The pro-NHS rebellion starts in South West Surrey

On June 8th 2017 South West Surrey could be the unlikely scene of a political revolution.

On Saturday May 6th a packed meeting of people from across the political spectrum selected a qualified doctor as a unity candidate to stand against the Tory health secretary Jeremy Hunt in his own constituency.

Dr Louise Irvine is a GP, a medical training expert and a seasoned political campaigner who has focused mainly but not exclusively on defending the NHS. Probably her greatest political achievements to date came when she helped campaigners to defeat Jeremy Hunt 's plan to force the closure of Lewisham Hospital.

Irvine said "I am very concerned that our beloved NHS is being run down, privatised, fragmented and underfunded ...This is an issue that affects everyone in the country. If we don’t all stand up for it now, it will be destroyed" and she's not exaggerating. Here are 16 ways in which Jeremy Hunt and the Tories are damaging our NHS.

The Green Party have already agreed to not stand any candidate in the South West Surrey Constituency. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have yet to decide.

The state of the NHS

• The Tories imposed £20 billion in NHS cuts between 2010 and 2015, and now they're imposing another £22 billion in NHS cuts , which include secret plans to close down dozens of hospitals and other NHS facilities.

• After his plan to force the closure of Lewisham Hospital Jeremy Hunt introduced new rules to make it much easier for them to force the closure of NHS services without taking the views of local people or staff into consideration.

• Waiting list times and waiting times at A&E departments have been rising, but instead of investing in the NHS to overcome these problems Jeremy Hunt simply scraps any waiting targets that are being missed.

• Theresa May's decision to scrap NHS bursaries has caused a massive 10,000 decline in the number of people applying to study nursing courses this year alone meaning the already serious NHS recruitment crisis is set to get an awful lot worse over the coming years.

• Ever more NHS services being carved up and given away to profiteering private sector health companies like Serco, Virgin Health and (the major Tory party donors) Circle.

• NHS staff have suffered years of below inflation pay rises for NHS staff whilst MPs bagged a whopping great 10% pay rise for themselves.

• The Tories imposed a £4.6 billion cut in the social care budget meaning that already overstretched hospitals that are having to pick up the pieces.

• Jeremy Hunt has been waging a needless ideological war with the junior doctors. Despite the efforts of the pro-Tory press to demonise the junior doctors the majority of the public believe that Hunt is to blame for the dispute.

• Jeremy Hunt famously advised people that they should Google their health symptoms instead of seeking medical advice. You don't need to be a health professional to understand that A Health Secretary telling people to Google their symptoms instead of consulting a medical expert is a risk to public health.

• The Tories wasted £3 billion their massive 2012 top down reorganisation of the NHS that the Tories repeatedly promised not to do before they sneaked back into power in 2010.

• Scores of A&E units, maternity wards, mental health facilities and NHS walk in centres have been shut down by the Tories since 2010, causing increased demand elsewhere in the NHS.

• The Tories have drawn up secret plans being drawn up to close even more A&E units, maternity wards and walk in centres., but they're not going to announce which facilities and services they plan to shut down until after the election. It could be your local hospital at risk.

• Jeremy Hunt has overseen a massive debt crisis in the NHS with primary care trusts all over England slumping into deficit.

• The Tories are always going on about how much they care about mental health issues, but they continue to slash the mental health budget and even instruct their outsourcing contractors to specifically discriminate against people with mental health conditions.

• The Chairman of Conservative Health has openly said that the only way the Tories could bring in charging for NHS services is if there was a feeling in the country that the NHS is "falling apart".

• NHS staff are being made to cope with increasing demand for services while funds and staffing levels are being slashed year after year. Workers can only be asked to do more with less for a certain amount of time before the system breaks.

What we can do

• If you have a Labour or Liberal Democrat MP (or other political representative) please consider contacting them and ask them to speak to the party leadership in favour of standing down their candidates in South West Surrey so that Louise Irvine has the best possible chance of unseating Jeremy Hunt.

• If you are a member of Labour or the Liberal Democrats use your voice as a member in order to speak in favour of your party standing down their candidates so that Irvine has a free run at Jeremy Hunt.

• Say a few kind words to the Green Party for putting the interests of the NHS above their own party political interests.

• If you live in South West Surrey or nearby, consider joining Louise Irvine's campaign to unseat Jeremy Hunt.

• No matter where you live don't forget to make sure you are registered to vote, and to encourage others to register to vote too. 

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OR

Why don't UKIP oppose TTIP?

Ukippers love to imagine that their party are the brave and rebellious political outsiders standing up to the Westminster establishment, but the slightest effort to actually look at the detail reveals that they adhere to exactly the same right-wing Thatcherite economic ideology of neoliberalism as the Lib-Lab-Con establishment. What is more, they share the same economic ideology as the unelected technocrats in Europe they're always banging on about.

One of the most glaring indicators that UKIP is just another establishment party hawking defunct neoliberal economic dogma is their refusal to condemn the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the countries that make up the European Union. The TTIP "trade agreement" is a grave threat to the sovereignty of all the nations involved because it will create a new tier of highly secretive tribunals (National Sovereignty and Investor State Dispute Settlements) designed to allow multinational corporations to sue the nation states that have signed up to it.

TTIP is being negotiated right now, and if the multinational corporations that are behind it get their way, the EU technocrats will rubber stamp it before the end of 2014. If this so-called "trade deal" goes ahead then the UK government will be opened up to all kinds of secretive court cases brought by multinational corporations, with the massive fines to be paid by the UK taxpayer.

To give a hypothetical example, lets say that the UK government decides to introduce new environmental legislation, which prevents a multinational mining conglomerate from strip mining one of our national parks (or reduces the profitability of their mining operation). If the government intervenes like this, the corporation will be able to bypass the entire British judicial system and sue the UK government in a secretive tribunal for every penny that they claim the new legislation has cost them in profit.*

If TTIP is passed it will likely result in the complete destruction of what remains of the NHS because foreign multinational corporations could simply sue the UK in secretive tribunals if the government refuses to sell them all the profitable NHS services they want to cherry-pick.

It might seem incredible that UKIP have somehow forgotten to mention something as important as TTIP in their 2014 European Election "manifesto". But then in mitigation they did have to cut a fair bit out in order to make space in it for a two page "I'm voting UKIP" window poster - the biggest section in the whole (absolute joke of a) manifesto!

Neither the Lib-Lab-Con establishment**, nor UKIP have criticised TTIP, meaning that the only parties that are actually standing up against this corporate over-writing of our sovereignty are left-wing parties like the Green Party, the National Health Action Party and No2EU Yes to Democracy. So much for right-wing people wrapping themselves in the Union flag and declaring the left "unpatriotic" eh?

If you oppose the TTIP corporate power grab, then it might be more sensible to vote for political parties that are prepared to take a firm stance against it (and take practical steps to undermine it) rather than voting for a party that can't even bring itself to criticise it, and has the worst attendance record in European debates in the whole of the EU making them unlikely to do anything at all to oppose it.

Given that it represents such a grave threat to the national sovereignty of the UK, anyone with an enquiring mind must be wondering why UKIP have carefully avoided making any kind of criticism of this corporate power grab, why not a single UKIP MEP voted against it the last time it was debated in the European parliament, and why their economics spokesperson Roger Helmer even voted in favour of it.

The reason would seem to be that a "trade deal" designed to give multinational corporate interests primacy over democratically elected governments and the British justice system fits so nicely with the neoliberal ideology that UKIP adheres to. Just like the Lib-Lab-Con establishment that they posture as an alternative to, UKIP are all in favour of a "trade deal" designed to over-write our democracy, supersede our justice system, destroy the public sector and disempower the public in order to better serve the interests of multinational corporations.

TTIP is a corporate power grab of astonishing proportions, and the lack of transparency over the negotiations is deeply concerning, but UKIP hasn't uttered a word of criticism, in fact one UKIP parliamentary candidate described TTIP as something that "benefits the whole of the EU – even if all the talks are held in secret" and described the announcement of a public consultation on TTIP as "an alarming turn for the worse", as if even the pretense of letting the public know what is being negotiated behind closed doors is some kind of nightmare scenario.

The hypocrisy of this stance is absolutely breathtaking - UKIP have built up a huge supporter base by posturing as a party that cares about British sovereignty, but when a huge threat to our national sovereignty is on the table, being negotiated by the very same unelected technocrats they are always banging on about, the UKIP leadership remain absolutely silent on the issue, and some of their political candidates even speak out in favour of it.

That UKIP cannot bring themselves to utter a word of opposition to TTIP, suggests that they are just a bunch of opportunists, using the language of sovereign independence to win votes, whilst doing nothing at all to oppose an undeniably huge threat to our national sovereignty.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.    

 * - Someone has written to me to complain that this hypothetical example is too melodramatic, but it is actually based on a real case in Peru, where the US corporation Doe Run has used the US-Peru "free trade" agreement to sue the Peruvian state for imposing environmental restrictions on the heavily polluted La Oroya smelting plant. You can read more about that case here.

** - Labour have sort of opposed bit of the TTIP, arguing for an excemption for the NHS. Some Labour MEPs have argued against the State Investor Dispute Tribunals too, but they haven't expressly criticised the whole deal, nor the unaccountable way that it is being negotiated.

UPDATE: Here's an excruciating video of the UKIP MEP William Legge telling the American ambassador that they must do more to sell TTIP to the public.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

       
UKIP is not an alternative
                 
 The mainstream media oligopoly
        
Why 73% of UKIP supporters should actually vote Green
           

Do UKIP want to privatise the NHS?
     

Reasons to vote alternative 
   
Margaret Thatcher's toxic legacies
                    
The ongoing destruction of the NHS
         
The "unpatriotic left" fallacy

             

The JP Morgan plan for Europe
    
Ukippers say the funniest things
           

Reasons to vote alternative

I've thought long and hard about whether I should actively endorse one particular political party for the European elections on May 22nd, rather than just campaigning against the establishment political parties that adhere to the bankrupt ideology of neoliberalism.

In the end, I've decided to provide some information and some general voting advice instead of endorsing one specific political party.

In this article I'm going to explain why you should bother to vote, then provide some information on which parties you should and shouldn't consider voting for.

Why you should vote

Voting in the European election is especially important for two reasons. Firstly, it is contested on a proportional basis, meaning that those who vote for alternative parties are not just "wasting their vote" as is the case in the unrepresentative and apathy inducing Westminster system. Secondly, The turnout for Euro elections is embarrassingly low (33% in 2009), which means that if you do vote, your voting power is effectively doubled (the turnout at the 2010 General Election was 65%).

Who not to vote for

The Lib-Lab-Con establishment

The European elections are conducted on a proportional basis, which means there are no such things as "safe seats" and "wasted votes", which are symptoms of the outdated and grotesquely unrepresentative electoral system in Westminster.

The archaic electoral system used in general elections has allowed the three Westminster establishment parties (the Lib-Lab-Cons) to run a closed-shop. Time after time they have lied to, and openly defied the wishes of the electorate, safe in the knowledge that alternative parties have virtually no chance of overturning their oligopoly on political power.

The European election is an excellent opportunity for people to protest against the out-of-touch Westminster establishment, because under the Proportional Representation voting system, every vote counts.

Anyone who votes for the Lib-Lab-Con Westminster establishment parties in the European elections is, in essence, voting for the continuation of the establishment orthodoxy.

UKIP

It looks as if UKIP could conceivably win the most seats in the European Parliament backed by a tide of political illiterates who consider them some kind of "alternative" to the establishment orthodoxy. What these people fail to realise is that UKIP is even more fanatical about the right-wing Thatcherite economic orthodoxy of neoliberalism (the bankrupt economic ideology that ruined British industry and created the global financial sector meltdown) than the Lib-Lab-Con establishment, and that they are bankrolled by a pack of former Tory party donors.

One of the saddest indicators of the political illiteracy of UKIP supporters is that the vast majority of them actually favour the explicitly socialist policies of renationalising the rail network and energy companies, but they are going to march off to the polls in order to vote for a blatantly Thatcherite party with a burning ideological hatred of the public sector; a right-wing party led by and bankrolled by people who consider the most right-wing Tory party in living memory not nearly right-wing enough.

Some of the clearest indicators of how right wing UKIP really is, are the anti-NHS statements from UKIP deputy leader Paul Nuttall, who has openly praised the Tory led coalition for their policy of carving up the NHS and privatising the pieces, despite the fact that 82% of the general public (and the majority of UKIP voters) strongly oppose NHS privatisation.

Another glaring indicator that UKIP is an establishment party is their outright refusal to oppose the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The TTIP is a grave threat to the sovereignty of all the nations involved because it will create a new tier of highly secretive tribunals (National Sovereignty and Investor State Dispute Settlements) designed to allow multinational corporations to sue nation states. Thus, if the UK decides to prevent a multinational corporation from doing whatever the hell they like (lets say strip mining one of our national parks) our country can be taken to one of these secret courts and forced to pay the multinational corporation everything they claim they would have made in profit (from their Lake District Strip Mining operation) in compensation.

That UKIP cannot bring themselves to utter a word of opposition to this, suggests that they are just a bunch of opportunists, using the language of sovereign independence to win votes, whilst doing absolutely nothing to oppose an undeniably huge threat to our national sovereignty.
 UKIP is the party to represent the kind of person who loved Margaret Thatcher, but thought her biggest fault was that she was too left-wing. If you are not as right-wing as Margaret Thatcher was, yet you actually vote for this unmistakably Thatcherite party, you are clearly an idiot, and should be ashamed of yourself.

The fascist fringe

It is incontestable that UKIP occupies the extreme-right authoritarian territory you would expect from a "Thatcherism on steroids" party, however they do tend to regularly expel people from the party when they express totally outrageous and openly fascist sentiments (mandatory abortions for disabled fetuses, suggesting black actors go to live in black countries, blaming gay marriage for the Somerset floods, referring to female party members as sluts...). That they attract so many of these lunatics in the first place should be deeply concerning.
 
People who are genuine fascists (rather than just politically illiterate/hopelessly confused little-Englanders) have a couple of parties to choose from:

There's the laughing stock that is the BNP, which is led by Nick Griffin (a man who is now as financially bankrupt as he is morally bankrupt) and there are the English Democrats, who are pretty much the political wing of the English Defence League.

Genuine Alternatives

The Green Party
(Green Party of England and Wales / Scottish Green Party)

One of the most amusing sounds in modern British politics is the sound of UKIP drones trying to dismiss the Greens as a "single issue party". The Green party have a detailed manifesto covering a huge range of issues, unlike UKIP, whose party manifesto had to be dropped after party leader Nigel Farage dismissed it as "drivel", meaning that they go into the 2014 European elections with the most absurdly childish party "manifesto" I've ever seen (a 12 page document, five pages of which are taken up by pictures, and the rest containing nothing more than a few unsubstantiated bullet points and pro-UKIP quotations).


Anyone who actually bothers to check out the Green Party manifesto, and then takes a look at the ludicrous UKIP "manifesto" will be left in absolutely no doubt about which is a serious political party with actual policies, and which is a bunch of absolute charlatans pretending to be a political party.

Everyone should be more-or-less familiar with the Green party position the environment, so here are some of the Green parties most interesting policies on non-environmental issues.

• Universal Basic Income: The Green party has been advocating Basic Income long before it became fashionable. The beauty of Universal Basic Income is that by making a basic subsistence income unconditional for all, it would prevent political parties from using welfare as a political football/stick to beat the poor with.

• A referendum on membership of the EU: "I support a referendum on our membership of the EU because I am pro-democracy" - Green Party MP Caroline Lucas. "The Green Party is opposed to the objectives, structure and policies of the EU as currently constituted"- Green party policy document on the EU.

• Renationalisation: The Green party has called for the renationalisation of the UK rail network and the energy companies. The vast majority of British people want these bits of national infrastructure run as not-for-profit public services, yet the Lib-Lab-Cons and UKIP all oppose renationalisation.

• Opposition to TTIP: One of the strongest indicators that the Green party is a genuine alternative party, and that UKIP are a pack of charlatans, is the way that the Green party actively oppose the attack on our national sovereignty known as TTIP, whilst UKIP bang on and on about protecting our sovereignty, yet remain absolutely silent on TTIP (presumably in the hope that nobody notices that they refuse to oppose it).
  

• Free education: The only people who support the introduction of extortionate tuition fees and brutal cuts to the higher education budget are the kind of  people who "measure the cost of everything and the value of nothing". The Green party are clever enough to realise that education is an investment, not a cost. Do we want a country with a highly educated workforce and a high-skill economy, or do we want a country where students from poor and ordinary backgrounds have to lumber themselves with an outrageous 9% "aspiration tax" for their entire working lives in order to pay for three years of university education?

• Clamping down on tax-dodging: The Green party are strongly opposed to tax-dodging, and have repeatedly made the case that the majority of ideological austerity measures would be unnecessary if the government would just clamp down on the tens of billions of pounds per year siphoned out of the country by tax-dodging corporations and the super-rich.

In social and economic terms, the Green party occupies the traditional territory of the old Labour party, but they are quite a lot more libertarian than old Labour ever was.

If you're one of these people who believes the Labour party can be taken back from the orthodox neoliberals who usurped it in 1994, voting Green in the Euro elections might be your best option. A vote for the Green party would help to drag the Labour party back towards the left, just as a vote for UKIP helps to drag the Tory party ever closer to the extreme-right fringe.

If just one in every hundred people who didn't bother to vote in the last European elections decided to vote Green, they would easily force the Liberal Democrats into the embarrassment of a fifth place finish.

No2EU

If you are more left-wing than Margaret Thatcher was, and the single biggest issue for you in the Euro elections is that you oppose the EU, you should consider voting for the No2EU party. instead of UKIP.

The mainstream media oligopoly has been extraordinarily successful in convincing people that the EU is a leftist project, however the reality is that the EU is extremely right-wing and anti-democratic. Just think about it for a moment:

• Would a leftist project make laws to prevent member states from renationalising state infrastructure?

• Would a leftist project allow an unelected banking cartel (the ECB) to rule over Europe?

• Would a leftist project have introduced anti trade union laws?

• Would a leftist project have spent trillions of Euros bailing out the corrupt and insolvent banking sector, rather than financially supporting people and industries directly?

The famous left-wing politician Tony Benn was speaking out against the EU when Nigel Farage was still in nappies, yet somehow, a huge swathe of the British electorate has allowed themselves to be convinced by the right-wing press that the EU is run by left-wing bogeymen, and the only conceivable method of expressing their opposition to the EU is to vote for UKIP (Thatcherism on steroids). Neither of these things are true; the EU is run by the same kind of right-wing neoliberals that have taken control of the Lib-Lab-Con establishment political parties, and it is perfectly possible to express your discontent with the EU by voting for No2EU, rather than endorsing an extreme-right Thatcherite party.

National Health Action party

If you are deeply concerned about the way that the Tories have carved up the NHS and set about selling off the pieces to the private sector (including several major donors to the Tory party), despite their pre-election promises that they wouldn't reogranise or privatise the NHS, then you should consider voting for the National Health Action Party.

The major problem for the NHA Party is that they are only standing candidates in the London region, meaning that those of us who live outside London must choose one of the other left-wing parties to have expressed strong opposition to the Tories ideological destruction of the NHS (the Green party, No2EU, SNP, Plaid Cymru)

Scottish Nationalist Party & Plaid Cymru

I don't live in Scotland or Wales, so I can't vote for the SNP or Plaid Cymru. I certainly wouldn't want to patronise Scottish and Welsh people by writing an in-depth description of the pro-independence parties that they almost certainly know more about than me. I think it is fair to say that both of these parties occupy political territory far to the left of the Lib-Lab-Con Westminster establishment. Both parties have decent records of voting against the most grotesquely illiberal legislation put forward by the coalition government (Secret Courts, the Gagging Law, Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive money grab ...).

If you believe that your country should have independence (or much more political autonomy from London) you should consider voting for SNP or Plaid.

Pirate Party

The Pirate Party is standing candidates in the North West region, so if you live there, they are worth considering if you are bothered about issues like confronting mass state surveillance, promoting political transparency, safeguarding personal privacy, digital freedom and net neutrality.

Some people tend to dismiss the Pirate Party as a fringe group of no real importance, however they have managed to pick up elected representatives in 11 different countries so far (Germany, Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Hungary, France, Austria, Croatia, Netherlands, Kosovo), so they are more than just the "joke party" that some people would like to pretend that they are.

Last time around the Pirate Party managed to pick up 4.5% of the vote in the North West region, so if just one in every 200 people who didn't bother voting last time around decided to vote Pirate Party this time around, they'd get more than enough votes to return the UK's first Pirate Party MEP.

"We want to see an end to mass surveillance. We want to see an end to treaties negotiated behind closed doors. We want to see digital rights and net neutrality protected. The best way to do this is to have a strong Pirate Party voice in the European Parliament." - Jack Allnut - Pirate party European Spokesman

Yorkshire First

Yorkshire has a larger population than Scotland, and an economy almost twice the size of Wales, however the region has no political autonomy. The Yorkshire First party proposes a regional assembly for the Yorkshire region in order to give Yorkshire folk some power over their own regional affairs, rather than allowing the Westminster clique to continue (mis)managing the region from down in London.

The Yorkshire First party claims to be "neither left nor right, just Yorkshire". If you live in Yorkshire and believe that the region should have more autonomy from London, you might want to consider voting for Yorkshire First.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I'll offer a bit of voting advice to anyone who is in the left-libertarian quadrant or the centre-ground on the political compass.

The two main parties to consider voting for are the Green party and the No2EU party. In my view the Green party is the better bet because they have a much stronger manifesto, they are much more likely to gain enough votes to return some MEPs, and they have a good chance of beating the appalling Liberal Democrats into 5th place.

If you are left-wing and anti-authoritarian, you should seriously consider voting Green.

If you are strongly opposed to the EU, but don't want to endorse an extreme-right Thatcherite party, you should consider voting No2EU.

There are also other parties to consider voting for if you live in specific regions: The Scottish National Party (Scotland), Plaid Cymru (Wales), National Health Action Party (London), Pirate Party (North West), Yorkshire First (Yorkshire).

Perhaps the most important piece of advice I can give you (no matter what your political orientation) is to learn something about the actual candidates before you cast your vote.

• Which of the candidates looks like they will best represent your interests?

• Which of the candidates have genuine life-experience and come from honest backgrounds (rather than career politicians, or lobbyists/investment bankers turned politicians)?

• Which of the candidates have articulated coherent alternative views on a wide range of issues?

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.
         

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

       
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 The mainstream media oligopoly
        
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The economic case against tax-dodging 
   
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What is ... Universal Basic Income?
         
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