Not in my name

Did anyone else hear about the Rally against Debt last Saturday? It seems about 350 people demonstrated in support of Government cuts and that it would be immoral to leave the debt to future generations.

It believed in substantial spending cuts sooner rather than later to avoid seeing more taxes going on debt interest, not paying for services.

Protesters held placards bearing messages including "Drowning in debt", "No more EU bailouts" and "Stop spending money you don't have".

Some of the crazies on this ‘demo’ included known Conservative activist, Matthew Sinclair, who attended under the banner of the Taxpayer's Alliance and said the cuts are essential:

"The country's facing a choice. It's facing a choice between racking up more and more debt and spending decades with taxpayers' burden and with the economy dragged down by that incredible debt. Or we start to take action to cut spending, to deliver better value and to start to rebuild our economic fortunes."

Other notable right-wingers attending included UKIP MEP Nigel Farage, who said: "We want to make it clear that not a penny more of British taxpayers' money should be spent on Euro bail-outs...and we regard giving £40m a day to Brussels for our membership of this union is giving us bad value for money. So from that little lot you get a fairly big shopping list of real, good, sensible cuts that could be made and we could perhaps keep a few more local libraries open."

With so few people attending you would have thought they would have been too embarrassed to call it a rally, wouldn’t you? But no, these are die-hard Tories we are talking about and they wanted to show those who attended the TUC demonstration earlier this year (yes, the one with half a million protesters) that there was an alternative voice.

Now let me get this right – this band of nutters think a fiasco in London can stand alongside one of the greatest demonstrations against government policy since the time of the Poll Tax resistance. Could I just remind them they were outnumbered on a ration of 1:1428!!!!

If this is the best the Tories can do then we have nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, they are usually far better organised and far more capable of causing bedlam to our society.

As we speak, hundreds of welfare to work staff are facing redundancy as they wait to hear if they will have a job for the next five years. Many won’t and will be forced to become clients of the new Work Programme themselves. Throughout, the government have been notable only by their silence and Chris Grayling, the architect of this demise has failed to answer accusations that he has watched whilst Rome burns.
The new Work programme will operate with fewer staff, yet will be expected to achieve better results than its predecessor, Flexible New Deal. As one writer recently said:

“… the delivery model is basically the same for A4e except we are being told to push the customers harder and not allow being on programme to become the easy option.”

But this isn’t just an A4e problem, it is across the entire sector and the government have failed to invest correctly, resulting in a programme that will be unable to achieve any better result than those before it, and at a cost of substantial redundancies for those who have been working in the sector for many years.

This lack of investment and strategic ineptitude was further exposed last week when the Department for Work and Pensions abandoned plans to introduce a system to automate the processing of all benefit claims. The DWP said that the system would still require "human intervention". In other words, they hadn’t thought it through, spent a fortune trying to get it to work and then found it wasn’t suitable.

The same disaster is set to hit the NHS as Citizen Dave continues his plans to “reform” the service. Unfortunately, some of those nasty discontents in the Lib Dems seem likely to put a spanner in the works and slow down or stop any of his plans. This won’t be enough to stop Citizen Dave – he is a man on a mission, even though the British Medical Association and some Labour MPs have expressed concern that the plans will allow private health firms to get a stronger foothold in the NHS.

The critics argue that the bill will allow competition law to be applied to the health service and lead to a much greater involvement, which in turn could undermine local NHS hospitals. The BMA has even likened it to the privatisation of utility industries.

But Citizen Dave, like the 350 who attended the “rally” in London last week refuse to listen to reason – they are Tories after all. Their venom is constantly being spat out and regurgitated by the media. Take the fact that the national media bothered to report the rally in the first place. It is another significant coup for the right because it tries to show how they represent the views of the majority.

Well, I refuse to have my name associated with the tragedy happening to the welfare to work sector. I do not wish to see changes to the NHS so that the private sector can cream off millions of pounds in profit.

When the Tories destroy our society, let the message be clear – they are not doing it in my name.

An ill wind from Tory HQ

Ken Livingstone
If you're suddenly feeling worse off this month, blame the Tories - David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson.

Worse-off Wednesday was an apt way to describe April 6, when a whole series of tax changes, benefit cuts and reductions to welfare payments imposed by the government came into effect, hitting pay packets and peoples' quality of life.

We are seeing housing benefit cuts to the tune of £220 million, tax benefit cuts amounting to £1.18 billion, a freeze in child benefit equivalent to a £356m cut and other welfare cuts amounting to £664m.

These cuts come to about £10 for every household in Britain. But clearly not everyone will lose out in the same way.

The biggest losers from these changes will be those entitled to welfare - the working poor, the growing number of unemployed and those with disabilities.

Not only are they the ones hardest hit by the changes but they are those least able to afford them.

But all this is just the beginning.

The government's own data shows that cuts will rise over time, so that by 2014-15 they and other cuts will amount to £18.08bn - or more than £750 for every household in Britain.

And it won't just be the very poorest who will suffer - the "squeezed middle" are in for a tough time too.

Combined, those on low and middle incomes are bearing the brunt of the government's measures.

A freeze on the threshold for the higher-rate 40 per cent tax-band at £35,001 rather than allowing it to rise with inflation to £37,400 means 750,000 people will be brought into the band for the first time, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The increase in employees' national insurance contribution rate from 11 to 12 per cent is also a tax increase.

And it all comes on top of an increase in the VAT rate, hitting the entire population with a regressive tax, and rising inflation which is now running at three per cent above average wage growth.

Much of this inflation is either directly caused by the Tory-led coalition through the VAT hike or has been allowed by them in the form of rising utilities bills and increased fares.

In London, for example, the impact of Chancellor George Osborne's lifting of the cap on rail fare increases is compounded by Mayor Boris Johnson's above-inflation public-transport fare rises.

In three years a single bus or tram fare in the city has risen from 90p to £1.30 - an increase of 44 per cent.

Fares in London are planned to rise by two per cent above inflation for years to come.

Londoners are also hardest hit by the flat-rate cuts in benefits such as housing, because housing is so much more expensive in London than in the rest of the country.

According to homeless charity Shelter 160,000 households across the capital will be affected by the cut.

All these cutbacks will literally hit hundreds of thousands of households, most of them in work.

According to independent research from the Resolution Foundation London families will lose an average of £603 a year as a result of the government's decision to reduce the percentage of child-care costs paid through the Working Tax Credit, £167 more than the average across the UK (£436). There could hardly be a clearer illustration of the damage being caused by the coalition government than families losing £603 a year as a result of just one of the many cuts being made.

So it was richly ironic that Boris Johnson used his £250,000-a-year Telegraph column this week to whinge about Labour criticism of government policies, comparing it to trying to "spread gloom in the sunshine."

The weather may be sunny but the winds blowing from the Conservative-led government are as icy as ever.

•It is becoming increasingly apparent that public opinion is moving against military intervention in Libya.

YouGov's Anthony Wells wrote earlier this week that "for the first time so far our poll today showed more people (43 per cent) thinking the military action was wrong than those in favour of it (38 per cent)."

Moreover opinion has moved on whether the intervention is going well.The week before last, 57 per cent of the public thought it was going well and 19 per cent thought it was going badly.

Polling this week found 42 per cent thought it was going well, 34 per cent saying it was going badly.

It is hardly surprising. Though posed in liberal and humanitarian terms, there is no clear logic to the Libya intervention compared to other humanitarian crises and problems in the world. There are few clearly defined war aims and no sense of what the exit strategy for the intervention may be.

At a time when the public is being told there is no money for libraries, when the NHS faces its greatest threat, when the Royal Mail is under threat of privatisation and when our young people are being saddled with cuts and mounting debt, it is not hard to see that the public will take some persuading over the long-term that intervention is the right policy.

•The Andrew Lansley rap might have once seemed an unlikely hit this spring, but the NHS is very dear to the British people's hearts.

Lansley, Cameron and Clegg have been forced to announce a "pause" which amounts to a tactical maneouvre to work out how best to proceed.

The Tory-led government has opened a two-pronged attack on the NHS. Although it was claimed that NHS spending would be protected the experience up and down the country is of resources being squeezed.

That is borne out by the fact that although nominal health spending is planned to rise from £103bn to £114.4bn - just over 11 per cent - while over the same period the Office for Budget Responsibility projects that inflation will have risen by 22 per cent.

That's a real decline of 11 per cent.

The fundamental character of the NHS is threatened with change with the government looking for the biggest conceivable private-sector role.

Government policy is not about improving the NHS for patients but improving the profits of the private sector.

All over London we are seeing examples of Londoners concerned about the future of their local health service - such as in the campaign to oppose the closure of the A&E and maternity departments at Romford's King George Hospital.

It's one of the many reasons I'll be putting campaigns to defend the NHS top of the agenda this spring.

Conservatives created the NHS ‘bureaucracy’ they are now attacking

by Guest
February 25, 2011 at 11:13 am


contribution by Jon Taylor

The Tories talk a lot about how the public sector has become bloated, according to them, it has become ‘weighed down by bureaucracy’.

But is Tory policy not responsible, at least in part, for creating the bureaucratic system we see before us today? I think it’s about time the left started to challenge the notion that bureaucracy is solely a left-wing phenomenon. It’s not.

Ironically, in terms of the NHS, much of the bureaucracy at which Lansely directs his venom was borne out of the purchaser-provider split. A policy initiated by the Tories in 1990, and regrettably not reversed by Labour in 1997.

This move, for the first time, established the internal market in the NHS. The idea being that competition would drive up quality, productivity, and efficiency.

There is no evidence that this has happened. There is evidence, however, that the purchaser-provider split has led to a huge increase in transaction costs, notably management and administration costs.

Currently it is predominantly Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) that are responsible for commissioning or purchasing services on behalf of us: taxpayers and patients. Within PCTs sit many of these bureaucrats whom the Tories like to blame for the various failings of the NHS.

These ‘commissioners’ are responsible for purchasing services from another group of bureaucrats based in provider organisations; contract managers, accountants and a like. These people perform a critical function. They manage financial transactions.

It is hardly surprising; therefore, that, as the market has become embedded in the NHS, the number of people needed to manage transactions has shot up. The moment we introduced the market we began to need people to manage money flows, negotiate contracts, and administer financial transactions.

It is for this reason that the Tories ‘war on bureaucracy’ is disingenuous populism.

The Department of Health’s own unpublished figures indicate that transaction costs resulting from the purchaser-provider split account for 14% of total NHS costs. This is money that could be spent on frontline care.

Lansley knows very well the function performed by the bureaucrats he loves to pretend to hate. He also knows that opening up the NHS to ‘any willing provider’ will increase transaction costs and, as a direct consequence, increase in bureaucracy.

Although ‘officially’ they will no-longer be on the government pay roll, the tax payer will still be paying for them from the cash handed over to private firms by GP’s.

However, in 2013 the government will be able to declare a great victory. Lansley can claim to have defeated his great nemesis – bureaucracy. He can hold up the private sector as our saviour.

The private sector, according to him I’m sure, will have come to our rescue by re-employing and rehabilitating these lazy, good for nothing, parasitic, public sector pen pushers.

Therefore, rather ironically, Andrew Lansely will actually need to recruit more people to his rapidly expanding army of demoralised x-public sector bureaucrats in order to deliver his longstanding and well documented ambition: wholesale privatisation of the NHS.

—
Jon Taylor works in the NHS for a Cancer Network, and is a trade unionist