Now Tulip Siddiq says she won't show up to Save the NHS tomorrow

Thanks to  a Hampstead and Kilburn constituent for forwarding this. Cameron's Tories haven't got a huge majority, we are supposed to have a Left leadership in the Labour Party, but their MPs won't turn up on a vital issue. What would Bevan say?

Has anyone got a message from Dawn Butler?
 

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Good evening,

I am writing in response to your email, in which you asked whether I would attend the Second Reading of the National Health Service Bill on Friday 11th March. Thank you very much for taking the time to write to me about this.

I could not agree with you more that the Health and Social Care Act, which was passed by the Tory and Lib Dem Government in 2012, needs to be repealed urgently. Spending on private and other providers has gone through the £10 billion barrier for the first time in the history of our health system, and unnecessary costs to our NHS have skyrocketed: the implementation of the Act itself has cost the taxpayer some £3 billion. When the Prime Minister took office in 2010 he inherited a health system where patient satisfaction was at all-time high, but as today's newspaper headlines starkly show, he has squandered this legacy: the NHS recorded  its worst ever performance figures in January of this year.

Quite rightly, ever since this Act was passed there have been a number of attempts, mostly by Labour MPs, to repeal the harmful elements of this legislation. The NHS Reinstatement Bill is another such attempt, and many Parliamentarians have tried to get it passed into law. This is the second such attempt to secure its passage, and I regret given there is a Tory majority in the Commons, it will be voted down by Conservative MPs.

I would have attended the debate at Second Reading tomorrow, but I am afraid that I have a number of prior commitments in the diary which mean that regrettably, I will not be able to make it. I am holding my constituency surgery at JW3 Community Centre tomorrow morning – this surgery has been scheduled for more than a month. In the afternoon, I will be speaking at an event to encourage more women into politics at the Women of the World Festival (see: wow.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/how-get-elected-1785). Were it not for these diary commitments, I would certainly have stood up to be counted on the day of the vote.

In any event, however, the only way we can secure the reforms our NHS needs is by unseating this Tory Majority Government. Last May, I stood on a Labour Manifesto which promised to repeal the Health and Social Care Act and to abolish the rules which force NHS commissioners to put contracts out to private tender. We would also have reversed the provisions which permit hospitals to earn up to 49% of their income from private patients. I still remain firmly committed to these principles, and I will take every opportunity as your MP to implement the change we need to save our health system.

Nevertheless, I do appreciate you drawing this debate to my attention, and I can only reiterate my full agreement with your concerns about the Health and Social Care Act.

Thank you again for getting in touch, and please do write back if you have any further queries.

Best wishes,

Tulip Siddiq MP

Labour Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Kilburn

To receive updates on my work in Parliament and across Hampstead and Kilburn, please click here to sign up to my eNewsletter.

Twitter: @tulipsiddiq

Website: tulipsiddiq.com

Join the Hunt protest on Thursday

Rebecca Johnson, Green candidate for H&K will pledge to protect the NHS from privatisation, funding cuts and TTIP this afternoon

A cause the Greens support

38 Degrees members in Hampstead and Kilburn are to present a petition this afternoon outside Waitrose, close to Finchley Road station, asking candidates for the constituency to protect the NHS if elected.  Rebecca Johnson, Green Party candidate in H&K will be there.

The event starts at 3.30pm and is expected to last about 30 minutes.

This is the text of the petition:

Our NHS is precious. Please do everything you can to protect it, including:

* Stopping privatisation
* Making sure it has the funding it needs to provide high quality healthcare to everyone
* Protecting it from US health corporations by keeping the NHS out of TTIP

Why is this important?

Our NHS is precious. We all rely on it to care for us and our loved ones. We want to protect it for the future, and we don't want to see it run down or sold off.

Over the past few years, NHS funding has been squeezed so much that services are suffering. This winter, hospitals up and down the country have declared "major incidents" because they're struggling to cope. And now most hospitals are warning that their budget for next year has " reached the point where patient care is at risk."

Meanwhile, the government is letting profit-hungry companies take over more and more NHS services. At at a time of squeezed budgets, this is the last thing the NHS needs. We want an NHS where patient safety is put first, and where the NHS is run for the public good.

TTIP, the planned trade deal between the EU and the USA, could threaten the NHS further. If TTIP opens our NHS to American private healthcare companies, we could see even more privatisation and a slide into more US-style healthcare. We want the NHS excluded from TTIP.

SELL OFF: the full NHS movie

Let's have a 'healthy' Harlesden debate on Saturday

 I had to try for ages to find out what time the Question and Answer session was at the 'Shaping a Healthier Future Roadshow' to be be held in Harlesden on Saturday.

Finally we were told that although the consultation was from 10am until 4pm that the Q&A would be from 11-12. There were problems about the timing of the Q&A at the Wembley roadshow and it began late.

Now expensive advertisements from NHS North West London have appeared in the local papers and guess what? They just have the 10am-4pm timing with no mention of the Q&A and its timing.

The Q&A is of course the only time the public get to hear alternative views about the proposals which include the closure of Central Middlesex A&E. Perhaps they really want to keep it to cosy 1:1s where the PR people have more chance of pulling wool over people's eyes.

Get there at 11am and let's have a public debate!

Harlesden Methodist Church, 11am, Saturday September 29th.

Barry Gardiner's NHS Meeting

We now have fuller details of the meeting which will take place at 3pm on Sunday June 12th at Brent Town  Hall. This  public meeting will outline and discuss the Government's NHS proposals.

Speakers include:

Diane Abbott MP - Shadow Minister for Health

Barry Gardiner - MP for Brent North

Ann John - Leader of Brent Council

Representatives from the British Medical Association & the Royal College of Nursing

Local Health Care Officials

This should be a really interesting event, please do your best to attend.

No confirmation of attendance needed.

Defending the NHS in Brent - May a Month of Action

The 'thinking space' on NHS 'reforms' (privatisation) has provided an opportunity for local campaigning organisations to call a public meeting to enable local people to hear the views of GP, health workers, service users and MPs on the proposals.

Brent Trades Union Council, Brent Fightback and the Campaign to Defend Brent's Health Services have combined to organise 'Defend Our Health Service' to be held on Thursday May 12th at Willesden Green Library, 95 High Road, NW10 2SF.

The following extract from a blog by Russell Razzaque on the Independent website LINK sets out the reality of the reforms:

Working within the NHS today, I have witnessed first hand the sheer confusion and, in some quarters, borderline panic, that has ensued as a result of the governments recent announcements. PCTs were established as the purchasers in the system. These are massive strategic planning decisions that involve many billions of pounds. Overnight, the government plan to remove all of them, and hand the totality of their powers over to GPs. They have not described how GPs – with no training in accounting or management – can take up this role. They have not provided guidance as to how GPs might pool together to achieve this. As the so called “GP consortia” can be as large or as small as anyone chooses, a chaotic bout of “run around” has ensued with GPs trying to partner up with each other across boroughs and local boundaries, unsure which way to go.

The PCTs have already started to dismantle and in London, staff with no future are haemorrhaging in droves, leaving a skeletal operation alone to determine the allocation of billions worth of spending. The Chair of The Royal College of GPs has described the proposed changes as the end of the NHS as we know it. The BMA, the Royal College of Nursing and several of the specialist medical Royal Colleges have spoken out against it. Calls to phase it in and start with a series of gradually building pilots have fallen on deaf ears. No one is sure how it will work or how adversely it will effect patient care. The very people who will be tasked with implementing such rapid change are already utterly perplexed by it. That is because they are supposed to be. It is an engineered shock. All the while, waiting in the wings, with a metaphorical defibrillator, will be the private sector. The large American insurance based corporations are eyeing the soon to explode UK healthcare market with salivating mouths. The vacuum that is being created, is being created for them. They will be hired to do the commissioning by and instead of GPs who are, through no fault of their own, clearly untrained and unable to do it. And it won’t be long thereafter before these same private organisations start hiring themselves as providers instead of NHS Trusts, many of which will ultimately go bust.

The government are, in fact, proposing to rig the market in their favour by requiring every single contract to go for competitive tendering. This means that, even if there is a high performing Trust with which the local population is happy, they will still have to submit themselves for retendering to the commissioners on a regular basis who will then be legally obliged to consider private sector organisations as part of the process. Subjecting hospitals to the instability of a retendering process could be disastrous. I have seen it happen myself. Staff numbers will fluctuate wildly as doctors and nurses, unsure if their organisation will survive, start moving between providers – just as they do in, say, the banking sector. This will potentially destroy continuity of care, as well as in-patient and emergency service provision which relies on regular staff numbers round the clock. A hospital shutting down as a result of losing a bid to a private sector provider, who has undercut their costs as a way of breaking into the UK market – rather than failing to provide an adequate service – could be a potentially dangerous event resulting in the collapse of secondary health care provision for the entire local area. This is why unfettered free markets are a bad idea for health care, and why the US experience has led to a hard fought reversal away from marketization. This is also why, if they were asked to vote for it, the public never would. In fact, in the last election they clearly did not. The Conservative manifesto, with its “no major reorganisations” commitment gave exactly the opposite impression. The only way such drastic privatisation can ever be achieved is through a short sharp shock to the system. Nick Boles, the pro Cameron Conservative MP, laid it out starkly, “’Chaotic’ in our vocabulary is a good thing.” Friedman would be proud. As he himself said, “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. This is clearly not chaos by incompetence. It is chaos by design.

Brent Fightback will be conducting a public survey about the proposals in Wembley in early May and are organising a contingent to take part in the 'March to Save the NHS' which takes place on Tuesday May 17th (Assemble 4.30pm at University College Hospital, Gower Street, WC1 to march to the Department of Health, Whitehall.

Further information on Keep Our NHS Public