Drop the Health and Social Care Bill; action still possible

The epetition that “Calls on the Government to drop its Health and Social Care Bill.” is well past the 100,000 mark. In fact it is on 164,000+. Sadly, the Backbench Business Committee (BBCom) has decided las Tuesday not to debate it. But they are obliged to take further arguments from MPs. 

Time is short. The Government intends to end all debate on the Bill on March 20th.

We can press our MPs to lobby the BBCom debate dropping the HSC Bill, and we can also bring pressure directly on the Backbench Business Committee by emailing and phoning. Here they are.

This is what I wrote to the Chair:

Dear Ms Engel

I write as a retired GP who is concerned that the NHS in which I was privileged to serve is facing a real and serious threat from the Health and Social Care Bill.

Like many other citizens, I was deeply disappointed by the decision of your committee not to allocate time to debate the proposal that the Government should drop the Bill.
The e-petition calling for this now stands at 164,410.

I appreciate that there is limited time for debates, but you have 35 slots in the current session, so this is not an absolute block.

I appreciate that the Health Bill has been debated before. Its Second Reading was given one day.
However the Bill is complex - three times as long as the Bill which set up the NHS - and the specific call to drop the Bill outright has not been debated before.
Therefore the argument that the Bill has been debated already has no merit.

The call to drop the HSC Bill satisfies the BBCom criteria of being "topical and relevant".

I have read that the Committee did not think there was wide support for the debate among members.
If so, this would indicate a serious disconnect between the opinions of MPs and feeling in the country.
It is true that the public is singularly ill-informed about the implications of the Bill, because the newspapers genrally have not given it the salience it deserves.
Even so, support in the general population for pressing ahead with the NHS reforms stands at only 33%, as against 52% who believe that the Bill should be dropped.

You do not need me to remind you that the professional bodies who are well informed are overwhelmingly against it, and even Conservative commentators and Cabinet Ministers are calling for it to be dropped.

This is an urgent matter, as the Government today has indicated that they wish to end debate on March 20th.


I hope therefore that the Backbench Business Committee will listen carefully and sympathetically to MPs' further representations at later meetings of Committee to argue the case for the subject of the e-petition to be debated.


Sincerely

Dr Richard Lawson MB BS, MRCPsych

Population, Fundamentalism and Irrationality

Depressing photo on the centre spread of the Guardian today.
They got it from the National Geographic, link here.

National Geographic copy:
At 88, Joe Jessop is an elder of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the controversial sect that split from the Mormon Church after it banned plural marriage. In Hildale, Utah, he has tried to fulfill his duty to build up his "celestial family"—5 wives, 46 children, and 239 grandchildren. "I've had a blessed life," he says. "I wouldn't trade places with anyone."

One man has 285 descendants in 2 generations.
Six people (Jessop and 5 wives) have multiplied their number by a factor of 47.

And he is pleased with himself. His God has blessed him. He cares nothing about reason, mathematics or ecological reality. God will provide.

God has provided us with the ability to reason, but s/he has also provided us with the ability to give reason a manual override when it does not suit our prejudices.

Ah well. 'Twas ever thus. La lutte continua. If we cannot limit our numbers, Gaia will do it for us. All we can do is try.

Positioning the Green Party for the General Election

It is right and good that the Green Party should use the coming General Election to put forward and celebrate the many achievements of our elected representatives. Truly, we punch well above our weight when we manage to overcome the dysfunctional electoral system and fight our way into the corridors of ...er...influence.

However, General Election 2010 demands far more than a quiet recitation at how good our representatives are at doing what they are paid to do. The political territory in 2010 is a No-Man's Land where political reputations hang fluttering on the barbed wire, where credibility of politicians lies blasted into shredded heaps of quivering red jelly. There is no point in sending Green Party Political Candidates out to walk forwards towards the massed machine gun posts of the Hun Media carrying rifles to which are attached a little flag inscribed with the words "We are quite good at doing what politicians do".

Stuff that for a game of soldiers. The Green Party is a radical party, a party that wants to transform economics and politics in a way that leads to sustainability. Sustainability is an cliche' now, but what it means is that the present way of doing things - economically and politically - is doomed. It has no future. It will crash. It will fall off its perch, off the edge of a cliff. It will soon be no more. Orthodox politics and economics is a smoking flax, a bruised reed, a pile of well-rotted manure, fit for only one thing, to be buried in the ground to act as fertiliser for new growth.

I am struggling to make myself clear here, but I hope the basic message is comprehensible. We need to attack the whole rotten system, the ridiculous FPTP electoral system, the Parliamentary old-boys' club, the inside-out, back-to-front economy, the way Brown has pumped money into the swollen pockets of the banksters, the way he has sent our soldiers to be ripped apart with IEDs in a futile effort to provide a pipeline for fossil oil products to reach our markets - and so on.

We have an opportunity in the General Election to position ourselves as a truly radical party, to appeal to the mass of voters who are royally pissed of with the smug set of economists-with-the-truth who are pleased to call themselves our rulers. Our ideology, though non-violent, is more radical than the far left, who seem content that bankers should have a monopoly of the money supply; more radical over immigration than the BNP, who are silent on the subject of how to prevent the desire of millions to migrate to the UK; more radical than UKIP, who rank lowest in the MEP probity department, and whose policies would freed from the yoke of Europe, only to accept the even heavier yoke of subjection to psychopathic TransNational Corporations such as Trafigura.

We need to be setting up NOW with a

• Twitter based campaign alerting to viral videos on YouTube actually demonstrating what our representatives are doing, giving examples of how the Green New Deal would work, using video-based imaginative techniques to illustrate the point,
• we need to show how the Green Party is the political wing of the mass of NGOs who are fighting to clean up the effects of a dysfunctional economic system, showing them that green reforms would switch off the fan that is spreading the muck that they are cleaning up.
  
• We need a powerful, radical Party Election Broadcast that will give people a single, stark, real understanding of the mess that grey politics is making of the planet, and giving hope for a radical transformation of the system.

We do not need a succession of talking heads in suits telling us in manager-speak what good chaps and chapesses they have been. That should be a given, a footnote and a link on each press release to a page that documents our achievements.

We need a radical attack on a rotten, tottering political and economic system, backed with a clear exposition of how green solutions work.

[Long pause before hitting the Publish button. Partly caused by whether I am going to be slung out of the Party for Bringing the Party Into Disrepute, and partly seeking a suitable word to round off the argument. The only suitable word I can think of is French, and rhymes with "Bared".]

President Obama's vision of a nuclear free world

(courtesy of Catoon stock and Punch Magazine (RIP))

A warm wave of cautious optimism crept over me as I watched Obama's speech on nuclear weapons to the crowds in Prague yesterday. The full text is here on the Huffington Post.

Watching him, the warmth of his personality, the clarity of his thought and expression, we remembered the dark days of the Idiot President, George W Bush, and we should again breathe a sigh of relief. The People for the New American Century have shuffled off the world stage, hopefully for good, though their toxic legacy remains.

True, the speech had a bit of a curate's egg quality to it, because his fingers are still clinging to the slippery rock of Atoms for Peace - civil nuclear power. We should not be naive about Obama, he is in command of the machinery of the US state, but the machine has its own momentum and mindset, and it will take a lot to change it. We should not be naive, but neither should we be nihilistic. A change has taken place with Obama, and we should try to ride the wave, not try to erect a wall against it.


Here are the promises and pledges from his speech:


Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -- that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

And as nuclear power -- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.

we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.

we will negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians this year.

my administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

the United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons.

we will strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a basis for cooperation.

Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy.

we must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course.

We will support Iran's right to peaceful nuclear energy with rigorous inspections.

If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed.

a new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years.

There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted. (Was he thinking about the G20 Police Riots here??)

So.

President Obama is aware of the logic that if the US can find "security" in WMD, why should Iran and Korea not also seek the same insane "security"?

As for North Korea (DPRK), it is just beginning to pull out of a famine that has lasted for more than a decade. A regime that cannot manage to feed its people, yet can afford a nuclear weapon and space rocket/ICBM programme is a regime that has no grip on reality. We may point at the hypocrisy of our own Governments who are afflicted with the same lack of proportionality, but DPRK is in a class of its own.

The way to stop idiotic regimes from forming is through the Global Index of Human Rights, including Appendix 4: We need therefore to move to a framework of international rules of governance that will help all dictators, indeed all rulers, to learn that certain courses of actions will certainly lead to unwanted effects on their own freedom to act for their own personal
advancement. Specified forms of misconduct will be matched with a tariff of penalties
which are applied in a measured, stepwise and consistent basis, in order to avoid the
protection that they often obtain from allies in the UNSC.

(That reminds me, I need to draw this into a resolution to put before the next Green Party Conference. Should be fun.)

On Iran, Obama himself can do much. Pres Ahmedinajad is into writing letters. George W Bush was unable to read them (no pictures), but Barack could write back, and even give him AhmeDJ a call on the phone. Personal chemistry could work wonders. Go, barack, contact him, do a Walk in the Woods with him. If you can persuade the American voters to choose a brown President, you can persuade Ahmed to switch off the centrifuges. Yes You Can!

Finally, as in any speech, there is stuff left out. He did not say the sensible thing about Afghanistan - buy the opium. Nevertheless, Obama's speech was much better than a poke in they eye with a blunt stick.

Darkness Falling

Went to a big seminar on the Severn Estuary yesterday in Clevedon.

I learned stuff.

I learned that the Environment Agency do not realise that siltation is coming from farm runoff, and that soil erosion is much less of a problem from organic farms. Frightening ignorance.

And then we got onto the cost of electricity from the Severn Barrage, and comparative costs between coal and renewable, and it suddenly dawned on me that whereas renewable electricity costs are detailed down to the last penny, when they are then compared to coal, oil gas and nuclear where only the up front costs are counted, and the end of pipe costs are discounted, as "externalities". How can we put a cost on the atmospheric impact of global warming and acid rain? Or the cancers, or a Maximum Credible Accident caused by an al-Quaeda hit on a nuclear power station? They do not even insure the damn things. Comparative costings do not and cannot exist.

The more I look at it, the more I realise we are living in a stacked deck. Yet we must keep on speaking truth to power, not because we believe power is listening, but because if we do not, the darkness will get that much worse.

We do have a choice

I was woken this morning by the thought

"We do have a choice. Humanity does not have to come to a miserable dwindling end, fighting over increasingly scarce resources."

It is physically possible - just - for us to learn how to live within the physical and biological constraints imposed by the real world. It is an enormous challenge, but it is economically and humanly possible. Green Economics here.

Then today I get an email from Vera Gottleib who quotes President Eisenhower
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

"I like to believe.." is th operative phrase. We can choose to believe that the current political and economic stupidity will continue to prevail, ending in generalised resource wars, or we can choose to believe that reason and good sense will reassert itself. There have been times in history when people just got on with winning a good living in harmony from nature. It just doesn't get into the history books, thats all.

Launching Out

Everything that exists has to start sometime, with the possible exception of the Singularity that preceded the Big Bang, and what better, or worse, time to start than November 2004, at a time when the forces of Resident GeorgeW Bush are tearing into the heart of a third world city in a frenzied and misguided attempt to kill the Hydra of hatred that originates in his own unregenerated heart, in delusional pursuit of bringing democracy to a country 2 weeks after he himself has been "re-elected" in a procedure whose democratic rectitude is far from clear.

So as the monkey part of our nature kills and maims in one world, a different part grieves and pines for just a little tiny bit of rationality in another world.

Three decades ago I launched into politics thinking that there was a debate to be had. I still cling to the notion that reason might be of some use to us in the 21st century, but the hand that clings is the hand of a drowning man, and rationality is a straw.

Still, I have always held that green politics is like a parachute on a hang glider: it may not save your life, but it gives you something to do on the way down.

Today I have two parachutes, which is not a good idea. One is the investigation into what went on inside the computers on 2/11. The other is the Index of Governance.

Enough said for one night. Except that I forgive you, America.