Saving the NHS

Stuart Jefferey, our excellent Green Party Health Speaker, is performing at a meeting in the House of Commons called by the NHS Federation on the 24th July. These are the topics, and my suggested answers:

What are the alternatives to the current market driven solutions in the NHS?

- Instead of the current top-down directives, the NHS should model itself on any healthy organism, which is always improving itself, removing dead and dying cells, and generating new cells. In the analogy, we should be facilitating improvements from the coal face, facilitating the process of finding out what works, and applying it painlessly across the board. This means the old suggestion box, where staff that have good practices and suggestions which are taken up and shown to be effective, can be rewarded with a fraction of the savings gained.

How do we retain the core values of the NHS?

- This is an ethos thing. Ask the staff. Measure morale and job satisfaction, find what the high performers have that the others do not have, and try to apply it across the board.

What are the priorities for change?

- BRING THE BLO*DY CLEANING SERVICES BACK INTO THE BLO*DY NHS TEAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How will our future health service be funded?

- Either general taxation, with hypothecated taxes on health damaging products and processes, or

- By a version of European systems, or

- By insurance going to local HMOs, in which case we are in the barbaric American system, with the lumpenproletariat effectively without health cover.

What should Gordon Brown do for the NHS in his first 100 days?

- Ask us how we feel about 20 years of continual revolution...

- Terminate PFI with extreme prejudice.

How can the commitment and knowledge of staff be used to drive the strategic
direction of the NHS?

- see 1st para. above

Has our thinking around the NHS become blinkered?

- YES. We cannot see that we are being driven to the American Insurance/HMO system.

Gliese 815c in the Goldilocks Spot

Professor McFadden of Surry Uni writes in the Guardian about Gliese 581c, a planet lying in the Goldilocks zone where it is neither too hot nor too cold, and therefore potentially able to support life. I write:

Dear Professor McFadden

I was interested to read "Hope for the alien hunters" in the Guardian today.

Contact with intelligent alien life forms would without doubt be a supremely interesting experience. The probability of contact is reduced, as you say, by a number of factors, chiefly the presence of a suitable planet in the "Goldilocks zone", provided with water, a suitable atmosphere &c.

Without any axe to grind, I would like to present another reducing factor, which might be called "Temporal Simultaneity". To communicate, two civilisation have to be active in the same period of time.

Is it safe to assume that intelligent life, once it appears on a planet, endures for an astronomically significant length of time?

The duration of human beings in relation to earth time has been likened to the thickness of a piece of cigarette paper placed on the topmost railing of the Eiffel Tower, earth time being the Eiffel tower, human history being the paper.

SETI assumes that two pieces of paper exist at exactly the same height, but the planetary towers on which we stand are in fact of hugely different temporal dimensions. Our Sun, I believe, is relatively a late-comer in the family of stars. Civilisations may have appeared on other solar systems in other star generations, but they may not still be around now.

If a civilisation capable of sending electromagnetic signals continues for hundreds of thousands of years, the paper becomes a little thicker and the likelihood that it will exist simultaneously with another transmitting/receiving civilisation is increased. If however, our civilisation destroys itself through nuclear war or as a result of uncontrolled releases of greenhouse gases and other erosions of our life support system, and if other civilisations have the same proclivities, then the probability of two competent civilisations coinciding in time and making contact with each other becomes vanishingly small.

I take no pleasure in putting this thought forward, but just suggest that it is something that we have to take into account.

Best wishes
Richard Lawson

Prisoner in Cell B*llocks to Trident

[Friday July 6th 2007]

I am lying in a 7' by 10' pink room with a blood red floor, a ceiling light of 36 glass squares, a toilet, a 1" mattress and 2 clean sheets. It is comfortable, and the police officers who are my captors could not be nicer. They do not beat us up, and although they are 100% professional in not entering into political discussion, their body language suggests that they, like us, do not agree with the mass murder implicit in the Trident nuclear submarine base on their patch. However, we both have our duty to perform. Ours is to block access to the Faslane WMD site. Theirs is to pick us up with exemplary gentleness,, carry us to their white vans, charge us with breaching the peace, (ha!) and put us in the cells for 10 hours.

I sleep, do a little Yoga and Tai Chi, eat hyper-microwaved meals and read the history of Scotland, which is a catalogue of seizures of power by individuals who would frankly have done better to learn skills such as joinery or agriculture. McA kills MacB and seizes power, only to be poisoned by McC &c…

At six in the evening we are released. It is great to be free, although the freedom is slightly tarnished by the fact that the only place for a celebratory meal while waiting for our support team is the cafeteria of the local ASDA.

Augustine said :

"No man can understand the state until he has been in its prisons".

Lao Tzu said :

"When people no longer fear prison, the state's power to do harm is broken".

(Or if he did not say that, he could well have done).

I said :

“We can save the planet from ecosystem collapse, or we can do militarism. We cannot do both.”

There are pictures and stuff here:

Tractors not Trident | Faslane 365

And I got to speak with Angie Zelter who is one of the bravest persons alive on the planet today, IMHO

A FASLANE PRESS RELEASE

Congresbury GP Dr Richard Lawson was held prisoner for 10 hours in a Strathclyde police cell on Friday 6th July for helping to obstruct access to the base of New Labour’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Four members of the Somerset Peace Group lay down in the road with a Tractors not Trident banner, singing a doctored version of the Wurzel's "Drink up thy Cider" song. Mystified Glaswegian police listened to several renditions, presumably trying to decode the message, before gently lifting the four activists and carting them off to the police station.

"The Strathclyde police were 100% professional, real gentlemen and ladies" said 60-year old Dr Lawson. "We explained to them that just as a police car may break the speed limit if chasing a terrorist, so we have a duty of civil disobedience in trying to stop Labour's WMD policy. There would be no problem if there was a 100% cast iron guarantee that Trident will not be fired in anger. The fact of the matter is that the Government is ready and willing to order it to be fired at some point in the future, causing millions of deaths to civilian non-combatants, men, women and children. This is terrorism writ large. There is no other word for it”.

Dr Lawson, who has three children and one grandchild, adds “I challenge any local politician, be they Labour, Tory or LibDem, who thinks Trident renewal is a good idea, to come forward and try to defend their belief in public in open debate. Trident is not independent, is not a deterrent, and is not a reasonable option for any realistic and sensible politician".

Richard Lawson is Joint International Coordinator of the Green Party and Press Officer for North Somerset Green Party.

Live Earth - Underwhelmed but not critical

I was underwhelmed by the glitz and showbiz hype, but I do not criticise Live Earth. Leave that to the Daily Mail and the Climate Change sceptics and deniers. Nothing is perfect, and Puritanical criticism of all imperfection the best recipe for dividing and disempowering a nascent mass movement. It is good that people who attended and watched feel an association between something that they enjoyed - the music - and something they have to do - reduce their carbon footprint.

It is good that people are encouraged to do their green thing, but change has to come through people, business and politics. Forum for a Future is working on the business angle, but politicians are painfully slow to learn that they have to transform the economic rules in order to produce a new, green, ecological economics. http://www.greenhealth.org.uk/GreenEconom.htm