The Bill is about to become law but our campaign will continue

At the beginning of the week, we wondered how much impact anything we did this week would have, given that the Bill finished its Parliamentary process on Tuesday evening and the Budget happened on Wednesday.  But on Tuesday and Wednesday we had a lot more media interest than we expected.  People wanted to know what the passage of the Bill would mean and whether we were going to continue.  

Today's protest outside the town hall was similar.  We had good support from the Green Party and Sheffield Pensioners Action Group as well as some other groups and some supporters who haven't been able to come to meetings for a while made a big effort to turn up.  It was also good to welcome some new supporters.

We have designed a pledge which says:

I believe that the Health and Social Care Bill (Act next week) 2012 will undermine the founding principles of the NHS which it claims to support. 

 

I pledge to

• fight for the NHS to remain as a publicly owned service true to its founding principles, 
• oppose the introduction of competition particularly from the profit-making sector and
• resist cuts which threaten a comprehensive service with access for all according to need, not ability to pay.

People were really interested in signing up and we could hardly pack up the stall because people still wanted to sign.  We got a lot of encouragement for keeping this struggle going.

We'll be going to the SACA workshop on 31st March to discuss how we can build this up on a regional basis, and nationally as well.