Union. Another substantially longer one, which is largely uncut, shows most of the protest. At no point are there anti-Semitic chants, nor chants of “no to racism,” which was reported in the Telegraph article but not in the Mail.

There was a BBC reporter outside Manchester Metropolitan Students’ Union where Porter was taken. The BBC news reports made no mention of anti-Semitic chants.

Like the WMDs in Iraq, this looks like noxious New Labour spin. May be the weapons will turn up and video evidence of racial abuse will be made available, but I doubt it. Although no eyewitnesses have come forward to corroborate the Mail or Telegraph‘s claims, several have come forward to say that they heard no racist abuse.

A member of the Campaign Against Fees and Cuts said on their website: “We were at the front of the crowd which chased Porter, and thus would have heard any racist chants – let alone a “barrage”! We were also in possession of two of the four megaphones involved”.

Josie Hooker, a student at the University of Manchester was about 15 metres away from Porter for the majority of the march. She also claimed not to have heard anti-Semitic chants or the chants of “no to racism”. “At no point did I hear anti-Semitic abuse and at no point did I hear anyone shout ‘no to racism,’” she said. “Due to my position on the march, I believe that if a 20 strong group of people were shouting ‘no to racism’ in response to anti-Semitic or racist abuse, myself or one of the 15-20 odd friends and acquaintances present in various positions among the protesters would have heard it.”

She also suggested that the photographer who heard the chant “Tory Jew Scum” simply miss-heard “you’re a fucking Tory too,” which was chanted throughout the protest.

Peter Campbell, a medical student from Newcastle, also claimed to have heard no racial abuse. Referring to the “Aaron Porter we know you, you’re a fucking Tory too” chant, he said: “It is a chant of disgust at a man who has repeatedly set back the student movement. It is certainly not pleasant, it’s not meant to be. However, it is not anti-Semitic.”

Chris Marks, from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, when asked if there were any anti-Semitic chants said: “Absolutely and categorically not. I was at the front of the group which instigated the protest. If there had been anti-Semitic chants we would have heard and challenged it. Anything shouted was jovial.”

Porter, kettled in Glasgow cries for the police

On the 12^th February, Porter was in need of police protection again, when he was chased through the streets of Glasgow. As he left the Labour Students Conference at Glasgow University, where he had been speaking, he encountered a group of student activists. Occupiers from Glasgow University, who are battling against cuts on their campus.

The protesters crowded around the entrance as he left. In the words of one protester: “Having been sacrificed to us by his Labour bosses, so they could clear the door of the clearly terrifying mob, Aaron was kettled by us. Much screaming of “I don’t expect to be filmed!” and “I don’t want to be hit!” followed – nobody was hitting him, in fact he broke someone’s camera.- until he did a total comedy run away”. Showing uncharacteristic swift and decisive action, Porter immediately dived between one of the protesters’ legs and fled. Porter was forced into hiding somewhere on the Glasgow University campus. Even the Labour Club didn’t know where he was hiding. It’s an indictment of the disgraceful policies of the NUS leadership when even the Labour Students and Young Labour delegates appeared, to say the least, unconcerned about Porter’s wereabouts.

Porter’s recent betrayals began when he condemned the occupation of Millbank, whilst keeping silent about the much more extreme police violence. Secondly he flip-flopped, saying he had been “spineless”. He announced support for student occupations and promised he would obtain legal aid for occupiers which he didn’t do. Then he voted against NUS support for an anti-fees demo, instead choosing to back a useless “candelit vigil”.

The Daily Telegraph reported on 8^th December that they have seen emails from Porter to the Government, leaked by his close associates. Trying to persuade ministers at the Department for Business to enact their planned 15 per cent cut in higher education funding without lifting the cap on fees. The NUS leadership urged ministers to cut grants and loans as an alternative to raising tuition fees. Aaron was ready to call for cuts of up to £800 million in grants behind the back of students.

In one email to the Department for Business, dated Oct 1, Porter suggested that £800 million should be “deducted from the grants pot” over four years. That would cut total spending on grants by 61 per cent. Porter also proposed the “introduction of a real rate of interest” for student loans.

In an email the following day, Graeme Wise, an NUS political officer, urged ministers seeking cuts to start with the “student support” package of grants and loans. Graeme Wise also suggested that the cuts in support could be imposed on students currently at university.The NUS’ plans also called for 2.4 billion to be cut from the universities’ teaching budget over four years, a reduction of 48 per cent.

The NUS have also been calling on NUS officers at different universities not to oppose hikes in fees, describing them as “relatively progressive” – completely at odds with what they said publicly. Another leaked memo told NUS officers to “engage” with university leaders rather than campaign for lower fees.

In response, the President of Cambridge University Students’ Union, Rahul Mansigani, said: “It is disappointing that anyone views as progressive a scheme that students up and down the country have campaigned against”.

Porter has been universally condemned by both students and NUS officers as a “sell-out”, a Tory and a careerist. He has been accused of giving into the government without a fight; spending more time condemning student protesters than arguing against the tuition fee rise; and more concerned with ingratiating himself with politicians than standing up for students

When newly elected, last summer he said in a Guardian interview, he would “define success as ensuring that a market in fees does not emerge”. Failure, he said, “would be a real market in fees coupled with cuts from the government”.

The Guardian interviewed him again on the 28^th February and asked him, How then can you possibly claim to have been a success? His responses were almost delusional: “I still believe we’ve run a successful high-profile campaign. A disastrous campaign would be one that made no impact whatsoever. This made an indelible imprint in the public’s consciousness and in the political landscape. Did we get what we wanted? No, we didn’t. Would I have signed up to the proposals for trebled tuition fees? Not in a million years. But I think it would be wrong of me to say that this was not a successful campaign. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the coalition was under real pressure.”

The VOAG would argue that the campaign’s impact was achieved not by the NUS, but by the occupations and by the protesters, condemned by Porter, who invaded Millbank Tower back in November. Had students not organised outside the NUS structures, and had they not stormed Millbank; had 50,000 students simply marched peacefully through London, tuition fees would not have developed into the high-profile issue it has become.

Many Liberal Democrat candidates signed an NUS pledge before the election that they would vote against any fee increase. The breaking of this pledge by the Lib Dem leadership became a focus for Porter. Porter declared to the guardian  “Committing them to oppose any rise in tuition fees was a master-stroke”. The journalist replied: “Well it would have been a master stroke, I agree, if the Lib Dems had felt bound by it – but in the event they just tore it up”.

“I still think that it was a remarkable campaign tactic”, said Porter. “Because the pledge meant that one of the parties could not run away from it”. “It was the most effective campaign of 2010”.

“But they did run away from it”, replied the journalist, “didn’t they”? “They did,” he conceded, without missing a beat. “The preferred outcome from the pledge would’ve been that the Liberal Democrats stuck to it – but they didn’t.”

On the 21^st February, Porter announced he would not be standing for re-election in the Student Union elections in April. Porter said that the campaign over fees is “moving into a different landscape” and the union needs a new president.

In an email to members, Porter wrote: “So this new regime brings with it a new landscape, and I believe the NUS needs reinvigorating to enter into the next phase of this campaign. After considerable soul-searching, I believe there needs to be a new President to lead the student movement into that next phase. As a result, I’ve resolved not to seek re-election at the National Conference this year”.

This is only the second time in over 40 years that an NUS President has not run for a second year in office. In a guardian interview following his announcement, Porter maintained he would be certain to win the presidency if he chose to stand. “Oh, without a doubt”. He predicted the NUS will elect a successor very much in his “image” – and said his tenure “had been a terrific success”.

Regarding the student protests, he told the Guardian, “I cannot see, on the issue of tuition fees, how illegal protest is helpful.” “Well tuition fees, whilst I disagree with them, are not the biggest evil in society. It is not the worst decision that the Labour government made to introduce them, and it is not the worst decision this coalition has made to increase them.”

He concluded his Guardian interview with: “For me the question is about what next year would’ve been like. And I think that the NUS, and also me personally, need to be able to draw a line under the tuition fee debate, and I suspected that my continuation as NUS president would’ve inhibited us to move on from the tuition fee issue”.

Aaron Porter then, leaves us with a sigh of resignation for the inevitable. ‘We lost, now lets move on’.  The Voice Of Anti-Capitalism in Guildford also gives a sigh, a sigh of utter contempt. What a waste of space.

There’s nothing inevitable about the education cuts, fee rises, or the implementation of the Bologna process and the marketisation of education. There is everything to play for. Education is only one area of the public sector that is under attach from the ConDem government. Workers And Students Unite is not an empty slogan,  together we can stop all cuts. There is an alternative, but we must first see the end of this government.The TUC National demonstration on the 26^th March is the first step and a spring-board to develop anti-cuts groups in every town, college and university in Britain.There are coaches subsidised by Surrey Unison leaving from Staines, Woking, Guildford and Redhill. Everybody is welcome. Tickets are only £2.00 Rtn. You can buy a ticket on-line at http://www.saveourservic.es or email:guildfordagainstfeesandcuts@yahoo.co.uk

The Government’s Plans To Privatise The NHS: The Voice Of Anti-Capitalism In Guildford Investigates

“The unions should no longer criticise from the sidelines but recall their membership in special conferences and discuss how to mobilise to defend every single hospital and NHS unit, and make sure this Health Bill cannot be implemented”. 

Or go down to the summary

The publication of the Health and Social Care Bill last month heralds dramatic changes for the NHS, which will affect the way public health and social care are provided in the UK. Those changes alone will have huge impact, but it is the formation of an NHS Commissioning Board, and GP commissioning consortia, that will once and for all remove the word “national” from the health service in England. The result, due to come into force in 2013, will be the catastrophic break up of the NHS.

Out go strategic health authorities and 152 primary care trusts and in come several hundred general practitioner consortiums, responsible for commissioning £80bn of NHS care from “any willing provider.” This means Privatisation!

Putting general practitioners (GPs) in charge of commissioning health services for their patients is similar, in some respects, to the fundholding experiment in the 1990s. The principle then was that GPs controlled the budgets to buy the specialist care their patients needed. Fundholding took years to implement, but evidence on short-term or long-term benefits for patients is lacking. In the current Bill, health outcomes, including prevention of premature death, will be the responsibility of the NHS Commissioning Board, which has been asked to publish a business plan and annual reports on progress. That business plan is urgently needed to allow transparent appraisal of how the Board plans to monitor patients’ outcomes.

The UK coalition Government has now been in power for about 8 months. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats included the formation of an NHS Commissioning Board, or GPs’ commissioning consortia, in their health manifestos. There was no mention of their health plans in either of the parties pledges and the plans were not mentioned in the coalition agreement. However, less than eight weeks after the election, an outline emerged in the white paper “Equity and excellence: liberating the NHS.

The speed of the introduction of the Health and Social Care Bill is surprising, especially given the absence of relevant detail in the health manifestos. The Conservatives promised, if elected, to scrap “politically motivated targets that have no clinical justification” and called themselves the “party of the NHS” — a commitment that seems particularly hollow now.

The NHS was unsurprisingly absent from the 2010 election campaign because satisfaction levels with the NHS were at an all time high, and for most of the electorate the NHS was a non-issue. In the words of Simon Stevens, president of global health at United Health Group, a company that stands to benefit from the reforms,“The inconvenient truth is that on most indicators the English NHS is probably performing better than ever.”

The House of Commons Health Committee’s report, “Commissioning 2011” points out that the proposed changes are to be implemented at the same time as annual efficiency savings of 4% over four years. The report says,“The scale of changes is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world. ”To pull off either of these challenges would therefore be breathtaking; to believe that you could manage both of them at once is deluded. Since its establishment in July, 1948, the aim of the NHS has been to offer a comprehensive service to improve health and prevent illness. Health care for all, for free, has been the common ethos and philosophy throughout the NHS. On July 3, 1948, in an editorial entitled “Our Service”, The Lancet commented: “Now that everyone is entitled to full medical care, the doctor can provide that care without thinking of his own profit or his patient’s loss, and can allocate his efforts more according to medical priority. The money barrier has of course protected him against people who do not really require help, but it has also separated him from people who really do.”

Now, GPs will return to the market place and will decide what care they can afford to provide for their patients, and who will be the provider. The emphasis will move from clinical need (GPs’ forte) back to cost (not what GPs were trained to evaluate). The ethos will become that of the individual providers, and will differ accordingly throughout England, replacing the philosophy of a genuinely national health service.  As it stands, the UK Government’s new Bill spells the end of the NHS.

Moving to consortiums will incur the costs of transition in addition to their recurring costs. On the basis of past National Audit Office data, the government has put the cost of the NHS reorganisation at £2-3bn. The white paper’s key financial pledge was to reduce the NHS’s management costs by more than 45%. GP consortiums would replace primary care trusts, which have administrative costs of over a billion pounds a year (for a population of 51 million) The potential consortiums have learnt that their running costs will be capped at between £25 and £35 per head of population which equals around 1.5billion a year (based on a £30 cap). So where’s the saving?

The government’s recent “bonfire of the quangos” provides an instructive example of how a rush job doesn’t necessarily guarantee the best outcome. Earlier this month, the parliamentary select committee on public administration criticised the axing of 192 public bodies and the merging of 118 more as poorly managed. It also said that the government’s NHS plans would not deliver significant cost savings or better accountability—two of the government’s key aims. The committee’s chairman said that,“The whole process was rushed and poorly handled and should have been thought through a lot more.”

Rationalising a few hundred arm’s length bodies hardly compares with turning the NHS upside down, yet the proposed timescale for the health reforms is dizzying. The bill promises that all general practices will be part of consortiums by April 2012, yet it took six years for 56% of general practices to become fundholders after the introduction of the internal market.

The health secretary has made much of these changes being evolutionary rather than revolutionary. People “woefully overestimate the scale of the change,” he said. After all, practice based commissioning, choice of provider, an NHS price list, and foundation trusts already exist. But a week later came the revelation that hospitals would be allowed to undercut the NHS tariff to increase their business. Health economists queued up to say what a terrible idea this was, citing evidence that it would lead to a race to the bottom on price, which would threaten quality. Taken with the opening up of NHS contracts to European competition law, it was the last piece of evidence needed to convince critics that the government was unleashing a storm of creative destruction onto the NHS, with the imperative: compete or die.

Regardless of the true motivation behind the governments plans, such radical reorganisations always adversely affect service performance. They are a huge distraction from the real mission of the NHS, “to deliver and improve the quality of healthcare” that can absorb a massive amount of managerial and clinical time.

With an estimated one billion pounds of redundancy money in their pockets, many of those made redundant in the reorganisation and “efficiency savings” of the NHS are likely to be employed by the new GP consortiums in much their same roles. It raises the question: if GP commissioning turns out to be simply primary care trust commissioning done by GPs, aren’t there less disruptive routes to this destination?

Meanwhile, government cuts haven’t gone away. Although the impact assessment of the new bill calculates that savings will have covered the costs of transition by 2012-13, the reorganisation will not have made any savings to contribute to the £15-£20bn efficiency savings the government requires from the NHS by 2014-15.

 East Sussex GPs Oppose Consotia
A recent survey of East Sussex GPs, conducted by the BMA found that more than 70 per cent of them fear patient care will suffer when changes to the NHS are given the go-ahead. The vast majority of GPs surveyed slammed government plans to put GP consortia in charge of health care. Just 7.7 per cent of respondents were convinced that GP consortia will be up to the task.

Although 58 per cent of the GPs believe too much money is wasted on bureaucracy in the NHS, just one in ten GPs approved government proposals to hand purchasing power to GPs. Under government plans, GP consortia will replace the East Sussex Downs and Weald Primary Care Trust by 2013 and will be responsible for buying 80 per cent of health services.

Dr Michael von Fraunhofer, of the Eastbourne consortium steering committee, said local consortia could be hamstrung with more than £30 million in debt from the outgoing PCT. He warned: ‘This will cripple patient care and the blame will fall on GPs unfairly. No matter how good, dynamic or inventive we are, we will be making massive cuts in choice and services just to stay afloat.’
Private Health Care Company, Care UK 
Meanwhile, private health firm, Care UK has won a £53m prison hospitals contract, despite an NHS bid offering a better service. The company has won the contract to run health services at eight jails in north east England, with its cheaper, lower quality bid. About 200 nurses’ jobs and pay could be under threat. Glenn Turp, of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was worried about infection control as Care UK ‘had no plans in place’.

An NHS executive who lost the contract, Les Morgan, sent an angry email to the Health Commissioning Unit which decides who should run healthcare at the eight jails. Morgan wrote: ‘Our bid was judged better on quality, delivery and risk. ‘We are keen to understand the large difference in scoring on price.’ Care UK’s then boss John Nash and wife Caroline donated £200,000 to the Tories before the general election, including £21,000 to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s private office.

BMA Discusses Strike Action
BMA boss, Dr Hajioff said, The British Medical Association will put ‘absolutely everything’ on the table including strike action when members determine their response to the government’s NHS Health and Social Care Bill. His comments come as health unions are planning further protests against plans by Barts and The London NHS Trust to cut 635 posts to save £56m over two years. This includes the loss of 250 nursing jobs and a 100 beds.

Similar plans are taking place all over Britain. The Royal Surrey in Guildford has already seen 400 redundancies and the loss of beds. BMA Council member Anna Athow said in a recent interview: “‘The Health Bill aims to accelerate the plans of the last government to physically close and destroy hospitals and make their staff redundant on a massive scale, in order to privatise the NHS”.

She continued; “The unions should no longer criticise from the sidelines but recall their membership in special conferences and discuss how to mobilise to defend every single hospital and NHS unit, and make sure this Health Bill cannot be implemented”. “The recalled Special Representative Meeting of the BMA on March 15 should discuss all options in this campaign. Hospitals must be occupied by local staff and campaigners in Councils of Action to stop them closing.’

In Summary   
1. Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill will encourage ’any willing provider’ to cherry pick profitable slices of NHS services. It’s the biggest-ever privatisation of health care anywhere in the world,

 2. The Bill will turn the NHS into a free market, cost billions to implement, and be far more unequal in its provision of services than the current system.

 3. GP consortia, with their budgets squeezed to create £20 billion of savings will have to restrict access to hospital care.

 4. GP consortia will have to employ private management consultants, who are the only people to have welcomed Lansley’s plans.

5. Patients will be even less informed as existing public bodies are replaced by local GP consortia, that function in secret sessions, and a remote national NHS Commissioning Board.

6. Health care services are to be privatised, with EU competition laws forcing GPs to put any service out to tender.

7. All limits on the money Foundation Trusts hospitals can earn from private medicine are to be scrapped. Hospitals will then prioritise attracting wealthy private patients.

8. Price competition is to be introduced in clinical services, despite warnings that this will undermine the quality of care.

9. The limited ’scrutiny’ proposals are a fraud: GP consortia and the Commissioning Board will take their decisions in secret, and are not even obliged to go through the motions of consultation.

10. The Bill is opposed by the health unions and the TUC, the majority of GPs, and virtually every organisation of health professionals, including the Royal College of GPs and the BMA.

That’s why Lansley must be stopped. It’s time for urgent political action to Kill Lansley’s Bill.
Read: “Kill Lansley’s Bill 10 good reasons” from the PCS Union. 

Save Our NHS Facebook Group
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Our-NHS/142561392425826?v=wall

Protest To Save The NHS on 9^th March          
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Our-NHS/142561392425826?v=wall#!/event.php?eid=176583299053096

Don’t forget: 26^th March. THE BIG ONE: TUC DEMO AGAINST THE CUTS.
Coaches leaving Guildford. Only £2.00 Rtn. Click link for details.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Our-NHS/142561392425826?v=wall#!/event.php?eid=178381258861986
or visit www.saveourservic.es