No Coup or War in Venezuela! Meeting on Monday March 11th Brent Trades Hall

Video: Jeff Webber speaking about the situation in Venezuela at a recent meeting with Hugo Blanco

Topical as always Brent Stop the War will be discussing what is happening in Venezuela at their meeting on Monday:

The next meeting of BRENT STOP the WAR will take place on Monday, March 11^th at 7.30pm at Brent Trades Hall (London Apollo Club) 375 High Rd, Willesden, NW10 2JR [It’s very close to Willesden Bus Garage, buses 6,52,98,226,260,266,302,460, and just five minutes’ walk from Dollis Hill Jubilee Line station]

 

Speaker: Calvin Tucker [Morning Star campaigns manager and international election observer to the May 2018 Venezuelan presidential elections] will be talking about the situation in Venezuela.

-->

Cllr Mili Patel breaks silence on The Village School academisation

Cllr Mili Patel

Cllr Mili Patel, Brent Cabinet member for Children and Young People, yesterday broke her silence regarding the proposed academisation, via a Multi-Academy Trust, of The Village School. The MAT would consist of The Village and Woodfield School, which is already an academy. The other Brent special school, Manor, is also an academy. The three schools are involved in a project to set up a free school together.

If academisation were to go ahead it would mean special education in Brent was outside local authority oversight.

In a statement to the Morning Star yesterday she said:

The Village School and Woodfield School have worked in partnership for some time.

The education policies of the Tory government - including a 2.7billion cut to the schools budget and barriers to schools partnering up in any way that doesn't involve them becoming academies - have led to the Village School governors considering joining the same multi-academy trust as Woodfield. This is something most of the governors themselves would tell you they never thought they would be considering.

As a Labour Council we do not want them to take this step and I have been working hard to demonstrate the advantages of staying within the Brent school of families [sic 'family of schools'] to its governors.

It is encouraging the governors have taken this important decision out to consultation which will give local people the chance to demonstrate the strength of feeling there is in Brent against these plans.

Morning Star on Michaela: Schools versus communities

Click on image to enlarge

NHS 'Listening Panel' Tomorrow

A poorly advertised NHS 'Listening Panel' is coming to London tomorrow, Friday May 13th to hear views on the Health and Social Care Bill which is currently on 'pause'. It will be held at Voluntary Action, 200a Pentonville Road, N1 9JP at 2pm. Anyone concerned about the changes is urged to attend and meet at 1.30pm outside the venue.

The issue of whether the Listening Panel is likely to be open-minded on the issue was discussed in April by John Lister in a Morning Star feature:  LINK

To front up the so-called “listening” exercise, an NHS Future Forum has been set up. It is stuffed with high-profile supporters of Lansley’s plans. All five of the GPs on the panel are among the minority of GPs who signed up for Lansley’s suggested commissioning consortiums. The whole forum is under the chairmanship of Professor Steve Field, who controversially supported Lansley’s white paper back in July and has since been replaced as president of the Royal College of GPs by Dr Clare Gerada, who has criticised much of the Lansley plan.

The forum on “choice and competition” will be led by Sir Stephen Bubb, a one-time Labour councillor and now at the head the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations.

Bubb is a vigorous advocate of competition and greater private-sector involvement in delivering healthcare. He led a challenge to Labour’s attempts to designate the NHS as preferred provider of community health services. Other doctors, trust bosses, primary care trust and strategic health authority bosses and senior council officers among the 40 hand-picked appointees on the forum are likely to be influenced by their career aspirations. They are unlikely to listen to any articulate critics of the Lansley plan.

The whole process has been set up to waste a month, to give the impression of responding to public opinion - and then to press through the key elements of the plan with little if any actual change.

There is no indication that the principal objections raised at the Lib Dem conference a few weeks ago have been taken on board by the Tories, not least because the suggestion that the private sector can somehow be prevented from “cherry-picking” the most profitable services from the NHS is pure fantasy.

Cherry-picking is central to the private provision of healthcare. Even the so-called “non-profit” social enterprises will have to focus on delivering a surplus from their work and will be compelled in a competitive market to withdraw from services which cannot guarantee to deliver them a surplus.

The only guarantee against the private sector cherry-picking services and destabilising existing NHS provision in many parts of the country is to drop Lansley’s plans altogether and to focus resources on investing in NHS care related to local need.

That’s why it’s vital that Labour and the unions crank up the pressure to force the Con-Dems to ditch the Bill.