We can defeat Lansley's hated Health & Social Care Bill

[open and play the Andrew Lansley greedy tosser rap in another tab will enhance your reading experience of this post]
Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill (the NHS Bill) can and must be stopped.

The latest blow to his ambitions to slice and dice the NHS and offer it to the corporate vultures as a carcass comes from the Health Select Committee of Parliament, which will report that Lansley's "reforms" will are interfering with the already demanding and damaging process of trying to make 4% annual efficiency savings.

This is in addition to the demands of all the major health workers organisations who are united in wanting the Coalition to drop the bill.

Core criticisms are:

• It will cost £2-3 billion 
• It ends  the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Health for the NHS.
• It has no electoral mandate. It is not in the Conservative or LibDem manifestos or even the Coalition agreement.
• It contains a clause that NHS hospitals can earn up to 49% of their income from private patients.
• Giving full budgetary responsibility to GPs will distract from their attention to patients and break the vital bond of trust. 
• It opens up the NHS to marketization which will allow progressive infiltration by American private healthcare corporations who are desperate to grow now that they have finished growing in the USA.
• An enormous array of informed health organisations oppose it.

These are just a few of the reasons to oppose the bill.

If it is not defeated, the British people will have let one of the best institutions in our country to die through ignorance, apathy and resignation.

It can be stopped. There is a Parliamentary ePetition that simply calls for MPs to debate a motion to Drop The Bill. It is here. Please sign it and ask your friends to sign it. It is has reached 34,000 today, and when it reaches 100,000 MPs will be obliged to debate dropping the bill. We will need to besiege Parliament on the day of the debate in order to focus the minds of the MPs.

Greens should think globally and also act globally

"Think Global, Act Local" is the time-honoured Green slogan. It is a good slogan, but it has tended to blind us to the necessity of acting globally at the same time as acting locally.

Global action is necessary given that the world is ultimately a single system - an infinitely complex inter-relation of physical, biological, social and economic interacting parts. Each of the parts is local, but the localities summate into the single global system.

"Globalisation" is an ugly, cumbersome word to describe the ugly, cumbersome way the human economy on the planet has evolved into one single powerful marketplace. We Greens have rightly been critical of the way this single market has overridden the need for environmental and social protection, but our opposition has perhaps tended to put us off from grasping the opportunity to act at the global level. Which is a pity, because Greens have an annual Congress every three years. the next is to be in Dakar, Senegal this year, 29 March to 1 April.

I attended the last Congress in Sao Paolo Brazil in 2008. The resolutions we passed are here, and at the same time we set up a small international secretariat.

It is remarkable that with huge diversity of Green Parties from all over the world, (there were 75 parties in 2008) we should have been able to agree on so much. This year the need for us to have a global voice is even greater, not just on climate change, but also on human rights, dictatorships and the global economy.

In Sao Paolo the Global Greens adopted the Global Human Rights Index, which has  a real bearing on the Arab Spring and similar movements against dictatorship and for democracy. The paragraph in the 2008 resolution reads: In order to lead the UN from a reactive to a pro-active stance on human rights, we will press for all countries’ human rights records to be expressed quantitatively, so that they can be published annually by the UN in ranked order, revealing the relative standing of each country, which will exert a continual persuasive force on all governments to improve their performance in the field of human rights. (source)

This year we need to build policy on a global tax framework to match the de facto economic globalisation that exists. Tax havens and tax loopholes create a race to the bottom, where countries compete to have the lowest tax rates in order to attract multinational corporations to their shores. This leads to a haemorrhage of wealth from the national economy into offshore bank accounts, as any skuleboy kno.

The Green Party in England and Wales is a latecomer to the Global Greens - I was the first delegate we sent -  and this year we are sending Ricky Knight and Gina Dowding. We must hope that from the deliberations we get a clear message to save the ailing world economy from the debilitating effect of domination by self-interested multinational corporations.

Who will pay for the PIP silicone breast prosthesis clean-up?

The current news about PIP, the now-defunct silicone breast implant manufacturer who came up with the brilliant wheeze to use cheap industrial silicone in its implants, raises interesting questions about the relationship between private and NHS medicine.

30,000 French women will have their balloons removed, but the DoH is reassuring UK recipients that there is nothing to worry about, even though it seems the PIP device is more prone to rupture, which will present the immune system with a challenge.

There is an association of 7-8 cancer cases with the PIP , including one rare Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma. It will take many more cases of cancer and illness to develop before the probabilities of a causative relationship becomes accepted by the academics. Studies of the carcinogenic potential of the contaminants will be needed, and all studies will cost much money. They should be funded by the insurance services of the private cosmetic surgery industry - but it would be naive to expect that will happen.

The French are using the precautionary principle, and the UK is using the HITS (Head in the Sand)  principle.

In the end, I predict that it will be advised that all the PIP prostheses will be ordered to be removed.

But who will pick up the bill?

Removal costs are about £2000, and replacement £5000. Most were put in at private expense. Removal and replacement should therefore be at private expense. But one woman said: "I was constantly unwell and the implants lost shape," she said. "They looked deformed. I went back to the clinic but they told me I would have to get the NHS to clean up the mess."


This is clearly the line that the cosmetic surgery industry and their insurers will be lobbying for.  The Tories, when they have finished being in denial,  will probably agree to the NHS doing the remediation work free of charge,  in line with their policy of dumping on the NHS while promoting and supporting private medicine.  




See also: My book Bills of Health, which showed that about 20% of NHS clinical work is devoted to treating illness caused by unemployment, poverty, bad housing and pollution.