Updated 10th August, 13th August, 31st August
It was good to see so many people turn out to support the marchers, especially in the wet on the Bank Holiday. Thanks to all our speakers and to the members of the Socialist Choir and Body of Sound for their performances and all their help, as well as to the Sheffield Street Band for adding oomph on both days.
Meanwhile in Sheffield, cuts both in the NHS and in local authority services which affect health are biting deeper. The new head of the NHS, Simon Stevens, with a strong background in the health market, will be outlining his proposals for the NHS in the next few weeks. Labour and the Lib Dems will be firming up their positions in their Party Conferences. Defenders of the NHS need to be on their toes.
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The big summer campaigning event for the NHS in Sheffield will be the arrival of the People's March for the NHS, organised by the Darlington Mums. You can see details of the routes and download posters from the march website.
This is a really exciting and spontaneous manifestation of popular support for the NHS and against the fragmentation and privatisation brought in by the current Government. There is a lot of support up and down the country, not only along the route and on each leg the core marchers will be joined by local people, accompanying them on all or part of the way. The marchers are very keen to demonstrate the breadth of support for the NHS and are not tied to any particular organisation. All groupings which support the principles of the NHS are encouraged to participate and support. SSONHS is co-ordinating part of the Sheffield route.
The march is from Jarrow to Parliament and will reach South Yorkshire on Sunday 24th August, overnighting in Barnsley and then setting off for Sheffield from Barnsley District Hospital on August Bank Holiday Monday, 25th August. After a night in Sheffield the march will set off for Chesterfield from the Town Hall on 26th August.
We are expecting the marchers to reach Weston Park by 5pm on 25th August, where there will be a reception and short rally. We suggest that people who want to join the march before then do so at Hillsborough Park at the Parkside Road entrance at around 3 pm. After marchers and the heir hosts have a meal at the Broomhall Centre, Broomspring Lane, there will be an informal social/get together from about 7.30 at the same venue, not the Shakespeare as previously posted. There will be informal music etc and a BYO arrangement for drinks.
On the following day (26th) the march will be seen off from Sheffield Town Hall by the Leader of the Council, Cllr Julie Dore and Cllr Jillian Creasy for the Green Party. There will be a short rally outside the Hallamshire Hospital, addressed by representatives of people working in the NHS and the march will then go through Hunters Bar, Nether Edge (11.30), and Woodseats to Graves Park and Meadowhead.
We have put out an appeal for help with resources (practical and financial), accommodation and transport, and have already offers of help from local organisations and individuals. Apart from the events we need to raise money for meals and refreshments. We need help with stewarding the march and setting up the rally at Weston Park. For offers or inquiries please email us here or if the link doesn't work try team@sheffieldsaveournhs.co.uk
for updates see our web page
We hope this will be a very special celebration of the NHS here in Sheffield
We are a grassroots movement comprising people from all walks of life who are, or will be affected by the government’s austerity measures and spending cuts to NHS Services across England. We also strongly oppose the creeping privatisation of the NHS by successive governments. Privatisation = Profit not Good Patient Care
Sunday, 20 July 2014
Is the NHS really in crisis? SSONHS Public Meeting 24th July
This meeting (details above) seems to be generating a lot of interest - we have even had people asking whether it is necessary to book - a welcome first for us.
We're experimenting with a format which opens up discussion - rather than suggesting there are easy answers. We start from the given that the government's failure to keep up with the 4% real term increase in the NHS budget, on top of the so-called efficiency cuts, has put the NHS in real trouble. Even senior Tories are saying that more money has to be put in. The question is, of course, how it should be raised. The Tories may well try some sort of patch up before the election and Labour are flirting with the idea of hypothecated National Insurance. But that's not what we want to talk about on Thursday.
The deeper debate is whether there are other changes needed in the NHS to meet changing social, demographic, economic and technical developments in order to maintain a universal health service true to its founding principles.
We've chosen to focus on certain aspects - first access to health services, a discussion led by two experienced GPs who are committed to the reduction of health inequalities. In the second half, two academics with considerable experience of the organisational side of the NHS will address issues such as competition vs collaboration, accountability, and whether preventative and community-based services will be both effective and save money. All the speakers will be in a personal capacity and will talk for about 10 minutes each.
It's a lot to pack in and there are bound to be a host of other issues coming up from the floor. We hope for a lively discussion.
At the end of the meeting we will have few minutes to discuss how to take things further, including whether we should organise more meetings of this sort and on what topics. We will also alert people to the developing arrangements for the Darlington marchers.
We're experimenting with a format which opens up discussion - rather than suggesting there are easy answers. We start from the given that the government's failure to keep up with the 4% real term increase in the NHS budget, on top of the so-called efficiency cuts, has put the NHS in real trouble. Even senior Tories are saying that more money has to be put in. The question is, of course, how it should be raised. The Tories may well try some sort of patch up before the election and Labour are flirting with the idea of hypothecated National Insurance. But that's not what we want to talk about on Thursday.
The deeper debate is whether there are other changes needed in the NHS to meet changing social, demographic, economic and technical developments in order to maintain a universal health service true to its founding principles.
We've chosen to focus on certain aspects - first access to health services, a discussion led by two experienced GPs who are committed to the reduction of health inequalities. In the second half, two academics with considerable experience of the organisational side of the NHS will address issues such as competition vs collaboration, accountability, and whether preventative and community-based services will be both effective and save money. All the speakers will be in a personal capacity and will talk for about 10 minutes each.
It's a lot to pack in and there are bound to be a host of other issues coming up from the floor. We hope for a lively discussion.
At the end of the meeting we will have few minutes to discuss how to take things further, including whether we should organise more meetings of this sort and on what topics. We will also alert people to the developing arrangements for the Darlington marchers.
Monday, 14 July 2014
Transatlantic Trade negotiations (TTIP) and their effect on health
This is a speech for the World Development Association Day of Action on TTIP July 12th
The proposed international trade partnership agreements TTIP and TISA have the potential to damage our health as well as our economy and environment. But you have to peer through a load of sliding windows, shifty statements and economic pie in the sky to find this out.
Let’s start off by debunking two myths. First of all there are arguments that population health will improve because we will all be better off. This increase in wealth – estimated at something like 9.7% change in real per capita income (Bertelsmann Foundation) - is what seems to bind the Labour leadership into the overall concept of the TTIP. What on earth makes people think that this sort of benefit will happen?
1. First of all the figures for economic benefit are grossly inflated because they are based on the assumption that all aspects of trade will be brought into the treaty – which they won’t be.
2. Secondly, even if there is an economic benefit, what makes anyone think it will be distributed evenly? This average trades off the losses – of jobs, job protection and freely available public services – the losses for ordinary people against the very considerable gains that will be made by the rich, the 1%, the business leaders with their golden hellos and golden handshakes, the shareholders and celebrities with their offshore accounts.
3. Thirdly the potential downgrading of regulation in other spheres – the loss of environmental protection, certain food measures, drugs and advertising, workers’ health and safety all have the potential to make our health a lot worse.
4. Fourthly there is the threat of the ISDS – the secret court where companies can sue governments which threaten competition. Philip Morris are suing Australia under an obscure international provision to try and prevent them going ahead with blank cigarette packets. Hardly good for our health?
So let’s call on the Labour leadership to take off their primrose spectacles and look at the real needs of the people they are supposed to represent.
On the other hand some TTIP opponents give the impression that the NHS will fall to pieces because under the TTIP, healthcare services will be brutally exposed to takeover by international corporations. Well this isn’t quite true either. The NHS as we used to know it even up to 2006 and even just about before the 2012 would have a significant degree of protection either because it was a publicly funded service or because it can be excluded during negotiations – and this is what is made a clear in a letter issued yesterday by the senior EU TTIP negotiator, Sñr Bercero, to one of our local MPs John Healey.
But since the opening up of NHS provision to the private sector, tried by Thatcher, then insinuated into the NHS Plan by Labour from 2001 to 2006 and since then legally institutionalised by the Coalition government, this protecting veil becomes full of holes. Every specialist service which is opened up to tender by NHS England, every CCG which goes out to private tender for NHS services, and, most alarmingly, every decision by the holders of the new personal health budgets to enter the healthcare market, puts that service into the competitive arena and vulnerable to TTIP.
And it’s not just TTIP. As part of the WTO a separate negotiation called TISA is progressing among 20 developed countries including the UK about liberalising the service sector. Here the dangers for a part privatised NHS are even worse especially if the Tories get in next time and especially if Andrew Lansley were to achieve his ambition to become an EU commissioner.
TISA will lock in the rights of private services. Take the example of Bolivia – before Morales was elected president a previous government placed Bolivia’s then pretty awful healthcare system into the WTO system, trying to encourage foreign investment. Of course this hardly produced a service which met the needs of the Bolivian people but when Morales tried to take it out to encourage the growth of an indigenous public service, WTO members like the USA refused to allow the return of hospital services to public control. Good article about TISA in the Big Issue.
Can healthcare be excluded from the TTIP? Of course it can as Sñr Bercero has made clear. The French, right from the beginning, fought hard on one of their perennial bottom line issues – protection from US cultural influences. Paris refused to be involved, exercising a virtual veto, unless cultural issues (mainly films and audio-visual media) were excluded. And they won. Last year the USA and Canada updated their trade agreement. Canada, which has much more publicly funded healthcare, despite cuts there too, refused to include healthcare and the USA was forced to agree. Ironically this has led some liberals in the US to press much harder for healthcare to be included in the TTIP in order to bring more competition into their own appalling system. But not at the cost of our own NHS! No thanks Uncle Sam.
Cameron has dodged all requests for healthcare to be excluded. All the supposed assurances given by government ministers have been equivocal. Sñr Bercero says public services can be protected not that they will be protected. Why this reticence from Cameron? Could it be because of the money given to the Tories by private healthcare interests? Could it be because of the number of Tory and Lib Dem MPs and peers with significant investments in private healthcare? 65 Tory Lords; 12 Lib Dem Lords, 37 Labour Lords, 31 cross benchers, not to mention 63 Tory MPs. (Social Investigations) Surely this can’t be the case. And yet….maybe it could.
Recently the EU halted negotiations in order to start an elaborate public consultation on ISDS which suggested that public provision in areas like health could be excluded from litigation provided government actions were not manifestly unfair. Well who decides what manifestly means? The ISDS secret court no doubt. It is quite clear that any government which was seeking to bring services back into the public sphere, would, at the very best, have to invest considerable resources into protecting itself from litigation.
Let’s be clear, this is not particularly about the EU. There are campaigners against the TTIP like the Greens who are in favour of the EU and others from the Left who are against it. UKIP have nothing to say. A UKIP government would not only be cutting and privatising the NHS but looking for a bilateral agreement between the UK and USA to deliver exactly the same sort of deals for business. So people should not be gulled into looking to UKIP for protection.
So what’s to be done?
First it is clear that the EU negotiators, despite all the fences, are susceptible to pressure. They have already been shamed into delay and attempts at consultation and transparency. So keep it up, locally, nationally and internationally.
1. The campaign needs to carry on right the way through this year and up to and including any EU parliament vote. Our MEPs must be held to account on this.
2. Secondly don’t take any half-baked assurances that our health services are safe. Healthcare needs to be formally exempted and no weasel words from the government can be tolerated. Take every opportunity to press your elected representatives either directly or through organisations like 38 degrees.
3. Finally we need to stop the privatisation rot in the NHS. Even under the present system commissioners need to understand that if they put services out to tender, they are potentially damaging not just the present but the future of the NHS as a publicly owned, publicly provided and publicly accountable service.
For more information, come to the SSONHS meeting on 24th July 2014, 7pm at the Quaker Meeting House. Leading local experts will discuss the issues facing the NHS.
To show your dissent to government policy on the NHS - Join the People’s March for the NHS organised by the Darlington Mums. We hope to see you on August 25th or 26th on the march or at Weston Park. Look out for more details
The proposed international trade partnership agreements TTIP and TISA have the potential to damage our health as well as our economy and environment. But you have to peer through a load of sliding windows, shifty statements and economic pie in the sky to find this out.
Let’s start off by debunking two myths. First of all there are arguments that population health will improve because we will all be better off. This increase in wealth – estimated at something like 9.7% change in real per capita income (Bertelsmann Foundation) - is what seems to bind the Labour leadership into the overall concept of the TTIP. What on earth makes people think that this sort of benefit will happen?
1. First of all the figures for economic benefit are grossly inflated because they are based on the assumption that all aspects of trade will be brought into the treaty – which they won’t be.
2. Secondly, even if there is an economic benefit, what makes anyone think it will be distributed evenly? This average trades off the losses – of jobs, job protection and freely available public services – the losses for ordinary people against the very considerable gains that will be made by the rich, the 1%, the business leaders with their golden hellos and golden handshakes, the shareholders and celebrities with their offshore accounts.
3. Thirdly the potential downgrading of regulation in other spheres – the loss of environmental protection, certain food measures, drugs and advertising, workers’ health and safety all have the potential to make our health a lot worse.
4. Fourthly there is the threat of the ISDS – the secret court where companies can sue governments which threaten competition. Philip Morris are suing Australia under an obscure international provision to try and prevent them going ahead with blank cigarette packets. Hardly good for our health?
So let’s call on the Labour leadership to take off their primrose spectacles and look at the real needs of the people they are supposed to represent.
On the other hand some TTIP opponents give the impression that the NHS will fall to pieces because under the TTIP, healthcare services will be brutally exposed to takeover by international corporations. Well this isn’t quite true either. The NHS as we used to know it even up to 2006 and even just about before the 2012 would have a significant degree of protection either because it was a publicly funded service or because it can be excluded during negotiations – and this is what is made a clear in a letter issued yesterday by the senior EU TTIP negotiator, Sñr Bercero, to one of our local MPs John Healey.
But since the opening up of NHS provision to the private sector, tried by Thatcher, then insinuated into the NHS Plan by Labour from 2001 to 2006 and since then legally institutionalised by the Coalition government, this protecting veil becomes full of holes. Every specialist service which is opened up to tender by NHS England, every CCG which goes out to private tender for NHS services, and, most alarmingly, every decision by the holders of the new personal health budgets to enter the healthcare market, puts that service into the competitive arena and vulnerable to TTIP.
And it’s not just TTIP. As part of the WTO a separate negotiation called TISA is progressing among 20 developed countries including the UK about liberalising the service sector. Here the dangers for a part privatised NHS are even worse especially if the Tories get in next time and especially if Andrew Lansley were to achieve his ambition to become an EU commissioner.
TISA will lock in the rights of private services. Take the example of Bolivia – before Morales was elected president a previous government placed Bolivia’s then pretty awful healthcare system into the WTO system, trying to encourage foreign investment. Of course this hardly produced a service which met the needs of the Bolivian people but when Morales tried to take it out to encourage the growth of an indigenous public service, WTO members like the USA refused to allow the return of hospital services to public control. Good article about TISA in the Big Issue.
Can healthcare be excluded from the TTIP? Of course it can as Sñr Bercero has made clear. The French, right from the beginning, fought hard on one of their perennial bottom line issues – protection from US cultural influences. Paris refused to be involved, exercising a virtual veto, unless cultural issues (mainly films and audio-visual media) were excluded. And they won. Last year the USA and Canada updated their trade agreement. Canada, which has much more publicly funded healthcare, despite cuts there too, refused to include healthcare and the USA was forced to agree. Ironically this has led some liberals in the US to press much harder for healthcare to be included in the TTIP in order to bring more competition into their own appalling system. But not at the cost of our own NHS! No thanks Uncle Sam.
Cameron has dodged all requests for healthcare to be excluded. All the supposed assurances given by government ministers have been equivocal. Sñr Bercero says public services can be protected not that they will be protected. Why this reticence from Cameron? Could it be because of the money given to the Tories by private healthcare interests? Could it be because of the number of Tory and Lib Dem MPs and peers with significant investments in private healthcare? 65 Tory Lords; 12 Lib Dem Lords, 37 Labour Lords, 31 cross benchers, not to mention 63 Tory MPs. (Social Investigations) Surely this can’t be the case. And yet….maybe it could.
Recently the EU halted negotiations in order to start an elaborate public consultation on ISDS which suggested that public provision in areas like health could be excluded from litigation provided government actions were not manifestly unfair. Well who decides what manifestly means? The ISDS secret court no doubt. It is quite clear that any government which was seeking to bring services back into the public sphere, would, at the very best, have to invest considerable resources into protecting itself from litigation.
Let’s be clear, this is not particularly about the EU. There are campaigners against the TTIP like the Greens who are in favour of the EU and others from the Left who are against it. UKIP have nothing to say. A UKIP government would not only be cutting and privatising the NHS but looking for a bilateral agreement between the UK and USA to deliver exactly the same sort of deals for business. So people should not be gulled into looking to UKIP for protection.
So what’s to be done?
First it is clear that the EU negotiators, despite all the fences, are susceptible to pressure. They have already been shamed into delay and attempts at consultation and transparency. So keep it up, locally, nationally and internationally.
1. The campaign needs to carry on right the way through this year and up to and including any EU parliament vote. Our MEPs must be held to account on this.
2. Secondly don’t take any half-baked assurances that our health services are safe. Healthcare needs to be formally exempted and no weasel words from the government can be tolerated. Take every opportunity to press your elected representatives either directly or through organisations like 38 degrees.
3. Finally we need to stop the privatisation rot in the NHS. Even under the present system commissioners need to understand that if they put services out to tender, they are potentially damaging not just the present but the future of the NHS as a publicly owned, publicly provided and publicly accountable service.
For more information, come to the SSONHS meeting on 24th July 2014, 7pm at the Quaker Meeting House. Leading local experts will discuss the issues facing the NHS.
To show your dissent to government policy on the NHS - Join the People’s March for the NHS organised by the Darlington Mums. We hope to see you on August 25th or 26th on the march or at Weston Park. Look out for more details