Blog of Stephen Glenn who was Liberal Democrat candidate for Linlithgow and East Falkirk candidate from the 2005 and 2010 Westminster General Elections.
As a fan of Douglas Adams he knows the true meaning of 42. When not blogging and Lib Demming he can be found supporting Livingston Football Club.
This morning I had a debate with John Prescott on Twitter regarding NHS Direct. I reckon we both fought our respective corners and fought them hard. Figurative punches were being thrown much to my relief. Me pointing out the lack of money to do everything and the rational for looking at what was essential and therefore needed to keep being funded was what was important.
The fact that nurses currently on the NHS Direct lines will be returned to front line duties and actually treating people. At one point John seemed to suggest that NHS Direct nurses in their current number were essential as "It's about the quality of service - the reassurance and knowledge that saves lives." But NHS Direct isn't where lives are saved that is through the diagnosis and treatment by Doctors and Nurse Practitioners in our surgeries and hospital.
Anyway we got to a point where the entrenchment was shifting, John said, "In case you hadn't noticed, YOU'RE the Government now. Enjoy!"
To which I replied "Sadly John I didn't get elected. But yeah I know that. At least this Government has realised there is a fiscal hole unlike you"
While I'd obviously welcome such a ringing endorsement for my debating skills from an ex-Deputy Prime Minister from a former Government. I'm sure I can could on the endorsement of the current Deputy Prime Minister in the current Government and leader of my party Nick Clegg.
"Anyone contemplating fraud against the NHS should be aware that they will be caught, and if they are caught, they will have to face the consequences of their fraudulent actions.
"Let me be clear today about what is a zero-tolerance approach to fraud and to fraudsters. Fraud perpetrated against the NHS is, in my view, a fraud perpetrated against each and every one of us and that is why it is so important to combat it. So it does make sense for all of us, in our own ways and in our own roles, to act as counter-fraud champions."
So spoke the SNP's Scottish Health Secretary to more than 100 delegates at a conference aimed at combating NHS fraud. Of course that role is one that is filled by the MSP for Glasgow Govan, the other being Deputy First Minister, for all three hats belong to Nicola Sturgeon.
This was 4 months after she first became away of the case of her constituent Abdul Rauf, but before she wrote that letter. In the letter she asked that even if the consequences of his fraudulent actions against the Department of Work and Pensions merited a custodial sentence that alternatives should be considered.
It adds another question to the list that she will have to answer after the current Scottish Parliament recess. Why is zero tolerance OK against fraud in the NHS but not against the DWP? Is it not also a fraud perpetrated against each and every one of us? Should we not also act as "counter-fraud champions"?
No it is not my audition for So You Think You Can Dance, and how dare you for thinking it would be.
Local Bathgate man 76 year-old Patrick Morrison (pictured) went into Astley Ainslie Hospital, Edinburgh after losing his right foot. When he returned home upon removing the protective sock covering it his wife Alexia aged 75 burst out laughing as he had been fitted with a left foot on his right.
She called the hospital who cut off the lower part of the replacement limb and replaced the foot with a right footed version.
However, false limb expert Malcolm Griffiths has been sacked by NHS Lothian, pending a hearing of the Health Professions Councilhe may be considered unfit to practise and either suspended or struck off.
Well not if this comment from Dr Helen Evans on Nurse's for Reform Website is anything to go by:
I had been invited by him to discuss NFR’s ideas on the future of health policy and presented a range of ideas. Amongst others, these included the end of national collective pay bargaining for nurses and doctors, the view that the state should not own or have any of its agents manage hospitals, a world of widespread health advertising (to overcome problems of patient ignorance through trusted brands) and a dramatic liberalisation of hospital planning laws. On this latter point, central government should have no say in when and where any hospital is opened or closed.
If he becomes Prime Minister I have no doubt NFR will meet with him and his policy team again.
"In Britain, NFR believes that the government should re-cast the NHS as simply a funder of last resort alongside an insurance and self-funder based market. It believes that the state should set free – through a range of full blown for and not-for-profit privatisations – all NHS hospitals and healthcare provision."
These are the people that Dave has been meeting with and by the comment above appears to want to meet with them again along with hus policy team if he becomes Prime Minister.
Should we believe that the aims of Nurses for Reform are in line with Dave's caring conservatism. His support of the NHS 'brick and mortar'. Well he has announced plans to offer free personal care to the elderly, but only if they stump up £8,000 upon retirement. It sounds like that is just the first step.
We can't go on like this. Dave shouldn't be allowed to set hands on the NHS.
A continuing series of spelling out Conservative plans Part 4.
I've just taken a quick look through the Conservative Party's manifesto chapter on health (you can access it here). Now on a cursory glance although expense and savings are mentioned many times there is no actual figures for much of this. Indeed apart from a line of in the introduction that says:
"By the time you've finished reading this sentence we'll have racked up £33,000 more in [national] debt"
There are only three figures of actual costs either current or future of what is involved.
First up we have we have that poor mental health costs the economy £77 billion each year. Before they go on to say that rules preventing welfare-to-work providers and employers purchasing services from Mental Health Trusts.
There is of course the one-off payment upon retirement of £8,000 for their 'free personal care for the elderly' as I blogged earlier during their conference this is but a poor imitation of what the Lib Dems have been proposing for a number of years now, and delivered in Scotland.
The only other monetary amount to be mentioned is a £10 million a year commitment beyond 2011 to support hospices in their vital work with children.
In the past the Tories have often thrust the argument out at the Liberal Democrat manifesto pledges that they were uncosted and meant nothing. That of course is no longer the case Lib Dem manifestos are fully audited and costed. For all their talk of expense and savings the Tories have not indicated one costing of what will be saved or what will be committed in what is Chapter one of their manifesto.
Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb had this to say about the announcement this morning.
"All today’s announcement confirms is that the Tories can’t be trusted with the NHS and have every intention of playing fantasy politics all the way up to the election.
"The NHS is facing enormous shortfalls in funding over the next few years yet the Tories continue to promise extra health spending without any details of where the money will come from.
"The time has come for David Cameron to be honest with the British public. If the Tories want to pledge extra spending on health in some areas then they must admit that without extra funds it will lead to cuts in frontline services elsewhere. And if they plan to remove all central targets how do they intend to prevent a return to the waiting lists of old?
"The sad truth is that David Cameron knows his health policies don’t add up. How else do you explain the sudden U-turn today on their flagship single room’s policy?"
Alistair Darling meanwhile has pointed out:
"The Tories have made over £45bn of promises, but can barely explain how they can pay for a quarter of this. This leaves them with a credibility gap of £34bn.
"These are not long forgotten promises from another time. All have been confirmed in the last two years. Most have been repeated in the last few months.
"You can't fight an election on a nod and a wink; sometimes claiming you are committed to these promises, and when challenged claiming you are not."
"The next general election is no more than 153 days away and I don't think it can come soon enough.
"Let's make this the year for change - the year when the positive defeats the negative.
"We can't go on in these difficult times with a weak Prime Minister and a divided government."
He also said that he would from today and every day until the General Election he would spell out what that means. That is a good idea I'll be waiting each day to see just what Dave D.A.V.E. Dave spells out and reporting back.
Well to be fair he did give us three of those letters today, n, h and s. He said the following:
We are progressive Conservatives.
"Our goal is to create a fairer, safer, greener country where opportunity is more equal.
"It's because we are progressives that we will protect the NHS.
"In its bricks and mortars, care and compassion, it is the embodiment of fairness in our society.
"We recognise its special place in our society so we will not cut the NHS, we will improve it for everyone."
So he is using the P word too progressive. But there are no cuts for the NHS, but hang on, bricks and mortar come top of his list ahead of care and compassion. Isn't Dave meant to be the caring, compassionate Conservative. The main concern that many of us have is that as part of his plans for the NHS certain aspects of it will be sold off. Putting brick and mortar ahead of care and compassion may not speak of the total fairness to society that Dave aludes to later.
Other P's that were used today include public sector pay. He announced he would freeze it for a year. All of it. Even those on the lowest grades. This in the name of fairness?
Those on the lowest grades suffer because the consumer price index is where the bulk of their spending is not the retail price index. The former is still increasing while the former may show deflation. To freeze pay for the lowest paid public servants as the Conservatives want to do is being positive to defeat the negative, indeed it will add to more negative for those people. There will be little 'aspiration' from the lowest paid public servants to be 'supported'.
The Lib Dems on the other hand have promised to freeze pay at the upper ends of the pay scales only and help out those at the lower end by lifted the Tax Allowance to £10,000.
However, Chapter one of the manifesto is promised on Monday, so obviously Sunday is a day of rest in this statement (precised by Woodstock above):
"We are starting our campaign to win the general election today and we will be spelling out exactly what that will mean every day from now until polling day."
See Also: Kasch Wilder isn't impressed saying it lacks radical change we need. Tory Blogger Byrne Tofferings even said in his predictions yesterday "Cameron to back-track on certain planks of Tory policy. I would expect Cameron to be very middle-of-the-road in his first term. I do not expect any major changes."
The Conservatives seem to think that a few key placed, if misused, words can help the branding of their party. They have been using the words 'clean' and 'honest' in the Norwich North by election then they were far from transparent but successful. So they are repeating the mantra in Glasgow North East.
They are also attempting to use the word 'progressive' to describe their past, present and future. Though interestingly seeing as the Lib Dems don't do well in polling to come equal top of the parties with the Tories in one poll on progressiveness slightly above out voting intention level, with them well down is a telling sign.
Heck there is even a piece in today's Torygraph by Antony Sheldon who has an upcoming book called Trust which tries to highlight Cameron's progressive theme. He opens by saying that Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, the Marquis of Salisbury, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher are rare in Conservative history in being prime ministers who changed their party and the direction of the country. But what was the direction of their country at the times that they were trying to change.
Disreali was up against Gladstone and his reform agenda. Baldwin may well have introduced votes for women but called his first election to gain a mandate for a protectionist pact, failing to gain a majority. Of course Churchill was a great war leader but post war was voted out for not having the vision to help the people recover, and then in opposition opposed the establishment of the NHS, something that still causes division in Tory ranks just last week. As for Thatcher she was hardly the great social reformer, her reign from milk snatcher, to unfair taxation, supporting the apartheid regime, section 28, suppression of rights to protest.
One telling quote is this:
"Thatcher had been radical on economic reform and [David Cameron] was going to be equally modernising on social reform."
See the above, think and also watch the below. Is being as radical as Thatcher was on economic reform necessarily going to be a good thing for social reform? I for one dread to think what social inequality that can bring after the economic inequality of Thatcher's 'steal from the poor give to the rich' Dooh Nobir* strategy.
*For anyone not catching that it is Robin Hood in reverse.
In America you get far more than you ever pay for. Here you get taxed to shit and then die on a trolly.
Now there is some truth in the first point are 500,000 bureaucrats really needed in the NHS, but he ignores that tdue to the legal mitication nature of America that there Health Care Provision employs a larger army of lawyers to protect their practitioners than we do here.
The thing is that in the US as he points out you do have to pay for it. As at the moment under a recession where you health insurance contributions may have been paid for by an employer finding yourself out of work can lead to a sudden reduction or end in that provision. The tax we pay in the UK goes towards an all incompassioning welfare system, which Mr Cole after just qualifying from University has yet to actually need to experience the full benefit off.
I'd hate for him should he ever live in an American style system of healthcare to be out of work or even between jobs when he needs emergency life saving surgery. While he is lying on the gourney they check his insurance cover and then debate what provision they can make for him when they find out he has none.
The launch of the National Pandemic Flu Service coincides with the announcement that the NHS is preparing for the worse case scenario of 65,000 deaths this year through swine flu. The advise is based on 30% of the population falling ill. Children under 14 are being hit hardest and the NHS was told to plan for a worst-case scenario of up to half of all children being infected during a first pandemic wave.
The figure of 30% for the model is based on the pandemics of 1957-58 and 1968-70, the scenario is also ranging the number of fatalities from 19,000 to 65,000 based on the 33,000 in that first pandemic and a few thousand less at the time end of the 60s. The NHS is being prepared for 12% of the workforce being off work sick, but emphasis this is not a prediction just a figure based on the worse case scenario. They are expecting the occurrence of cases to drop off over the summer but to peak again in October after children have returned again to school.
While Tower Hamlets has the highest proportion of visits at 769, per 100,000 0f population and London boroughs of Hackney, Islington and Lewisham not far behind the rich and famous are also not immune to it. Harry Potter star Rupert Grint, ex-Prime Minister's wife Cherie Booth, England footballer Micah Richards are just the tip of the iceberg of high profile cases.
To put things into perspective in some years there can be as many as 20,000 extra deaths a year related to influenza. Those with underlying health conditions, the young and the old are most at risk and are the categories being targeted for the government immunisation programme.
While I'd obviously welcome such a ringing endorsement for my debating skills from an ex-Deputy Prime Minister from a former Government. I'm sure I can could on the endorsement of the current Deputy Prime Minister in the current Government and leader of my party Nick Clegg.
