Category: LibDem

The deal is done!

Boris got his deal, the economy is tanking (which is bad news for everyone except Boris, Rees-Mogg, Farage and their disaster capitalist mates). The UK faces major shortages and price rises on imported goods and other goods like medicines.

The financial sector is legging it to Europe, as are several of our remaining manufacturers but at least, for once, we really are in it together… including Tory and Brexit voters, most of whom lack the means to profit from Brexit like Aaron Banks will.

Hopefully, one day we will return.


So let’s face facts, accept the disaster we’re stuck with and pull together to maintain our community. The lesson of history predicts major social division and unrest anytime from mid-January onward. Fuelled by the likes of Farage and co who will be desperate to blame others for their own actions, it’ll be easy for us to collapse into rioting and mutual hatred not seen in UK since the civil wars of the seventeenth century.
And (almost) nobody voted for that!

let’s stick together and come through this disastrous mess as a nation united by adversity, not a people destroyed by self-inflicted misery and the resentment it so often brings in its wake.

That was a long haul!

10 years ago ConDem austerity destroyed my Ltd company. It wasn’t necessary – it was ideological. The Condemn government used the global financial crash to give tax cuts to the wealthy and make the rest of us foot the bill. Small businesses like mine went to the wall, public sector workers faced a seemingly unending pay freeze and the unemployed and disabled faced such cuts to their benefits that the united nations declared UK to be an abusive state.

It took me 10 years sleeping in vehicles & cheap rooms traveling around UK for work, paying out most of my wages to keep afloat & keep the family housed & fed. In the early days I found myself only able to eat every other day. The kids were well fed though.

Every missed payment to creditors increases the pressure by design. Interest piles up and with it minimum payments rise to accommodate the ever-increasing balance owed. I paid back the original sums several times to no avail because of increased interest and penalties on late payments.

The system is designed to keep us indebted to those investment bankers who caused the problem to begin with. Their sub-prime opportunism inevitably came back to roost but it wasn’t the bankers who suffered for it. They were still getting paid big bonuses and pretending they were needed to keep the economy afloat. Yeah, right!

At times I thought I’d never get out of the hole those greedy lenders had dug for me. But I did it! This week I registered as sole trader again. Back on my feet, no thanks to the tories.

But anyway, now I’m back. I’m offering #mentalhealth & #socialcare training again either face to face (distanced) or online via www.MindTheCareTraining.com and also 1:1 work via http://www.TAMtalking.co.uk 
Give me a call. I’m good at what I do. You’ll get a damn fine service at a reasonable price.

Go on, you know you want to!

Who’s to blame?

From Brexit to Coronavirus, austerity to the global financial crash of 2008 some people seem to have very clear ideas about who’s responsible. So check out the new gameshow from Left Eye View to see if you know who to hold responsible.

Government refuses to honour pledge to European citizens.

7/1/2020: Despite reassurances that European citizens living in the UK will be treated fairly the conservative government used its majority to refuse to honour that guarantee. They also ensured that any such citizens will be denied the right of appeal. This from the BBC website…

Harness that anger – quickly

So here’s the thing. It’s New Year’s day 2020 and like many of us I struggle to think of much to be optimistic about for the year or even the decade ahead. Tory austerity will continue, most likely at an accelerated pace and even more people seem likely to fall into poverty with an ever shrinking social safety net to support them. I know I’m not the only one who worries about this today because I see my contacts on social media saying exactly the same. That’s the Facebook echo chamber at work, I imagine.

But let’s just take a breath. Pause for thought and see if we can’t make a little better use of our characteristic, socialist compassion.

I have long believed that the difference between the right and the left is this. The right looks after its own, be they defined through race, religion, nationality or social class whereas the left wants to make the world better and fairer for everyone. And that includes the people we might be angry with as the country embarks on another decade of Tory inequality.

Too many of us are promising never to befriend a Tory voter again. Too many of us are venting our anger, our sense of betrayal even on our working class neighbours who voted Tory, LibDem or worse. I understand that anger. I feel it too. But it’s not what we should be about and it certainly won’t help restore fairness and decency to the UK.

We’re all fallible, even us and so are our neighbours. In my view nothing demonstrates that fallibility more than the recent election result. Our friends and neighbours have just voted for austerity, privatisation of public services, greater inequality and the destruction it working class communities across the land. And we’re all going to suffer for it – including them.

If we are to survive the next few years with our rights intact and our people protected we have to come together. That’s not just an option, it’s a necessity. We need to heal our broken communities and quickly because the Tories aren’t hanging around. And we’ll never do that by ostracizing our neighbours because they made a mistake, a mistake fuelled by the concerted efforts of the mainstream media and a right wing network that wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit them!

Personally I’ve only ever disowned a single relative and that’s not because he’s a Tory. It’s because he wants to treat Muslims, refugees and asylum seekers as less than human. He even claimed to want to sit stop the white cliffs with a machine gun and execute desperate refugees. Him, I disowned years ago but I won’t be rejecting anyone for voting Tory, angry and disappointed that I am.

They’re part of our community and we need them!

Welcome to the Twenties

It’s 2020! Welcome to the Twenties!

What a decade it’s been. We began 2010 in the throes of recession thanks to a global recession that began in 2008 with the American sub-prime mortgage and investment fiasco and quickly spread across the globe. By 2010 our economy here in UK  had suffered massive damage but we had a working welfare state to protect our citizens from the worst of the crisis.

Then, in May of 2010 the real British catastrophe began, The ConDem government introduced austerity and so began a decade long process of starving our social safety net of funds while throwing massive tax cuts at the wealthy. Ten years on and our vital services are almost unrecognisable, they’re so depleted by years of Tory and LibDem cuts and back door privatisation. And now, in the closing weeks of 2019 a new disaster has begun to bite.

Boris Johnson has such a huge parliamentary majority that he can do whatever he wants and make no mistake, he will. He’s already made it clear that he plans to ‘review’ the relationship between the government, parliament and the judiciary in such a way that he and his ministers will be able to rewrite any law they choose without recourse to anyone – not even the law. Privatisation of the NHS is increasing quickly now and manifesto promises about minimum wage rises and working peoples’ rights are already being fudged. The new decade looks set to be a whole lot worse than the one we’ve just left.

If this nation is to survive the next ten years and still retain even a modicum of decency, if we are to maintain anything close to the social safety net we have taken for granted for so many years we  need to come together as one. We need to put the differences of the last few years aside, forget the petty prejudices and paranoia centering around race, religion, country of origin or social status and work together for the good of the whole community.

Many of us are working hard to do just that. Join us – help keep UK society together until the storm of this far right government is over. It’s a storm we need to face together or few of us will survive it at all.

The NHS is not safe in their hands

FB_IMG_1573195407980.jpgA few days before the general election I found myself increasingly frustrated as I tried (and ultimately failed) to get a family member to understand the threat to the NHS from privatisation. He had 2 lines of argument that I just couldn’t break through.

1. Boris has said that the NHS won’t be privatised
2. Even if it is privatised that’ll just make it more efficient.

Trying to get him to understand the contradiction between his two points was as useless as attempting to make chicken soup from a brick. He just wasn’t prepared to listen, preferring instead to flood my Twitter feed with American alt-right memes equating socialism with totalitarian communism and countering any attempt to provide reasonable balance with accusations of Marxism or just plain accusations that I was lying to him.

Well, it’s now a little under 3 weeks since the election that gave Boris Johnson an overall majority and carte blanche to do as he pleases with Britain’s economy, with the country’s approach to rights and of course with our precious public services like the NHS. So let’s review the situation, shall we?

First some history. It’s not true to say that the NHS won’t be privatised when large parts of it already have been. Private providers are rife, especially in the South of the country where Richard Branson’s ‘Virgin’ owns huge tracts of the service which are run for profit. This is the company that managed not to pay a single penny in corporation tax in 2017! The service may continue to operate under the NHS umbrella but it’s modus operandi is very far from that of the rest of the service.

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NHS contracts go to private hospitals, private outpatient departments, private GP surgeries and even private ambulances. Many of these firms are indeed American, by the way so it’s very definitely not true to suggest that US healthcare firms aren’t interested in the NHS. They are and they have been for quite some time.

Almost a quarter of NHS mental health beds are now in the hands of private firms and they are paid handsomely out of the public purse for their efforts. This includes approaching half of the child and adolescent mental health services (whether in the community or hospital). And we all know how hard it is for adolescent mental health services to cope with demand – perhaps we can also see why.

Three private firms, Elysium (Luxembourg), Cygnet (US) and Acadia (US) own and make huge profits from British mental health services and yet they are responsible for fully thirteen of the sixteen mental health units judged “inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission in 2019.

All of these services continue to provide care that is free at the point of delivery but there’s a catch. Well, actually there are several catches…

p06ttxsp.jpg1. Private companies tend not to provide the less profitable services – they cherry pick the ones they can make most money from, leaving the NHS to carry the cost of the really expensive treatments and procedures. In the past the NHS used money from one pot to subsidise others but that’s no longer possible. The delicate balance of public health care budgeting is being destroyed by private profiteers.

2. Private companies don’t train staff – they let the NHS do that and then they poach them. This may make them look more efficient but that’s only because they’re relying on the public purse to train their staff – staff the private firm then uses to make money for its shareholders. And make no mistake – it is all about profit. The money the NHS ploughs back into research and development is the same money that private firms plough into shareholder dividends. That means for every procedure done privately there will be less money available for treatments next year. It’s an endless spiral, a race to the bottom as we can see…

3. Private companies starve the NHS of funding and resources as outlined above. They leave the NHS impoverished as it struggles to provide the most expensive services with less and less funding. This inevitable results in reduced conditions for staff, run down buildings and equipment, overworked staff and even closures of hospitals and departments. We have seen al this in spades over the last few years, beginning with new Labour but dramatically increased in pace since the ConDem government changed the rules in 2012 to make it easier for private companies to cherry pick work from the NHS. It’s interesting to learn that many of the ConDem ministers involved also hold shares or even sit on the boards of private healthcare companies.

4. It’s not uncommon for private surgeries to go wrong and need to be fixed by the NHS. Private firms still get their money but don’t compensate the NHS for sixing up their mistakes. This cost the NHS £250 million in 2016.

5. The NHS is publically owned. That means it’s an ‘arm of the state’ and as such is bound by human rights legislation, freedom of information and data protection legislation to a much higher degree than private organisations are. If you want to know what’s happened in the NHS you fill in a Freedom of information request and the information is provided in keeping with the Data Protection Act. If you want to know what happened inside a private organisation… well… erm… not so much.

6. Healthcare data is worth a fortune to private companies who sell it to insurance companies, marketers and even political organisations (via third parties, of course). Why wouldn’t they? It’s all about profit in the private healthcare market.

This isn’t the complete list of reasons why private healthcare is strangling our NHS but it may include the most significant. At least the most significant to date.

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On December 28th 2019, 15 days after we learned of Boris’ electoral victory the news broke that the government is inviting still more private firms to tender for the right to deliver NHS cardiology, paediatrics, oncology and gynaecology services. Officially this is a way to cot waiting lists but hang on a minute. Given the 6 points listed above is private healthcare really the solution to waiting lists or is it actually the cause?

This government, like the tory and ConDem governments that preceded it is using our health as a political cash cow. We’re the victims, sacrificed to ever increasing lengths of stay on hospital trolleys in A&E, all in the name of profit. Our NHS diminishes in size, in scope and in quality whilst private entrepreneurs profit from providing sub-standard care in its place. And you tell me that the NHS hasn’t been privatised.

Really?

I think you’d better go and give your head a wobble.