Tristan Koriya - What I stand for

I am a member of the Round Table, which does such great work for local causes. Every year on Christmas Day I volunteer at Lutterworth Open Christmas which provides a festive meal and entertainment for local people who need a bit of extra company at this time of the year. I have completed the three-peaks challenge four times and helped to raise thousands of pounds for various charities.

 I proudly serve as an Army Reservist with the Royal Logistics Corps.

 My sense of duty and caring for others comes from my parents. My mother worked in the NHS for 26 years. My father has been a factory worker for 30 years after serving in the Armed Forces.

 Sarah and I are expecting our first child. I worry about the future our child will have under a Tory government. The gap between the richest and the poorest is wider than ever. I want to build a Britain that works for the many, not the few. That means building the homes we need to rent and to buy. It means keeping our communities safe. It means giving our schools the funding they need. And it means restoring our NHS to its place as the envy of the world.

Tory threat to NHS

The Health Service Journal has today revealed the extent of the threat posed by a re-elected Tory government. Essentially, the HSJ says: "Closing wards and services, blocking choice of private providers, systematically extending waiting times, and stopping some treatments are all being considered under a national programme targeted at the health economies with the highest overspends."

In response, Jonathan Ashworth, Shadow Health Secretary and Leicester MP, says:

"With 48 hours to go until the General Election, the true scale of the secret Tory plan for cuts and closures across the NHS has been revealed by the Health Service Journal.

"We now know if the Tories are re-elected on Thursday we'll see hospital wards closed, waiting times growing, treatments rationed and staff cut.

"The fact that NHS bosses have described this as the most extreme and difficult NHS finance process they have experienced and would challenge the value basis of the NHS, will make chilling reading for patients and their families who deserve the very best levels of care.

"Every single day the Tories are in power hospitals are being left to crumble, staff are being let down, waiting lists are growing and patients are being denied the care they need and deserve.
"Let's be clear - these new, secret Tory plans will only be stopped by electing a Labour Government on Thursday.

"The NHS cannot survive five more years of a Tory government. That is why Labour has pledged to bring the health service back from the brink with a multi-billion pounds rescue package. The British people deserve nothing less."

Incidentally, did you see this story on the BBC lunchtime news? No, me neither. Funny that. Questions may need to be asked.

Jeremy Corbyn's speech to our South East Regional Conference (2) The Solution

Housing:


"Labour will allow councils to borrow to build council housing again and we will suspend right to buy so that when that housing is built it stays. We will invest in building genuinely affordable homes to buy, rent or for shared ownership. We have put forward a plan to invest in building housing and to create skilled jobs in the construction sector, and to meet higher standards of energy efficiency benefiting the occupants and the environment.


"We will toughen regulation on the private rented sector to ensure homes are fit for human habitation and rents are controlled."


Environment:

"We’re not going to use public money to subsidise dirty, groundwater-polluting, landscape-scarring industries like fracking.


"We will invest in the transition to a low carbon economy, not clinging on to polluting technologies that we can consign to history by harnessing technological advances with public investment.
And that investment delivers a return; a stronger economy, better jobs with higher incomes that produce more tax revenue to better fund public services.
We have huge natural resources in the UK, a world-beating history of scientific research and technological development including in many of our institutions of academic and scientific excellence [but] as a country we lag behind the rest of the world’s major economies in generating energy from renewable sources. We lag behind on the speed of our broadband and we lag behind on our transport infrastructure too.


"Nowhere is that more true that on our railways."


Rail:
"The next Labour Government will take back control from the privateers and put control in the hands of passengers, commuters and elected politicians. We will invest in rail, invest in on-board broadband and cut fares."


NHS:


"The NHS is Labour’s proudest creation and as someone who once represented NHS workers, I know the dedication of NHS staff. But, under the Tories, the NHS is in crisis like never before.


"We know that flu epidemic or the norovirus can lead to a winter crisis but the Tories have put the NHS in crisis in spring, summer, autumn and winter. NHS waiting lists have never been longer. NHS deficits have never been larger and they are growing. More people are waiting longer in pain for an operation. More people are waiting longer, often in severe pain, in A&E.


"Over £4 billion of cuts to adult social care inflicted under the Tories has left hundreds of thousands of people without a care package. Thousands more with minimal 15 minute visits and more elderly people turning up at A&E due to neglect and not safe to be discharged home because the support is no longer there.

"Faced with this unprecedented crisis in A&Es, this unprecedented pressure on the NHS, what is the Tory solution? They wasted £3 billion on a top-down reorganisation of the NHS, they have privatised services, like ambulances in Sussex, and that privatisation has failed. Our great friend Ken Loach has quite rightly lead the protests against a £700 million privatisation of NHS services in Bath. Our excellent Shadow Health Secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, has already condemned this. They are threatening a new round of A&E closures and downgrades.


"This is why we are determined to bring all NHS Services back into the family of NHS provision.
That’s why we are focusing our National Campaign Day on Saturday 26 November on defending our NHS. So I want every CLP in the country out in their community campaigning to defend our NHS and to highlight the damage that the Tories have done. Our National Health Service - free at the point of use - with parity of esteem for mental health services and integrated with social care. That is at the very core of our vision for the kind of society we should be."


Strength in Numbers:


"Because our party doesn’t have the benevolence of the press barons, it doesn’t have the donations of oligarchs. What we have is each other. Over half a million of us. More members than every other political party in Britain, along with the millions in our affiliated trade unions.


"Our Labour Party now has over 550,000 individual members. That membership is our most valuable resource. If we organise it, then our ability to speak to voters, stand candidates, and lead campaigns in our communities, that ability is second to none. And working together, we can expose their failures on the economy, their failures on housing, their shambolic Brexit, their failed privatisation of our railways.


"By working together we can get more Labour councillors next year and a Labour Government to rebuild and transform our country so that no one and no community is left behind."

Jeremy Corbyn's speech to our South East Regional Conference (1) The Problem

"We meet after the global wake-up call of Tuesdays US presidential election...

      Whether in the US or the UK people feel left behind. Marginalised by an economic system that makes them work harder for less, while hoovering up ever greater rewards for a small elite.
People are right to be angry with our failed economic system, falling living standards and rising inequality.
     Young people today find it ever harder to get a home of their own. Harder to find good secure jobs. Landed in lifelong debt simply for trying to get an education.  Older people see their children and grandchildren struggling. Their libraries and community services cut. Their friends’ social care worsen. They’ve seen politicians privatise what once belonged to everybody and paid the higher bills and higher fares as a result.
     And if we don’t step forward and offer real solutions that meet the needs of our time then into the vacuum step the merchants of hate and blame. They see the problem, but instead of offering solutions to make people’s lives better, they offer someone to blame. Nigel Farage blames immigrants yet offers not a single practical proposal to put a penny more into the NHS. He actually wants to privatise our NHS, a service that now relies on hard-working migrants to keep going. The Tories bandied around terms like ‘scrounger’ and ‘skiver’, whipping up division against the unemployed and people with disabilities. And in the US we’ve had the shocking spectacle of Donald Trump’s election campaign, which found an unending list of people to blame: women, black people,
Mexicans, Muslims, military veterans. Everyone except the billionaire class of tax dodgers to which he himself belongs.
     However, we should remember that Donald Trump tapped into real problems: stagnating or falling wages, underfunded public services, insecure work and housing, years of being left behind and neglected, frustration that your children’s prospects look bleaker and anger at a political elite that doesn’t listen. But instead of offering real solutions, or the resources to make them work, he offered only someone to blame. Everyone, that is, apart from those actually responsible for a broken economy and a failed political system.
     The Tories do the same. They have opened the door to UKIP and fanned the flames of fear.
     Theresa May, as Home Secretary, fed the idea that immigration was the real problem; made promises she knew they couldn’t deliver about slashing numbers and whipped up hate with ‘Go Home’ vans. No wonder she didn’t even temper her welcome to Donald Trump. She has used the same strategy herself; if delivered with more refinement.
     We have no idea how Donald Trump proposes, as he has said, to “make America great again”, and Theresa May’s Tories offer slogans, but not solutions, for most people in Britain. We won’t tackle the damage done by elite globalisation just by leaving the EU. We won’t ‘take back control’ unless we take on the corporate vested interests that control our energy, our transport and have infiltrated our public services.
     One thing is for sure, neither billionaire Donald Trump nor the billionaire-backed Tories have any interest in giving people back control or reining in the predatory excess of a globalized free-for-all.

But Labour is in the business of real solutions to the problems and failures that Trump and the Tories are unable to address."

Jeremy Corbyn's reponse to Jeremy Hunt

Amanda Hack - your Labour Candidate for South Leicestershire

Amanda's election address should be dropping through your letterbox any day now.  Congratulations to the election team - it looks great and the contents are spot on.

If yours hasn't arrived yet, here are some key points:

• We've seen massive cuts to local services - social care, children's services, school support, youth services, all either closed or cut to the bone.  The next tranche of Tory cuts will close libraries and museums.  Labour is committed to a fairer alternative.
• The NHS as we know it cannot survive five more years of Cameron.  Labour will hire 20,000 more nurses and 8000 extra GPs, funded by a clamp down on tax avoidance, a mansion tax on properties worth than £2 million, and a levy on tobacco firms.
• The cost of childcare has risen by 30% under the Tories.  Labour will provide 25 hours free childcare each week for parents with 3 and 4 year-olds.  Labour will work with primary schools to provide childcare for school-age children from 8am to 6pm, and help parents balance work and family life.

Find out more about Amanda and her campaign by visiting the constituency party's website or by following Amanda on Twitter @hack4labour.

We're Britain. We're better than this."

"We are talking more about immigration as a party and it's right that we do so.  But it will always be on the basis of Labour values, not UKIP values.  Unlike David Cameron what will never do is try to out-UKIP UKIP.

"I think it is time we levelled with people about UKIP.  It is time we had a debate about where they really stand.

"They think that working mothers aren't worth as much as men.  Life was easier when there wasn't equality for gay and lesbian people.  The NHS would be better off privatised.  Rights at work, whether they come from Europe or from here, are simply a barrier to economic success.

"We're Britain.  We're better than this.  You can't build a vision of the future if you don't believe in equal rights.  You can't succeed as a country if you try to close yourself off from the world.  You can't make a fairer country if you try to destroy our National Health Service."

Ed Miliband, November 2014

The Time to Care Fund

The NHS is one of our greatest achievements but it’s struggling under a Tory-led government which wasted billions on an unnecessary top-down reorganisation. Even the Tories themselves see it as their biggest own goal.


That’s why Ed Miliband has announced that the next Labour government will create a £2.5 billion a year NHS Time to Care Fund to save and transform our health service.

We’ll support 20,000 more nurses, 8,000 more GPs, 5,000 more careworkers and 3,000 more midwives. By appointing these additional staff, our doctors and nurses will have the time they need to care properly for patients, as well as transforming services in communities and at home.

The Time to Care Fund will not be paid for through more borrowing or by raising taxes on everyday working people. Instead, the money will be raised from a tax on houses worth over £2 million, a co-ordinated crackdown against tax avoidance, and by ensuring tobacco companies contribute towards the costs they impose on the NHS.

The Tories haven’t just destabilised our health service; they’re holding it back from meeting the challenges of the 21st century as well. We need a world-class health and care service that is equipped to address the modern challenges that come from an ageing population, more people living with chronic conditions, the rise of mental health, and a higher premium on preventing illness.

The NHS is going backwards under the Tories so there has never been a better or more important time to care about its future. 

Only Labour can be trusted to protect the NHS and with the Time to Care Fund, we’ll ensure we have a health service fit for the 21st century.  

Hospitals feel the pinch & Possible consequences of the pensions overhaul

David F saw these items on the BBC News site and thought you should see them (just click on the blue underlined text):

Like householders up-and-down the country, hospitals have been counting the pennies this week. The results make grim reading, says Nick Triggle.

A huge change in the way people fund their retirement is likely to occur owing to the Chancellor's plans for pensions, but what are the hidden consequences?

Items of note

David F has sent me notes from November's meeting of Warwickshire Fabians - former Health Minister Mike O'Brien on the NHS.  You can access the page by clicking on the title in the Pages section on the right.

Also sent by David, a link to a fascinating New Statesman on Paul Dacre, the Mail editor who hates Labour so much that he hyperbolises diary entries by the late Ralph Miliband.  If you haven't already seen it, you can access it by clicking here.

Tory cuts - NHS crisis

The Sunday Times reports that in the last six weeks 8000 operations have been cancelled as hospitals fill up with elderly patients – that’s a 17% increase in cancellations compared to the same period in 2012, itself a 20% increase on the year before.

The Department of Health says the number of cancellations remains low in the context of ‘millions’ of operations performed by the NHS each week.  (You’ve got to question that statistic – are we all having one each?)  Our own David Fish says this is ‘head-in-the-sand denial.’  DoH bureaucrats and ministers have been warned plenty of times by front-line health professionals that when it comes to essential healthcare, cuts means crisis.

 

Labour’s Shadow Health Minister Andy Burnham says the cancellations are because more people than ever are being admitted to hospital from A&E – “a clear sign that too many frail, older people are struggling to cope because of the loss of care support at home.

“David Cameron’s fingerprints are all over the crisis in A&E.  On his watch, it has got harder to get a GP appointment and people are ringing surgeries to be told nothing is available for days.  Add to that his severe cuts to social care, the closure of Walk-In Centres and the break-up of NHS Direct and we have an A&E crisis made in 10 Downing Street.”

Saving the NHS

'Outgoing NHS England Chief Executive David Nicholson  launched a sustained attack of the political debate around the health service in his farewell speech to the NHS Confederation.

'Sir David argued for the need to get away from the "tyranny of the electoral cycle" and said
that the government 'wasted' two years restructuring the NHS  instead of addressing the need to  transform services.

'Worse, during the 2010 election campaign, politicians "went around the country making promises
of no change".  David Nicholson made explicit reference to moratoriums on hospital reconfigurations, which had been promised by former health secretary Andrew Lansley before he took office.

'"We said at the time it was not the right thing to do - so what happened when we got a new government in, we wasted those two years where can really make change happen."

'David Nicholson argued that the reason that NHS England was set up was to look ahead and think strategically about the future of the NHS.  This strategy would get the NHS "out of the tyranny of that electoral cycle, to think about the NHS over the medium to long term".'

[Health Service Journal 14 June 2013 Page 15]

Thanks to David Fish for submitting this item.

Lord Hunt's NHS wake-up call

There's a new post by Lord Philip Hunt on the Labour Lords site.  A timely reminder that, with the Tories sinking ever lower in the polls, this is a battle we can yet win.

NHS Risk Register

The government notoriously refused to release the risk assessment into the so-called reform of the NHS despite the findings of the Information Commissioner.  As usual, someone has leaked part of it and colleagues from the Socialist Health Association have helpfully posted it on their site.  It only covers the West Midlands, but I can't see the risks will be any different here in the East.

I am adding the SHA to the links on the righthand side of this blog.

Branch comments on current affairs

At the May Branch meeting we discussed how the Government is struggling just now. Camerons and Osbornes weaknesses are really showing through, and they respond badly under pressure, as shown at PMQ, where Ed Milliband is certainly raising his game in attacking the Tories.

The Governments seems to ge going from one catastrophe to another: Our economy has shrunk again, with the dreaded double dip recession; huge numbers of young people are out of work; the Jeremy Hunt affair is dragging on; the outrageous suggestion of moving poor London people out of the capital en masse is shocking the voters; and while there are deep cuts to legal aid, there is a planned, unwanted, hugely costly re-organisation of the NHS. What next from this coalition?

The time is right for Labour to take the stage with new policies for a win at the next General Election.

Unison's Vision Principles for the NHS

Last night's public meeting on the Tory's so-called NHS reforms, organised by Market Harborough Labour Party, was a real eye-opener. I hope to gather material from all three speakers over the next week or so and post it here on our blog, but I'd like to start with Unison's ten vision principles for the future of the NHS which were quoted by Unison's (and Lutterworth's own) Gerry Looker at the end of the evening.

1. The NHS remains a free, comprehensive, public service, funded by taxation rather than health insurance or 'top-ups'.
2. Access to the NHS continues to depend on need, not the ability to pay.
3. Improvements in the quality and responsiveness of services are achieved through a continuing process of engagement in partnership with service users, staff and trade unions.
4. NHS staff are valued and supported in their work.
5. Determining pay, terms and conditions for NHS staff continues to be a UK-wide activity.
6. The NHS is accountable, both locally and to Parliament.
7. Equality is fully and effectively embedded in the delivery of healthcare provision.
8. NHS organisations will work collaboratively across geographical areas to help deliver specialist services and with social care, to ensure services are shaped around the needs of users and carers.
9. Patients will receive high quality care which conforms to national standards.
10. Quality and efficiency is delivered through public health care provision rather than competition between private providers.

These seem like statements of the obvious - but every one of them is under threat from Lansley's sledgehammer bill of which there was no mention in the Tory manifesto only 17 months ago. Indeed, Cameron made specific electoral pledges not to destroy our NHS.

We are allowed a referendum on self-serving voting systems and lots of Tories were happy to defy their own government whips to demand a referendum on the terms of our EU membership - but the NHS, by far Britain's greatest and most enduring achievement of the last hundred years, is being systematically dismantled even before the bill has passed through Parliament.

Clicking on the post title will take you to the Unison campaign material and there's loads of other useful stuff on their website, www.unison.org.uk.

Finally, congratulations to Sonia and Annie and the rest of Market Harborough Branch for organising this important event.

NHS is one of the most efficient health systems

Our NHS is one of the most cost effective health systems in the developed world, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
It shows the NHS saved more lives pound for pound than any other developed country over the past 25 years, with the exception of Ireland. Our NHS is both cheaper, and saves more lives. Of the 17 countries considered, the USA had one of the least effective health systems.
So why do we need costly changes to the NHS? It is working very well now. The Governments "reasoning" for the changes are the "inefficiency" of the NHS, but these results prove him wrong. Choice and competition, as recommended by the Tories, causes dismal results, if the USA is anything to go by.
As a worker of over 30 years in the NHS, it is good to see a positive piece of news on the subject. What a pity Mr Lansley doesnt act on the facts.